Domande e risposte esame di lingua inglese

Why do people use skin-whitening products?

In many parts of the world today, there is a profitable market for products which lighten or whiten people's skin. The promotion of the use of skin-whitening products is widespread in many countries in Asia and Africa. In these societies, 'white' and lighter skin is considered more beautiful and therefore more desirable. Especially for women, white skin is associated with beauty and based on the color of the skin, it tells if a woman is beautiful or not.

Nevertheless, these products are full of chemicals and are very dangerous because they manipulate the melanin in the skin. They are not natural at all.

This phenomenon has historical origins, back to Colonial times. Indeed, darker skin was and is associated with labor and field work in the sun, and so with oppression, poverty, and ugliness. On the other hand, white skin is associated with wealth and people who don't work hard. All of this has set the standard for attractiveness in poorer societies.

countries. During the English course, to better understand this phenomenon, we have seen and analyzed some Indian ads that promoted back in the 2000s a cream product for skin lightening called "Fair and lovely". Often these kinds of products had a name related to something pure, genuine and beautiful. The majority of these spots had as the main character a girl that, after using the product, becomes successful in life, finding a job or a man to marry with. Even though the product that I mentioned has been banned, the phenomenon is still spread in many countries, especially today in South Korea. What is the meaning of the term 'stolen generation'? The term "stolen generation" refers to all the children, about 20/25 thousand, of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian government agencies and church missions in the period between the late 1800s and 1970s. During that period, a law gave theterritories of Australia. These policies gave the authorities the right to remove Aboriginal children from their parents without their consent. The children were then placed in missions or institutions run by the Catholic and Lutheran churches. At these missions, the children were only taught about Christian culture and were not allowed to speak their own indigenous languages. As a result, they grew up without any knowledge of their own indigenous cultures and lost their indigenous identity completely. This made it extremely difficult for them to reconnect with their families as basic information was not recorded. The main reason behind these removals was the belief that the Aboriginal race was a source of embarrassment for white Australia. The aim was to "save" the mixed-race children and assimilate them into white society in order to maintain the purity of Australia. The earliest recorded instance of child removal through legislation was the Victorian Aboriginal Protection Act in 1869. Similar policies and legislation were later adopted by other states and territories by 1950.

Territories. The situation changed only in 1969, when Aboriginal people for the first time had the right to vote. The Australian government and every organization involved apologized for all the suffer caused to that people only in the last few decades and promoted the development of a project called "Closing the Gap", totally financed by the government, that helps people from the stolen generation to find information and meet their Aboriginal family, trying to save everything that in the past has been deleted and to re-establish the relationships between Australians and Aboriginal people.