Unit 4 · Continents and Cultures

Think about how your family eats dinner. Do you use forks, chopsticks or your hands? Do you eat at a table or on the floor? Families in different places answer these questions in different ways.

These shared ways are called culture. Culture is the way of life a group of people shares. It includes language, food, clothing and beliefs. It also includes art, music, stories, holidays and manners.

Every group has a culture. A country has one. A town can have one. Even a school has its own ways, like its songs and rules. A custom is one habit that a group shares, like shaking hands to say hello.

Walk down a busy street in Chicago. You might hear English, Spanish, Polish and Arabic. Each language is a way people share ideas with words. Around the world, people speak about 7,000 languages.

Food is part of culture too. In Mexico, corn tortillas are a daily food. In Japan, rice is served with many meals. In Ethiopia, people share a flat bread called injera. Families pass their recipes down from grandparents to grandchildren.

Clothing shows culture as well. In Scotland, some people wear a kilt on special days. In India, many women wear a long cloth called a sari. A piece of clothing that is part of a group’s history is called traditional clothing.

Every year, many families in Mexico celebrate the Day of the Dead. They build a small table called an ofrenda. They put photos, flowers and favorite foods on it. The holiday is a loving way to remember family members who have died.

Holidays often come from beliefs. A belief is an idea a person holds to be true, like a religious teaching. Christians celebrate Christmas. Jews celebrate Passover. Muslims celebrate Eid al-Fitr. Hindus celebrate Diwali, a festival of lights.

Art and stories carry culture too. Groups tell old stories called folktales. They teach lessons, like being brave or kind. Painting, dance, weaving and music help people remember who they are.

A baby is not born knowing how to say thank you. She learns it. Her parents say it again and again. Soon she says it too. Culture works this way. People learn it by watching and listening.

Families teach songs, recipes and manners. Schools teach a country’s history and holidays. Friends teach games and jokes. Places of worship teach beliefs. Learning the ways of your group is called growing up in a culture.

Because culture is learned, anyone can learn about another culture. A child who moves to a new country can learn a new language. A family can learn to cook a new food. People can hold on to their own culture and learn a new one too.

Chicago is famous for deep-dish pizza. But pizza first came from Italy. Italian families brought it to America. Then cooks in Chicago made a new kind in a deep pan. A food from one place changed in a new place.

The same thing happens with other foods. Tacos came from Mexico. Ramen noodle soup is popular in Japan, and its roots go back to China. Today you can eat all three in Chicago. When cultures meet and share, this is called cultural exchange.

People often move to a new country for work, for family or for safety. A person who moves to live in a new country is an immigrant. Immigrants bring their foods, words and music. Over time, these become part of the new place too.

Say these words out loud: ketchup, pajamas, tomato, safari. They all sound like English. But each one came from another language. Words travel when people travel.

Pajamas comes from languages of South Asia. Tomato comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs in Mexico. Safari comes from Swahili, a language of East Africa. A word that one language takes from another is called a loanword.

Chicago’s own name has a story too. It comes from a word in a Native American language of the area. Many people say it named a wild onion or garlic plant that grew near the river. Place names often hold a piece of history.

Look at a world map. You will see big pieces of land with ocean around them. A very large piece of land is called a continent. Most U.S. schools teach seven: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America.

Not everyone counts the same way. In many Latin American countries, students learn that North and South America are one continent, called America. Some count Europe and Asia as one, called Eurasia. So some people count six continents, and some count five.

Asia is the largest continent. Australia is the smallest. Antarctica is covered in ice, and no one lives there all year. Scientists visit and stay there for months at a time to do research.

Spin a globe in your classroom. It is round like Earth. A globe is a model of Earth shaped like a ball. It shows the sizes and shapes of land and water most truly.

A map is a flat drawing of a place. You can fold it and carry it. But Earth is round, so a flat map must stretch some parts. On many world maps, Greenland looks as big as Africa. Really, Africa is about 14 times larger.

Maps have helpful tools. A compass rose shows north, south, east and west. A key explains the symbols. The equator is an imaginary line around the middle of Earth. It splits the world into a north half and a south half.

Imagine someone said, everyone from Chicago loves deep-dish pizza. Is that true? Some Chicagoans love it. Some never eat it. Some cannot eat cheese. One sentence cannot describe millions of people.

A stereotype is an idea that all people in a group are the same. Stereotypes are unfair because people are different. In any country, people live in cities and on farms. They have different jobs, beliefs and favorite foods.

Respect means treating people and their ways with care. When you meet someone from another culture, you can ask and listen. You can say, tell me about your family’s holidays. Then you learn about a real person, not a guess.

In Europe, you can ride a train for a few hours and cross into another country. Europe is one of the smallest continents. But it has more than 40 countries packed close together.

Each country has its own language, or even several. People speak French in France and German in Germany. They speak Polish in Poland and Italian in Italy. Many Europeans learn two or three languages in school.

Many European countries work together in a group called the European Union. Many of its members use the same money, called the euro. A border is a line where one country ends and another begins. Inside much of the European Union, people cross borders without stopping.

