英美文化概况论文

The Differences of Teenagers’ Life

Between China and America

It is universally known that teenagers are the expectation of their parents and

the hope of a nation, and almost all the countries in the world, including China

and America of course, pay much attention to the teenagers’ life. However,

because of the differences of culture in different countries, teenagers are

obviously not living a same life. And in this article, I want to talk about some

differences of teenagers’ life between China and America, for life of teenagers in

these two countries are both typical.

First of all, let’s go into schools and find out how teenagers spending a day at

school.

As a Chinese student, I really know the teenagers’ life at school in China. We

have to get up early so as not to be late for classes in the weekdays, and there are

nearly ten lessons, which contain Chinese, maths, physics, chemistry, English and

so on, from moning to night so that many students, especially the highschool

students, prefer to spend most of time staying in the classrooms rather than go to

play games. As there are too many tasks of learning for us, sometimes we even

think that doing things which have nothing to do with studing is just a waste of

time. So now you should know that Chinese teenagers’ life at school seems to be a

little monotonous and there are few things to do except listening to the teachers in

classes, reading books and doing exercises. And at the end of the day, we are

always feeling very tired.

Compairde with Chinese teenagers’ life at school, American teenagers’ is easier

and more colourful. American teenagers attend classes for an everage of only five

hours a day, while Chinese teenagers spend about 10 hours a day. What’s more,

although American teenagers should also learn a lot of subjects like mathematics,

science, social studies (a subject that includes history, geography, citizenship and

economics) and so on, the contents of these courses are much easier than Chinese

students’. In result, American teenagers have relatively few tasks of learning, and

they have far more free time to do things which they like.

After classes over, American teenagers will have more activities. For example,

doing a part-time job is universal among the teenagers.There is an interesting fact

that according to a survey, it is found that “About 54 percent young students have

no pocket money in America, and there are fewer chances to get money from their

parents as their ages increase. It is also found that 68 percent American students

earn pocket money through doing part-time job in their spare time.”(Tin Jennifer,

2005) By this way, American teenagers not only earn pocket money, but also get

many chances to train themselves to have the ability of adapting to environmental

variety and the ability of living independently.

However, it seems to be hard for Chinese teenagers to do the same things like

doing a part-time job as American teenagers. One of the reasons is that Chinese

teenagers have less spare time and just within the little spare time, they have to

finish much homework. Besides, Chinese parents always protect their children

excessively in social activities. Many parents fear that their children will face a lot

of difficulties or become bad boys in society; they always reduce their children’s

chances to contact with society or do not let them go to the outside alone. As

result, Chinese teenagers live a relatively safe life, with the protection of their

parents and teachers, but they may lose a large quantity of chances for themselves

to kown the reality of society and develop the aware of independence. And now

we should somewhat understand the reason why American teenagers often seems

to be more confident and mature.

In a word, compared with American teenagers, Chinese teenages live a more

tired and simple life. The most important things for them is to finish quite a large

number of tasks of studying and they do not need to care about other things too

much, because their parents always try to do almost everything for them.

But why do these differences above appear? In my opinion, the key reason is

that, as we all know, now the only way to select talented person in China is

examination. That is to say, we test a person’s level by mark, whith sounds a little

cruel. Due to this policy, Chinese teenagers have to undertake the heavy tasks of

studying, which is just like Zhengqiang’s(a professer of Zhejiang university)

words“In the nowadays, the heavy tasks of studying brings too much pression to

our Chinese teenagers but take too much happiness of the teenagers’ life away”.