S e c o n d e d I t I o n 1 Reading for the Real World 1

The Green Myth
Discussion
Discuss the following questions.
1.
Do writers such as Jon Entine do more harm than good with their articles 
attacking business? Why or why not?
2.
Should a company be punished for false advertising? Why or why not?
Track 40

---

Vocabulary Preview
 
Match each word or phrase with the correct definition.
1.
factor 
a.
alone; apart from all others
2.
find out 
b.
to discover
3.
influence 
c.
one thing of possible influence
4.
isolated 
d.
to put in order from best to worst
5.
judge 
e.
to say if something is good or bad / right or wrong
6.
rate 
f.
to have some effect on
Pre-Reading Questions
Think about the following questions.
1.
What is the first thing you usually notice about another person? 
Why is that so?
2. 
Why do you think that you notice that part of a person first?
3.
Do your friends notice this part of other people first also? 
If not, what do your friends notice first?
Ideas 
About Beauty
 
C ro s s - C u l t u r a l V i e w p o i n t s 1
U N
I
T
11

---

126
Ideas About Beauty
5
10
15
20
25
R 
esearchers have collected convincing evidence that people tend to rate 
beauty in much the same way. Groups even from different cultures do 
not really show that much difference in judging the main factors of 
beauty. However, researchers do not agree on whether the factors which influence 
how most people judge beauty come from genetics (nature) or culture (society).
Devendra Singh, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, 
conducted an experiment in 1993 to find out if different men found different 
female body shapes attractive. Dr. Singh gave drawings of different female body 
shapes to a variety of men and asked them to choose the most attractive body 
shape. Even though men came from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, they 
all tended to rate the “
hourglass
” body shape as the most attractive. In fact, Dr. 
Singh found that any woman whose waist is 70 percent as wide as her hips is 
judged as attractive by most men no matter how big the woman is overall. Body 
shape, not weight, seemed to be viewed as the 
critical
factor for attractiveness 
by men in this survey.
Dr. Singh explained this result from the perspective of 
evolution. Women who develop an hourglass shape have a 
relatively higher level of estrogen, a female hormone, than 
women who do not have this body shape. Because estrogen 
levels also influence