Read the following passage and answer the questions based on it:
The inheritance of culture is rarely obvious. What we call tradition is often just repetition with reverence, and what we call structure is more often sediment—settled behaviors shaped by forgotten motives. No individual wakes up conscious of the script they perform daily: the deference coded into language, the hierarchy in who speaks and who listens, the legitimacy given to one dialect over another. These scripts are learned by doing, not by knowing. Structures do not enforce themselves through law alone; they linger in weddings, gestures, floor plans, and silence. The most enduring hierarchies don't shout — they whisper, hiding in rituals too familiar to question. When efforts are made to 'preserve culture,' they often freeze one version of the past, assuming it pure and unchanging. However, culture never stood still. It changes, not by denial, but by negotiation. To honor a legacy is not to protect its shape, but to confront what it excludes. If history is architecture, then culture is weather — it reshapes even stone, slowly, insistently. A society unwilling to interrogate its inherited rhythms is not preserving culture — it is embalming it.
Q1. What is the author's main claim about cultural inheritance?
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
Correct Answer: It is practiced unconsciously through daily behavior
Explanation
• The author explicitly highlights that culture is absorbed subtly rather than through deliberate instruction: "No individual wakes up conscious of the script they perform daily... These scripts are learned by doing, not by knowing."
• Furthermore, the passage emphasizes that cultural patterns live in everyday habits, gestures, and rituals that are so routine people rarely question them.
• The other choices contradict the text because the author clarifies that cultural inheritance is not enforced solely by laws, formal institutions, or conscious teaching.