Ⅰ
Opinion A
Long ago, many people had
dreams of making robots like human beings. Karel Capek. the Czech playwright
who first coined the word "robot," derived it from the Czech word for
“forced labor."
If we accept this meaning,
it is possible to say that high technology has already made the dream of
creating robots come true.
But some will not be
satisfied with these industrial robots. They may well expect robots to have
brains and characters so that they can interact with them as colleagues or
pets.
Though technology will
soon make such things possible, it does not follow that this is desirable. I
think it is not. Why should robots do the same things we do? Anything that we
can do should be done by ourselves.
Robots should do things
that we cannot do. And they should not be pets.
We should take care of
others, for example, the elderly, children, people with physical disabilities
and so on, who want humanity, not technology.
Virtual-reality
"idols" capture young men's hearts now, which is strange, I think.
But for many people, it is a perfectly ordinary thing --- as are robots.
I do not love computers and electronic devices, though I use them every day. If they spoke to me and acted like human beings, I would be surprised and feel like running away. (222 words)
Opinion B
I am very glad that
manufacturers in
Even if I don't buy a
Furby or an AIBO for now, just seeing them on television or reading about them
in the newspaper makes me happy.
When I was a child, I
used to read the Astro Boy comic books about the adventures of a brave and
kind-hearted robot boy, and thought I wanted to make friends with robots
someday. So, I think my dream has come true.
I like talking about
robots with my daughters because doing so means talking about the future. As the
role of robots seems to have changed over the years, I think people will not be
able to live without them in the near future.
Above all, I am very
interested in the concept of a robot guide dog. With an ability to recognize
obstacles on roads as well as traffic and pedestrian signals through a video
camera and a sound sensor, such robots will be useful not only to blind people,
but also the elderly.
A recent newspaper
article said that a professor of engineering and his research team are
developing such a robot. I hope robot dogs will soon be able to help people
just as Astro Boy did. (217 words)
Opinion C
Computers have made it possible to close the
gap between machines and animals.
Many kinds of advanced and helpful robots seem
to be appearing, such as those that can display "emotions," recognize
human faces, speak, play music and dance.
Robots will soon be able
to help humans do household jobs, clean and shop, while offering advanced home
security and entertainment options. In particular, robots capable of performing
nursing care services may be useful to elderly people.
However, new technology
has both advantages and disadvantages. Just as the "car society" has
resulted in countless traffic accidents and increased air pollution. the
"robot society" is also likely to cause unpredictable damage.
If operated recklessly,
robots can be dangerous weapons. In the worst case scenario, we may face the
danger of losing our ability to manage our daily lives after robots replace us
as housekeepers.
It must not be forgotten
that robots are inferior to humans in terms of intelligence and emotions. In
the future, I would like to be cared for by humans, not robots.
I hope the robot society
will enable us to deepen our respect for living beings. We must consider how to
effectively interact with machines, not become dependent on them. (202 words)
ロボットと人間の関係について立場の違う意見を３つ提示。設問は，それぞれの意見の要約。
今年は鉄腕アトムの誕生の年にあたるそうで，そういう意味では大変タイムリーな話題でした。ディベートの題材になりそうなので，今年の英語ディベートのトピックの候補にしたいと思います。
さて，英文は明らかに日本人が書いたもの。学生が書いた英文に手を加えたかもしれません。英文の構成力が弱く，（要約しにくいように無理とそう書いたのかもしれません）英文として受験生に提示するにはおそまつな感じです。もし，こんな感じで生徒が英文を書いてきたら，主張をもっと前に，はっきりと書きなさい，と指導すると思います。いかにも日本語による，日本人の作文，といった感じです。
Ⅱ
A family using brand-new
genetic screening techniques has managed to free itself of a generations-old
problem, giving birth to a baby girl who will not develop her mother's
hereditary ear]y-onset Alzheimer's disease. And a fair number of observers have
responded to the news of this triumph --- reported in The journal of the American Medical Association - by worrying that
it opens the door to making “designer babies". “Today it's early-onset Alzheimer's. Tomorrow
it could easily be intelligence, or a good piano player or many other things we
might be able to identify the genetic factors for", said Jeffrey Kahn,
director of the
Whether we "ought
to" engage in genetic tinkering will be an important question for years to
come. But it seems a misguided emphasis in this case, which is not an example
of parents improving a child's potential qualities but rather a shining
instance of the long-term human aspiration to get rid of disease and suffering.
