Changing identities and cultures practice questions.

A global fast-food chain sells regionally specific dishes and adapts its menu to local dietary rules while keeping its brand and operating model. Which term describes this?

• Glocalisation, adapting a global product to local conditions
• Cultural imperialism, replacing local practice with foreign practice
• Cultural hybridity in which two cultures merge into a third
• Diffusion, in which a practice spreads without any change

Answer: Glocalisation, adapting a global product to local conditions

Glocalisation is a commercial strategy: the corporation adapts the surface of the product to sell in a new market while the underlying model - supply chain, branding, labour practice, standardisation - remains global. Recognising which layer changes and which does not is the analytical point.

Of the world's several thousand languages, a large proportion have few remaining speakers and are not being learned by children. Which process is the main driver?

• Economic and educational advantage attaches to a few dominant languages
• Minority languages are inherently more difficult to learn
• Governments have universally banned the use of minority languages
• Digital technology has made written language unnecessary

Answer: Economic and educational advantage attaches to a few dominant languages

Parents shift to the language that gives their children access to schooling, work and public administration, so transmission stops within a generation or two without anyone deciding to abandon the language. Prohibition accelerated the process historically, but the ordinary mechanism is incentive rather than ban.

Since its 2018 revision, the European Union's Audiovisual Media Services Directive has required video-on-demand services operating in member states to make at least 30% of their catalogue European works and to give those works prominence. Which description of this measure is most accurate?

• A voluntary industry code agreed between the streaming platforms themselves.
• A regulatory response intended to protect the diversity of cultural production.
• A trade sanction intended to punish foreign broadcasters for their content.
• A grassroots revitalisation movement led by minority-language communities.

Answer: A regulatory response intended to protect the diversity of cultural production.

The quota is law binding on distributors, so it works on what is offered and how visible it is, not on what audiences choose or on what producers make. It is the standard institutional counterweight to cultural homogenisation, and it is imposed from above rather than growing from a community.

A student writes: "The same clothing and coffee chains appear in city centres from Santiago to Seoul, so the world's cultures are becoming uniform." Which single flaw in that reasoning would an examiner identify first?

• It relies on examples from the southern hemisphere, which cannot represent global patterns.
• It confuses cultural diffusion with cultural imperialism, which are the same process.
• It measures culture by consumption, when culture is defined only by language.
• It treats the presence of a brand as proof of shared meaning and practice.

Answer: It treats the presence of a brand as proof of shared meaning and practice.

The same outlet is used differently in each place - as a status venue, a study space or a quick stop - so identical shopfronts are evidence of a common retail landscape, not of a common culture. Diffusion and imperialism are not the same process, and culture is far wider than language.

A population that has spread from its original homeland while keeping cultural, family and economic links with it is called a ___ (one word).

Answer: diaspora

The defining feature is the maintained connection, not the distance moved; a scattered group with no continuing ties to a homeland is simply a migrant population.

A fictional linguistic survey records 240 languages in one region, of which 96 have fewer than 1 000 remaining speakers. Calculate the share of the region's languages that are in that category, to the nearest whole number, in %. Answer: ___

Answer: 40

96 / 240 x 100 = 40 %, a proportion typical of the figures used to argue that linguistic diversity is a measurable and rapidly changing part of cultural diversity.