In Sofia’s city of Krakow, Wawel Castle sits on a hill above the river. Polish kings lived there hundreds of years ago. Today, families visit it on weekends, and new apartments and shops stand nearby.

Much of Europe looks like this. Rome has ruins from ancient Rome, about 2,000 years old. Paris has the Eiffel Tower, built in 1889. London has old churches and new glass towers. A place people protect because it shows the past is a historic site.

Europe’s past is not only castles. Wars, including two world wars, did great harm there. After World War II, many countries chose to trade and work together. They hoped this would help keep peace.

Asia stretches from the icy north of Russia to the warm islands of Indonesia. It holds the tallest mountain on Earth, Mount Everest. It holds wide deserts, thick rain forests and huge cities.

Asia is the largest continent by land. It also has the most people. About 4.7 billion people live in Asia. That is close to 6 out of every 10 people on Earth. A count of how many people live in a place is its population.

Many of the world’s oldest civilizations began in Asia. A civilization is a large group with cities, leaders and writing. China, India and the land between two rivers called Mesopotamia all had early civilizations.

China and India are neighbors, with the high Himalaya Mountains between them. Each has more than 1.4 billion people. In 2023, India passed China to become the country with the most people.

China’s civilization is thousands of years old. Most people speak Mandarin Chinese. Chinese writing uses characters, and each one stands for a word or part of a word. Families gather for the Lunar New Year, often called Spring Festival.

India has many languages. Hindi and English are used by the national government, and the country officially recognizes 22 languages. Many faiths live side by side there, including Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Christianity and Buddhism. India is a democracy, where people vote for their leaders.

Arjun wakes up in Mumbai, a city of millions on India’s west coast. His family lives in an apartment with his grandparents. Several generations under one roof is common in India. This is called an extended family.

Arjun’s mother takes a crowded commuter train to work. Arjun goes to school, where he studies in English and in Marathi, the language of his state. After school he plays cricket, a bat-and-ball game loved across India.

At dinner the family eats dal, a stew of lentils, with rice and flat bread. Some families in Mumbai eat with their right hand. Arjun’s grandmother tells stories from the Panchatantra, a very old collection of animal fables from India.

Africa is the second largest continent. It has 54 countries, more than any other continent. People there speak well over 1,000 languages. Arabic, Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba and Amharic are just a few.

Africa has the largest hot desert in the world, the Sahara. It covers much of North Africa and is about as big as the United States. Africa also has the Nile, one of the longest rivers on Earth. It flows north through Egypt to the sea.

Africa is more than desert. It has rain forests, grasslands called savannas and snowy peaks like Mount Kilimanjaro. It also has big modern cities. Lagos in Nigeria and Cairo in Egypt each have millions of people.

About 700 years ago, a great empire ruled much of West Africa. An empire is a group of lands ruled by one leader. This was the Mali Empire. It grew rich from gold and from salt, which traders carried across the Sahara on camels.

Its most famous ruler was Mansa Musa. In 1324 he traveled to Mecca, the holy city of Islam. He brought so much gold that people talked about him for years. Cairo, a city on his way, remembered his visit long after.

The city of Timbuktu in Mali became a center of learning. Scholars there wrote and copied books about religion, law, math and the stars. Some of these old books are still kept in Timbuktu today.

Amina lives in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, on the Atlantic coast. Fishing boats painted in bright colors come in each morning. Her aunt buys fresh fish at the market and talks with the sellers she knows.

Many people in Senegal speak Wolof at home and French at school. French is the official language, from the years when France ruled the country. Senegal became independent in 1960. Most people in Senegal are Muslim.

At lunch, the family shares thieboudienne from one big bowl. It is a dish of fish, rice and vegetables. Guests are welcomed warmly. Many families there take pride in hospitality, the custom of making visitors feel at home.

Long before Europeans arrived, the Americas were home to many nations. The Maya built cities with tall stone temples. The Inca built roads through the Andes. In Illinois, people built great earth mounds at Cahokia, near today’s St. Louis.

The first peoples of a place are called Indigenous peoples. In the Americas they spoke hundreds of languages. Each nation had its own leaders, farming, stories and beliefs. Many grew corn, beans and squash.

After Europeans came, Indigenous peoples lost much land and many lives to war and disease. But they did not disappear. Today there are 574 federally recognized tribal nations in the United States. Millions of people in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and Bolivia speak Indigenous languages.

About 500 years ago, ships from Europe began arriving in the Americas. Spain, Portugal, England and France each set up colonies. A colony is land ruled by a faraway country. Enslaved Africans were also forced to come, and they shaped these lands too.

The colonies left their languages behind. Most of Central and South America speaks Spanish. Brazil speaks Portuguese. The United States and most of Canada speak English. In Quebec, in Canada, most people speak French.

Culture in the Americas is a mix. It blends Indigenous, European and African ways. Music like jazz from New Orleans and samba from Brazil grew partly from African roots. Foods like corn and chocolate came from Indigenous farmers.