The mother, herself a geneticist, had a 50 percent chance of passing on a gene
for a rare form of Alzheimer's that renders victims helpless as early as their
forties. A doctor took several of her eggs, analyzed them for the bad gene and
used only those free of it.
The confusion of two
generally distinct purposes -- to ease suffering on the one hand, to fine-tune
human potential on the other - - is widespread in the debate over the use of
results from genetic research.
As new technology carries
the potential for misuse, reproductive technologies will always need special
attention. Drawing the exact line on the spectrum between relieving pain and
improving life will undoubtedly be a long-term societal project. But to say the
line's exact location is unclear does not mean it does not exist or cannot be
drawn. Can anyone really believe there is no way to distinguish, morally or
legally, between preventing a vicious disease such as Alzheimer’s and seeking
to make a better piano player? Saying so is the wrong approach to a technology
that offers such hope.
(350 words)
入試問題を解いていて楽しいのは自分は知らなかったのに，その筋の人たちにはかなり話題になったテーマに接するときです。この
designer babyというのはおそらく日本の新聞でも取り上げられ，それなりに話題を提供したものだと思いますが，私は知りませんでした。入試問題から教えてもらうとなると，かなりのタイムラグが発生しますが，それでも，全く接しないよりいいと思います。
医学系の受験生に読ませてもいいような話題。それにⅠと同じくディベートになっています。
http://www.geocities.co.jp/Technopolis-Mars/8080/p/bio_desi_02.html
それから新語であるgenetic screening , early-onset ..といった語の意味がインターネットで即座にわかるのも感動的。辞書はもう，新語の数を競う必要はなくなったと思います。辞書には定着した将来も使われるであろう語だけ収録し，これまでの語の記述を充実させるだけでいいと思いました。どうせ新語の登場に辞書が追いついていけるわけがありません。そちらはインターネットに任せれば充分でしょう。
この英文を読んで，筆者の考えに対して１００語の英文を書くという課題が与えられていました。
Ⅲ
Japanese teachers of
English will be sent to
Previously, the Laotian
government invited English teachers from the
This led officials to
decide to invite Japanese teachers of English, based on an idea that teachers
do not have to speak fluent English and Laotians could learn faster from
Japanese.
According to the director
of JICA's
こちらは日本の新聞の記事のよう。
下線部訳ということで，穏当な問題です。
ネィティブより，英語を外国語として教えている日本人教師のほうがよい，すばらしい考えです。
公募したのでしょうか。それともご指名？
【感想】
東京学芸大は教育学部，英語の問題のようです。
大問４も英作文で「男子は女子より抽象的思考ができる，是か非か」
Ⅰ，Ⅱ，Ⅳとディベート的な題材で私としては大変好感が持てました。ただ，大問２は思考と英語表現力が両立しないような気がして多少不安ではありますが…
そんなわけで，全体的な印象では良問ぞろいでした。
（２００３年３月２７日）
Speech situations
There is more to
mastering a language than learning its vocabulary and grammar. You also need to
understand a wide variety of speech situations; you may also find that the rules
given in a textbook are not a reliable guide to the way language is used in
practice. Rules are OK, as far as they go, but sometimes they may not go very
far.
Each speech community has
definite ideas about the situations in which various topics can be introduced,
particular words employed or even pronounced, and certain tones of voice used.
Members of the American speech community know that a formal speech situation, such
as a public address, requires a different set of rules than an exchange of jokes.
But the problem of when to say how and what is usually much more subtle than
that.
English normally makes a
clear distinction between you must,
which imposes an obligation upon the listener, you should, which offers advice to a listener, who is free to
ignore it and you may, which gives
approval for something the listener already wants to do. In most situations you may is the most polite and you must the most rude. However, a
foreign speaker of English usually does not know that in certain speech situations
just the opposite is true, and he may be insulted at what seems to him to be
rudeness when actually politeness was intended. This comes about because he
fails to see the true intention of the speaker.
Imagine a situation in
which he visits the home of an American for dinner and his hosts offer him a
very special dish prepared in his honor, saying, “You must try some of
this." The foreign speaker who knows his English grammar but not his
speech situations might consider this statement rude, because he thinks you must is a direct order for him to do
something. The American hosts would know, of course, that if they had said, “You
should try some of this,” they would be speaking with less rather than more politeness.
