(Update 2024) Describe a Person You Know Who is From a Different Culture IELTS Cue Card

I’m going to talk about a friend of mine, Andrea. He comes from Milan and used to work as the chef in a posh local eatery before emigrating to China. I met him through our mutual friend, Jerry, a regular customer to the cafe I always go to. Jerry’s a quintessential foodie and runs a few social media accounts featuring restaurants and food.

One day, Jerry and I talked about Italian cuisine, which I was quite keen on, and also some of the most fabulous Italian restaurants in our city. He mentioned a place I’d never heard of and it’s got an excellent rating on Yelp for its wide variety of Italian dishes. personalized service and quality ingredients. He suggested going to that restaurant for dinner, adding that he’s a good friend of its owner and could make reservations with him. I was certainly not going to waste that opportunity to taste some authentic Italian food.

As soon as we arrived, a foreigner came out of the restaurant and greeted us with cordiality. Jerry introduced us to each other. That’s how I met Andrea.

Andrea joined us for dinner that day and shared many of his personal stories to us, like how he met Jerry, his hometown, where his passion for food came from and why he moved to China in his late 40s. Andrea’s very amicable and talkative. We were exchanging pleasantries before the meal, but when it was over, I somehow felt like we’d been friends for many years. On top of that, the food served there is divine, especially carbonara and Parma ham. From then on, I would go to his restaurant every time I’m craving for some Italian delicacies.

Well, the effective way to know someone better is talking, a principle that also can be applied to understanding foreigners. Of course, I do not mean a simple hello, but a relatively deep conversation which can contribute to the growth of relationship and clear up the misunderstandings. As for the place, I guess, home and restaurant with homey environment are both good choices, because the comfortable surroundings relax your mood and make your inner guard down. I mean, you can feel free to discuss the traditions, conventions, historical stories and to exchange opinions on critical events.

In my opinion, one of the merits of culture diversity is that we get the chance to experience a totally different lifestyle. Imagine that how boring the life would be if there is only one culture on the globe! Another advantage of culture diversity popped into my mind is that differences among cultures offer the opportunity to improve ourselves. That means we can learn something from other cultures, including technology, ideology,and even recipe. And it’s impossible to ignore the drawbacks of culture diversity. Causing conflict is the most serious one, I think. Just because of the existence of different cultures, conflicts always emerge based on the misunderstanding.

The first thing we can do is to show the respect to traditional culture. History is continuous and traditional culture engendered other cultures. If someone deny tradition, the person is rejecting the world he or she lives in. Second, learning some traditional culture may make the co- existence come true. After a period learning, people may develop a great interest in tradition and also find some common between traditional culture and other cultures. In this case, promoting the coexistence of different cultures is not that difficult.

There are two things I’d like to mention here. The first one is dialect. Based on the needs of studying and the convenience of communication, people, especially those who live in urban areas, increasingly tend to use Mandarin almost everywhere, causing children losing the chance to learn dialect. The second one is skills for making traditional artifacts. We can appreciate various unearthed cultural relics in museum, but it’ s really hard for modern people to duplicate those fine works of arts. The same thing has happened to current handicraft industry.