Knowledge of Foreign Countries of UT Austin students#
Jason/Lv150 February 23, 2005
Knowledge of Foreign Countries of UT Austin students
Many Americans pay little attention to foreign countries. Particularly, American students in UT Austin are lack of knowledge of international affairs and history. According to the data collected for the survey about China, one of the most important nations in the world, most UT Austin students could not tell the name of the leader of China or anything about Chinese History. It is dangerous for these students if the situation keeps unchanged, but there are some ways can help them.
Perhaps the reason of this problem is that UT Austin students have limited sources of news, and the news sources have only few paragraphs about international news. For example, The Daily Texan, the most popular newspaper in UT and one of the major news sources of UT Austin students, have only 1/2 page for internal news, less then 5% of total. Some newspapers, such as Financial Times, have more international news, but they are less popular.
Consequently, those who lack of knowledge of international affairs have a lot of disadvantages. For one thing, they may encounter academic difficulties. Among the ones who could not tell the leader of China, there was a student who is studying Chinese politics. “I can not tell his name now, buy I may find it after some research work”, she said in an interview at the front of PCL. For another, it may lead to misunderstanding of foreign culture and cause come culture conflicts in their university life in UT, because UT have a large number of international students.
That is not true that we have nothing to do with this. The students can get information about international affairs from several ways. Since UT provides free internet service in many locations, thy can simply read international news on internet. Watching foreign TV channels is also helpful for understanding other cultures. Students can ease the unbalanced information problem between foreign and domestic knowledge by take these steps.
Although American students in UT Austin might not necessary to become an expert in foreign affair, they are doubtfully become successful without certain degree of knowledge about other countries, according to the analyses above. They can make some change with their information sources and avoid the detriment of lack of such kind of information.