What's more, “You may try some of this" would actually be a 'very rude
remark in this speech situation, even though grammatically it would seem to the
foreigner to be the most polite alternative. (376 words)
タイトルがついていて，何について読むのか受験生がわかるのは親切。
内容はいかにも英語の先生が好みそうな題材。自分が読んだか，教科書として使ってみたのか，いずれにしろ，受験生の方向性（法学部）は考えずに，ご自分の関心，趣味で選んだ感じ。後半のYou
must try some of this.の紹介に多少の新鮮さはありますが，それでも典型的な題材の感じです。
The elephant's trunk
No one who sees an
elephant, especially in its natural state, can fail to be impressed by its
size, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about the elephant is the
flexibility and versatility of its trunk.
The elephant's trunk is 1.8
m long and 30 cm thick and contains 60,000 muscles. Elephants can use their
trunks to uproot trees or carefully put huge logs in position when used to
build bridges. An elephant can curl its trunk around a pencil and draw on a
small sheet of paper. With the two muscular extensions at the tip, it can remove
a thorn, pick up a pin or a coin, uncork a bottle, slide the bolt off a cage
door, or grip a cup so firmly, without breaking it, that only another elephant
can take it away. The tip is sensitive enough for a blindfolded elephant to
identify the shape and feel of objects.
In the wild, elephants
use their trunks to pick fruit from trees, to shake coconuts out of palm trees,
and to powder their bodies with dust. They also use them to check the ground as
they walk, avoiding traps, and to dig wells and drink water from them.
Elephants can walk
underwater on the beds of deep rivers or swim like submarines for miles, using
their trunks to breathe. They communicate through their trunks by making a
variety of different sounds. The trunk allows an elephant to smell a snake
hidden in the grass or food a mile away. It really is an amazing instrument.
(257 words)
こちらはうってかわって，典型的な説明文。普段考えることのないゾウの鼻ですが，それほど意外性があるわけでもなさそう。英語の題材の選定は難しいものだと思います。
今年度の入試結果があけてきましたが，生徒の受験する大学が固定化してきて，少子化の影響もあるのか，私立大の受験生の大学によって違うとは言うもののかなり落ちているかもしれません。英文の素材そのものにはっきりとした大学間格差が感じられます。
（２００３年３月２６日）
2. A
Squares are by no means a
uniquely
(224 words)
2B
Human beings are the most mobile of the larger land mammals, and, even if only moving on foot, a single human group can spread out within a few years into an area of hundreds of square miles. Under these circumstances languages, like other human cultural characteristics, become diverse given the fact that languages change constantly, small and then large differences can then be used to mark regional and social distinctions. Unlike other social characteristics, however, languages fulfill the role of essential media of communication and hence cannot become too diverse if communication is to be maintained. However, until recent times, communication took place for most people almost entirely within a local or family group. This meant that, if an original single group became divided through migration, there was little to prevent an original fairly uniform language diverging so much that communication between the two new groups became difficult or even impossible. We can thus see how different languages can arise and how they can become markers of different ethnic groups and different nations. (173 words)
4.
The most desperate period
of my life, financially speaking, was my years as an undergraduate at
At
I had always loved
libraries, but working in the stacks of a library with a large multiflooded
collection was a frightening prospect. My memory of those months is of a
labyrinth so dimly lit as to inspire hallucination--- a universe, or a
graveyard, of books. Not very encouraging to a nineteen-year-old whose hope was
to be a writer someday. It was one of the profound shocks of my life, when I
received my first paycheck, to discover that so much of my salary went to
income taxes: I wasn't working for a dollar an hour but for something like
seventy cents. A librarian kindly pointed out. "It's the same for all of
us.'
