Callum: Hello and [bad word] to Talk about English. Today we start a new series about
culture and [bad word]  It’s called - Who on Earth are we? -
and is presented by Marc Beeby.
Marc: Hello. I’m Marc Beeby. I’m white. westerner. I was born in Australia and I
went to school in England. The culture I grew up in was basically English. But
what does that mean? What’s my culture like? How has my culture affected the
way I behave, how I see the world? And do I behave and see the world in a
different way from you and the people from your culture?
Talking about culture in any way is surprisingly hard - even describing what
our own culture is like can be difficult, and it’s even harder to say how our
culture affects the way we behave. And what about ‘foreign’ cultures? We may
have a few ideas about what ‘foreigners’ are like, but are these ideas based on [bad word]  or are they just stereotypes – simple and inaccurate pictures of people we
don’t know very well. Over the next twelve programmes we’ll be thinking
about these issues: we’ll also be hearing about ways of describing culture, and
exploring some of the major differences between cultures. Today, as an
introduction, we’ll be looking at a topic that will be central to all the
programmes in the series: [bad word]  - what happens when
people from different cultures meet [bad word]  But we start with what
happens [bad word] breaks down. War.
Ilse Meyer
I was a child in Berlin in the first world war and I used to lie in bed at night, praying that God
should give victory to the German soldiers until one night it suddenly occurred to me that at that very moment French and English children might be lying in bed praying that God should
give victory to their soldiers.
Marc: In 1945 the United Nations was established "to save succeeding generations
from the scourge of war’. 55 years later, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan [bad word] the latest attempt to build lasting world peace – the proclamation of
the year 2001 as the Year of Dialogue among Civilisations.
Kofi Annan
The United Nation itself was created in the belief that dialogue can triumph over discord. That
is why I have warmly [bad word] the proclamation of the year 2001 as the United Nations year
of the dialogue among civilizations.
Marc: This dialogue, [bad word] between people from different cultures,
isn’t something that’s only relevant to politicians and representatives of the UN.
It’s personal. The world, we hear, is getting smaller. Global business, worldwide
tourism, faster and more accessible ways [bad word] all mean that most of us, at some point in our lives, [bad word] into contact with people from cultures that are very different from our own. And when that happens we find ourselves facing some very interesting, very personal questions. Rebecca Fong
teaches a course in [bad word] at the University of the West of England. Here she is, a million miles away from war, facing up to flowers
and the question of beauty…
Rebecca Fong
When I was quite young I went to live in Japan, and after having been there for a little while I was asked by some of the women I was working with if I'd like to do 'Ikebana' which is Japanese flower arranging. I decided not to but I did go to many flower arranging exhibitions and one day I was at one of these exhibitions and I saw an arrangement and I laughed and I said 'oh well that one was obviously done by a beginner ' and the person I was with who had been studying for a long time said 'no no that was done by an expert and I could never do that, that's very hard'. I later discovered that when the Japanese are looking at flower arrangement they see something that we don't see. 
Группа Learning English.
Продолжения текста: [bad word] /downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/webcast/scripts/whoonearth/tae_whoonearth_01_080501.pdf