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
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Ideas About Beauty
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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
fertility,
men may subconsciously view a
woman with an hourglass figure as a good
candidate for
producing children. Therefore, according to Dr. Singh, the men who
choose
these types of women have the potential for having more
children. Over time, evolution would favor men who have