I would work at the
library until it closed, at
I was never released from
my “sacred sisterhood” except by graduating and moving away. My prevailing
anxiety about failing my academic studies must have inspired overcompensation,
for I was the valedictorian of my class. Forty years later, going through my
recently deceased father's papers, I would discover the amount of the New York
State Regents scholarship that had so changed my life: it was five hundred
dollars a year. (585 words)
【感想】
２Aはイギリスと公園，というイギリス物。
２Bは人間の移動と言語の誕生
いずれも入試問題としてはあまりに一般的。しかし，２Bは英文はかなり難しいと思います。
４の大問は誰か有名な女性作家の自伝の一部。インターネットでは全くヒットしませんでした。最後に「奨学金を５００ドルもらっていた」というくだりがあるのですが，これは，「５００ドルももらっていたのに，父がちょろまかしていた」といったニュアンスがあるのでしょうか。それとも単に５００ドルもらっていました。ということだけでしょうか。私立大学の学費はかなり高いのは確か，アルバイトで自給１ドルだったら，月に１００ドルぐらいになるでしょうから，たいした金額ではないのでしょうか。
まぁ，誰なのか知りたいものです。
ところで，疑問のある小問がありました。
会話問題で，「適切な発言を空所に入れなさい」というものです。
１．
(e)(situation: Talking at a party)
Janice: Did you hear what Jean said to me?
Tomoko: ( 3 )
Janice: Me? I thought I was being nice!
Tomoko: I guess she didn’t see it that way.
1. Don’t you think she was rude to you?
2. I couldn’t believe it either. How rude!
3. She is prettier than you, you know.
4. That’s nothing. You should hear my mother.
5. Well, you were pretty rude to her, too.
（パーティーの席上で）
Janice:Jeanが私に言ったこと聞いた？
トモコ：（ ）
Janice:私が？ 私は親切だったと思うけど。
トモコ：彼女はそんな風には見ていないみたいよ。
１．彼女はあなたに失礼だったと思わない？ ２．.私も信じられないわ。なんて失礼なんでしょう。
３．彼女はあなたよりずっとかわいいでしょ。 ４.どうってことないわよ。私のお母さんを聞くべきよ。
５．えぇ，あなたも彼女にとっても失礼だったわよ。
答えは５番だと思いますが，選択肢のtooがわかりませんでした。必要ないのではないかと。しかし，今日本語に直していてわかりました。Jeanは直接Janiceに失礼なことを言って，その現場をトモコに見たか，とJaniceが聞いているようです。そこで，Janiceの最初の発言は，Jeanって失礼な子ね，という批判めいたところがあったようです。
（２００３年３月２２日）
Ⅰ
According to a recent
research, car use in
Although
How can congestion be
reduced? One way is to change the way drivers pay in
However, there are both
advantages and disadvantages to road pricing. If it is a fixed amount per day,
like five pounds for
The technology for road
pricing is also being developed to automate it. Such automation means that
satellites are used to trace the positions of cars, which has the result that
the government can gain information on where somebody is at any time. This is
seen as a threat to privacy. Perhaps a simpler way to reduce congestion would
be to make children go to school on foot or by public transport as many do in
Ⅱ
When I was at
In
When the soul of Business
is pursued properly, it is no less graceful than the soul of Honour. They both
come to the same end. One who respects Honour will have fair business dealings;
and the best business men will hold Honour in respect. I think this is the
reason why
When the soul of Business
is wrongly directed by some inferior person, it is more than I can bear. These
people often think they can take advantage of me because I am “soft”. How much
they are mistaken in me! It is only my etiquette not to struggle with them over
money matters, lest it do injury to our noble humanity. But am I afraid of
anyone? No. Even if the whole world becomes my enemy, I cannot be afraid. What
will I do with those people who behave meanly to me? There is but one word for
them: "Good-by forever." I can't have any further friendship with
them. Everything is finished between us. (601 words)
Ⅲ
Before a big exam, a
sound night's sleep will do you more good than reading your textbooks. That, at
least, is the folk wisdom. And science, in the form of behavioural psychology,
supports that wisdom, But such behavioural studies cannot distinguish between
two competing theories of why sleep is good for the memory. One says that sleep
is when permanent memories form. The other says that they are actually formed
during the day, but then "edited" at night, to wash away what is unnecessary.
To tell the difference,
it is necessary to look into the brain of a sleeping person, and that is hard.
But after a decade of painstaking work, a team led by Pierre Maquet of the
Cyclotron Research Centre in
The particular stage of
sleep in which the Belgian group is interested is rapid eye movement (REM)
sleep, when brain and body are active, heart rate and blood pressure increase,
the eyes move quickly back and forth behind the eyelids as if watching a movie,
and the brainwave traces resemble those of wakefulness. It is during this
period of sleep, usually lasting between 10 and 25 minutes, that people are
most likely to relive events of the previous day in dreams although somewhat
mysteriously they rarely remember the dreams themselves.
