You could benefit from flipping through the pages of I Can't Believe You Asked That, a boo

k by author Phillip Milano that's subtitled, A No-Holds-Barred Q&A A bout Race, Sex, Religion, and Other Terrifying Topics.

For the past seven years, Milano—who describes himself as "a straight, white middle class married guy raised in an affluent suburb of Chicago"—as operated yforum.com, a Website that was created to get us talking. Through the posting of probing, provocative and sometimes simply inane questions and the answers they generate, people are encouraged to have a no-holds-barred exchange on topics across racial, ethnic and cultural lines. More often than not, the questions grow out of our biases and fears and the stereotypes that fuel misunderstanding among us.

As with the Web site, Milano hopes his book will be a social and cultural elixir. "The time is right for a new 'culture of curiosity' to begin to unfold, with people finally breaking down the last barrier to improve race and cultural relations" by actually talking to each other about their differences, Milano said in an e-mail message to me. Milano wisely used the Internet to spark these conversations. In seven years, it has generated 50,000 postings—many of them questions that people find hard to ask in a face-to-face exchange with the subjects of their inquiries.

But in his book, which was published earlier this month, Milano gives readers an opportunity to read the questions and a mix of answers that made it onto his Web site. "I am curious about what people who have been blind from birth 'see' in their dreams," a 13-year old boy wanted to know. "Why do so many mentally disabled people have such poor-looking haircuts and 'nerdy' clothes？" a woman asked. "How do African-Americans perceive God？" a white teenager wanted to know. "Do they pray to a white God or a black God？"

Like I said, these questions can generate a range of emotions and reactions. But the point of Milano's Web site, and his book, is not to get people mad, but to inform. us "about the lives and experiences" of others. Though many of the answers that people offered to the questions posed in his book are conflicting, these responses are balanced by the comments of experts whose responses to the queries also appear in the book.

Getting people to openly say what they are thinking about things that give rise to stereotypes and bigotry has never been easy. Most of us save those conversations for gatherings of people who look or think like us.

The purpose of the website is to

A．give people a chance to speak out.

B．prepare materials for a book.

C．get people exchanging ideas freely.

D．solve the social and cultural problems.