Question

Culture becomes the lens through which we perceive and evaluate what is going on around us.

Answer 1

Culture shapes the environment in which we live and also affects such an environment. Since we are immerse and exposed to culture's spreading mechanisms (namely, school, church, family), the kind of values and ideas we acquire about the world are mostly -but not absolutely or inevitably- determined by the action of the culture we come from. Certainly, much of our personal culture can be shaped by personal decisions or random events that had a perdurable effect on us (for instance, not every single Latin American may go crazy about Salsa and other Latin rythms, regardless the fact that Latin music is mainstream for that culture).