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“The Goodness of Gratitude"
In the article, “The Goodness of Gratitude”, the author, Lisa Fields describes how thanking others or expressing kindness to them gives people good influences mentally and better outcomes on their health. Fields starts her article by describing how she wrote “thank-you notes” and baked brownies when she was appreciative, and then the people, who have been given the gifts from her, were also grateful to her. Gratitude is feeling thankful for what people have been given or something that happened to you. Gratitude is communicable; thus, people who received thanks will be nicer to others. Also, gratitude has effects to make relationships better. Even if people think that they are not thankful now, they can train their brains to be thankful. Usually people are not good at recognizing the good things that happened, so writing down three positive things that happened to them every day makes people’s brain more grateful. In fact, according to the article, John Kralik, who had been spending not good life, he changed his life dramatically better by writing 365 thank-you notes over 365 days. The author concludes the article by stating that just a simple act, gratitude, has big positive effects that could change our lives, and we will be surprised by that.
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Taken from American Ways: An Introduction to American Culture, Chapter 1, page 8
In the United States, people have become very sensitive to the language used to describe racial and ethnic groups, and they try to be politically correct, or “P.C.” For example, some black Americans prefer the term “African-American” instead of “black” to identify with their African heritage. The terms “Native American” and “American Indian” are both used by those native to the North American Continent. Some Spanish speakers prefer to be called “Latinos” (referring to Latin America) instead of “Hispanics” (referring to Spain), while others prefer to be identified by their country of origin (Cuban-American or Cuban, Chicano, Mexican-American or Mexican, etc.).
In spite of all this diversity, there is still a tie that binds Americans together. That tie is a sense of national identity – of being American. Incidentally, when citizens of the United States refer to themselves as Americans, they have no intention of excluding people from Canada or Latin American countries as residents of the American continents. However, there is no term such as “United Statsians” in the English language, so people call themselves “Americans”. Thus, what is really a language problem has sometimes caused misunderstandings. Although citizens of Latin American countries may call the people in the United States “North Americans”, to many people in the United States, this makes no sense because the term North American refers to Canadians and Mexicans as well as citizens of the United States. NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, is a trade agreement among Canada, the United States, and Mexico.
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