Dr Marguet used positron-emission
tomography (PET) to study the brains of people as they practiced a task during
the day, and as they slept during the following night. The task required them
to press a button as fast as possible, in response to a light coming on in one
of six positions. As they learnt how to do this, their response time got
faster. What they did not know was that the appearance of the lights sometimes
followed a pattern ?? what Dr Laureys refers to as an "artificial
grammar" Yet the reductions in response time showed that they learnt
faster when the pattern was present than when it was not. In other words, they
were learning without being aware of it.
The PET scans revealed that the cuneus ---a
small structure at the back of the brains --- was active during both the
four-hour training period and following REM sleep, but not in any other stage
of sleep. The scans, however, revealed significantly less activity in the
cuneus during REM sleep in those who had seen randomly flashing lights than in
those who had learnt the artificial grammar.
What is more, the
grammar-learners, unlike those exposed to the random pattern, showed an
increase in activation in brain areas distantly connected to the cuneus, such
as the caudate nucleus, a structure already known to be involved in grammar and
sequence learning. Those with more to learn (i.e. the artificial grammar, as
well as the mere mechanical task of pushing the button) have more active
brains. The “editing" theory would not predict that, since the number of
unrelated stimuli would be the same in each case. And to reject any remaining
doubts that those who were tested were learning as opposed to unlearning, their
response times when they woke up were even quicker than when they went to
sleep.
The team therefore
concluded that the neural connections involved in memory are reinforced through
reactivation during REM sleep, particularly if the brain detects an intrinsic
structure in the material being learnt. (585 words)
http://www.cipherwar.com/news/00/sleep.htm
【感想】
１番は変哲のない英文。印象に残りそうにありません。ただ，イギリスを題材に扱った英文が結構あるものだと感心します。
２番は「愛知県出身の画家」の書いたもの，という説明があります。中身からみると，なにか明治の初期にイギリスに行ったときのような感じです。日本では「商売は商人しかしない」「名誉のためだったら息子でも刺し殺す」とは，武士道といった感じ。この英文を読んでなにがわかるのでしょうか。「名誉を重んじる日本人が昔はいた」といった郷愁で，イギリス人に逆に「日本人は商売になると顔色が変わる」と言われそうです。
３番は理科系の生徒には興味深いでしょう。こうした，ある実験を通して，結論を導き出す，といった英文をたくさん読めばいいと思います。
（２００３年３月１９日）
Ⅰ
Anyone with more than
passing contact with cats has probably known one that could tell when its owner
was arriving home, open the door to get out, scratch on the window to get in,
or perform some other feat that suggests that cats have something of note
between their ears.
On the other hand, many
of us have known a cat that seemed not able to respond to almost any stimuli,
made a mess, or injured itself when it overstepped its intelligence bounds,
never picked up on learning tricks, or never learned to make its needs known.
Obviously, there are
smart cats, and there are not-so-smart cats. Like humans, for every cat that
can accomplish a feat of great intelligence, there is another one that bungles
it. But, as a species, (are, cats, denying, intelligent, is, no, that, there).there is no denying that cats are intelligent.
Of course, no one has yet
developed an IQ test for cats or has been able to prove the claimed intellectual
superiority of certain breeds, such as Siamese. But certain characteristics of
cats lead us to believe that they can think.
One clue is their
cautiousness. Many other animals are not smart enough to know when there could
be danger. Another is their curiosity. They will explore things in situations
not essential to their survival --- a sure sign of intelligence far beyond the
needs of mere existence. They also have a capacity for problem solving. Using
their acute awareness of the world around them, they can work out answers to
problems and then adapt solutions to different situations.
Cats are also
independent-minded, with wills of their own. Unlike Pavlov's dogs, which repeat
actions or press buttons so that they get a reward, many cats would sooner fall
asleep than be involved in such experiments. Some of these cats may be judged
as not very bright, or lazy, but arguably they are only exerting their
independence and refusing to cooperate.
