按照人文学科特点，第二版的下册涵盖社会学、文化学、语言学和新闻学四个领域。全书侧重杜会、语言和文化等领域。在原教材中，考虑到我国对学科领域的分类，社会学领域的内容没有包括在内，但在修订版中，课文的选材、注释和练习基本上都以《大学英语课程教学要求》的“一般要求”为基础。并且添加社会学领域的内容。

Unit One

Text: An Invitation to Sociology

Reading Passage One: The Sound of Silence

Reading Passage Two: Structuralism in Anthropology: Claude Levi Strauss

Unit Two

Text: The Analysis of Culture

Reading Passage One: Looking Backward at Cultural Studies

Reading Passage Two: The Influence of American Culture on Post-War Austria

Unit Three

Text: Sign, Signified, Signifier

Reading Passage One: What Is Language?

Reading Passage Two: Language and Thought

Unit Four.

Text: The Mass Media: What Is Newsworthy?

Reading Passage One: Electronic Newspapers

Reading Passage Two: Journalism Education Marked by Fragility

Unit Five

Text: The Sociological Imagination

Reading Passage One: Durkheim's Solution to Modemity's Riddle

Reading Passage Two: The Interactional Basis of Self and Other

Unit Six

Text: Constructing Cultural Metaphors

Reading Passage One: Shoring Up the West

Reading Passage Two: What Is Global Culture?

Unit Seven.

Text: Language and Literature

Reading Passage One: The Whorfian Hypothesis

Reading Passage Two: Language as a Social Behavior

Unit Eight..

Text: In All Fairness

Reading Passage'One: The Pulitzer Prizes

Reading Passage Two: Public Sphere, Complex Citizenship and News

Unit Nine

Text: Social Capital and America's Ills

Reading Passage One: Social Isolation Growing in US

Reading Passage Two: The Differences of Habermas's Ideas with Marx

Unit Ten

Text: Postmodernism and the Pluralism of Value

Reading Passage One: Popular-Common Culture.

Reading Passage Two: Globalization

Unit Eleven.

Text: The Language Game

Reading Passage One: Language as Human Behavior

Reading Passage Two: The Relationship Between Language and Thought

Unit Twelve

Text: News Agencies and Cyberspace

Reading Passage One: Journalism and Moral Innocents

Reading Passage Two: The Sweet Sound of Conflict

Appendix Ⅰ Key to Exercises

Appendix Ⅱ Chinese Translation of the Texts

Appendix Ⅲ Glossary