说起英国人，或许我们或多或少都有些刻板印象：爱喝茶，吃甜点，喜欢聊天气，迷恋即食快餐……今天，我们来聊聊英国社会的阶级划分。
事实上，正如喝茶和聊天气一样，阶级观念也是英国文化中不可或缺的一部分。这一点在英国电视节目中也可以看到：真人秀上嘲讽社会底层，而在《唐顿庄园》这类反映贵族生活的电视剧中又不遗余力地讽刺上流社会。甚至有人说，英国人有天生的 class radar，可以根据一个人的名字、语音、穿着等辨别 TA 来自哪个阶级。
一般来说，英国社会可分为四大阶级：底层阶级、工人阶级、中产阶级和上层阶级。但是 BBC 和专业学者称这种分类已经过时，现在可以综合经济资本、社会资本和文化资本三大因素将英国人分成七个社会群体：精英群体、传统中产阶级、技术型中产阶级、新兴富有工薪阶级、新兴服务业工作者、传统工人阶级和无产阶级。
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The British Class Obsession
① You can tell a lot about a country by what's on its television sets. Britain's TV screens are completely steeped in class, and have long been so.
② From laughing at poor people in reality shows to laughing at posh people in Downton Abbey, this is how Britain likes to unwind in the evening: by sneering at other classes, and sneering at people for sneering about class.
③ Like it or loathe it, many see the class system as a quintessential element of British life, together with our obsession for tea and cake and talking about the weather.
④ Whether you are a lord, a lady, or just the king of your own middle class kingdom, everyone in the UK fits into the class system. How the class system works is a hard question even for a British person to answer.
⑤ There are four main groups in the British class system: lower, working, middle and upper class. Although recently the BBC has tried to confuse everyone even more by adding three more categories.
⑥ The British are very aware of class; it is often said that we have an in-built 'class radar'; we pick up on subtle social clues which indicate which class a person comes from. Class is not just about your job, where you live and how much you earn. It's about who you are.
▍生词好句
1. be steeped in: 充满着
· if something is steeped in something, it's completely surrounded, involved or heavily influenced by it.
2. sneer at /snɪə/: 嘲笑；蔑视
· when you sneer at something, you smile or laugh at that thing in a way that shows that you don't really like it; you smile or laugh at something because you are better than this thing or you think you're better.
3. like it or loathe it /ləʊð/: 不管你喜欢不喜欢
· whether you like it or not, no matter if you like it or hate it
4. quintessential /ˌkwɪntɪˈsenʃ(ə)l/: adj. 最典型的；最本质的
· typical
▍What we've learned today
1. The British are so obsessed with class, our TV is steeped in references to our class system and we love sneering at 'other classes'.
2. The class system is just as important to us as drinking tea, eating cake and talking about the weather. It's a quintessential part of British life.
3. There are four main class categories: lower, working, middle, upper. We all know our own class, we can't change our class and we always know another person's class.
4. We are still obsessed by class culture because historically the structure of British society hasn't changed much over the last five hundred or even one thousand years.
5. All British people have a class radar. We use this almost subconsciously to calculate the class of other people. We use name, accent, vocabulary and sometimes appearance as the main factors when we are calculating someone's class when we first meet them.
