▶ Your Answer : Some people might say that books could provide more information about foreign countries than any other sources, and other would say that watching movies or soap operas is the easiest way to understand the countries. However, as far as I'm concerned, reading newspapers and magazines would be a best way to know about other countries for two reasons: to convey up-to-date information and to be easy and efficient way to know other countries. First of all, newspapers and magazines give new information quickly. Of course, learning the history of the foreign countries would be a good way to understand rooted emotion of the nation, but our fundamental purpose is to win in the competitions with them or to work with them. At this time, what is more important is knowing the situation at present,not their history. To be a book is published, a significant time is consumed; on the other hand, newspapers or magazines allow us to know affairs which happened yesterday or even today. According to a survey conducted by the management department of California university in 2009, the 75 percent of the people working in the field of trade were subscribing more than 2 kinds of news papers or magazines from their partners' or competitors' countries. They said that from that kind of media, they can grasp the countries' market situation and overall atmosphere at present. They also said that the resouces have the most important role in making strategies to working with them. In this sense, using newspapers and magazines is a great way to know foreign countries. Also, getting information from newspapers and magazines is an easier and efficient way compared to other ways. Some people say that watching some movies or soap operas would be easier since the characters starring in them use easy words. However, sometimes watchers of other countries only feel significant cultural gap, and do not understand the characters' feelings at all. Not only that we can not gain enough information when considering the time we spent waching them. Other people would say that having penpal friends who live in abroad, but this way also has a serious problem because we tend to get knowledge which is skewed by our friends' worldviews. This will disturb to understand the foreign country objectively. In the case of books, we would feel difficulty although they might provide us a lot of information, since the context is used to contain the knowledge which can be exactly understood only when we have background knowledge. Compared to that, when we try to use newspapers and magazines, we can get understandable as well as significant amount of information in a comparatively short time. In short, although there are various information sources, in that newspapers and magazines convey new information faster and easier, as well as effectively since they are written in order to be read by most common people, and they are published in a short time. |