单项选择题

Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following passage:
Languages are remarkably complex and wonderfully complicated organs of culture. (76) They contain the quickest and the most efficient means of communicating within their respective cultures. To learn a foreign language is to learn another culture. In the words of a poet and philosopher, "As many languages as one speaks, so many lives one lives." A culture and its language are as necessary as brain and body; while one is a part of the other, neither can function without the other. In learning a foreign language, the best beginning would be starting with the nonlanguage elements of the language: its gestures, its body language, etc. Eye contact is extremely important in English. Direct eye contact leads to understanding, or, as the English saying goes, seeing eye-to-eye. We can never see eye-to-eye with a native speaker of English until we have learned to look directly into his eyes.
According to this passage, gestures are______.