Cats brains, in order to
stay active, need to process a constant flow of information and stimulation
from their environments. Electroencephalogram (EEG) readings, recording the
brain activity of cats in stimulus-free environments, showed that the cats
brains gradually shut down to a basic body-maintenance level, without storing
any thoughts or ideas.
This experiment also
explains why kittens whose senses are not "exercised" from an early
age do not grow up to function normally. The most intelligent cats are those
raised by people who handle them, play with them, and provide a variety of
stimuli for their amusement and growth. (418 words)
→【大意】
Ⅱ
The release of a new drug
is a pretty big deal in the world of medicine. The company that made it will
throw a lavish party. The stock market will react to the news. Doctors will be
inundated with freebies and trial samples. And now that the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration has lifted its restrictions against direct advertising, the
public too will be assaulted with ad campaigns in newspapers, magazines and
television.
As a physician, I often
hear from patients who have read about a new medication and want me to write a
prescription. To them, I must sound like a stick in the mud. Unless the
medication they're taking is not working, however, I'm generally reluctant to
change. They assume that newer drugs are
better, I assume the old ones are fine.
So I felt somewhat vindicated
recently by a report in the Journal of
the American Medical Association
about the safety problems associated with new medications. Of 548 drugs
approved by the FDA over the past 25 years, fully 20% turned out to have
serious or life-threatening effects that were unknown or undisclosed at the
time of approval, according to an analysis directed by the
How could this happen? I
put the question to Dr. Karen Lasser, the lead author of the study. Basically,
she says. "The drugs aren't adequately studied before being released to
the public." As she points out, new drugs are tested first on relatively
small numbers of users, who in the past tended to be men. It’s only when the
drugs are marketed to the general population and taken by large numbers of
women, children and the elderly that more obscure side effects emerge.
The Pharmaceutical
Research and Manufacturers Association took issue
with the study, releasing a statement that called it “misinformed and
misleading." All medications involve some risk, the drug makers point out,
and some new medications have significant additional benefits that are
discovered only after they are approved.
But the drug companies,
by marketing their newest products so aggressively, are part of the problem.
'They push the public and doctors to use new drugs that are more profitable but
also more dangerous," says Dr. Paul Allen, one of the study's co-authors.
That's a message patients
should take to heart. Don't assume because you see a lot of ads for a new drug
that the one you are taking is no longer desirable. And if you switch to a new
medication, be attuned to any unexpected side effects. The most common adverse
reactions include liver toxicity, heart problems and fetal damage.
This is not to say that
there aren't plenty of important new drugs in the
pipeline. I am sure that if there's a sound reason for doing so, I will
still prescribe newly released medications for my patients. But only when
absolutely necessary. And then I will keep a very close eye out for any adverse
effects. (525 words)
Ⅲ
A particular problem
directly related to continuing population growth is growing global food
insecurity. For a variety of reasons the demand for food by the consumer has
begun to outrun the capacity to provide. Where all attention was previously
focused on population growth as the sole source of demand on available food
stocks, today an equally important source of demand has become apparent and that
is affluence. As per capita income increases, purchasing power climbs and with
it a demand for higher quality foods, especially foods of animal origin such as
meat, eggs, milk and milk products. Eating meat can be considered an
inefficient way of utilizing grain. In the
It is to our advantage
and the world's as well that the United Stales grain harvests in the years
1975-1977 have resulted in bumper yields. Overflowing granaries and low grain
prices are the mark of this high productivity. But the great increases in food
production have not occurred where populations are growing the fastest. Gains
in production require modern energy-intensive methods combining irrigation,
pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, genetics, and mechanization. One reason,
among several, why poor countries have lagged behind in food production is
because their farmers have not had access to appropriate technologies, such as
sufficient fertilizers, irrigation, improved seeds, pesticides, storage facilities,
and transportation. The world's poor are thus driven to world food markets to
supplement their needs. However, they must compete there with richer nations whose
own increased demands have forced the price of grain upward. Caught in the
price-squeeze of competition in which rising food prices outstrip purchasing
power, the poor countries can buy less and less with their precious dollars. So
today, we have the producer nations with surpluses to sell, the affluent
consumer nations who have money to buy, and the low income consumer countries
that cannot effectively compete in the world food markets. World hunger is
sustained by scarcity promoted by the economic system of rich countries.
According to some estimates, world agriculture could produce enough to feed up
to 30 billion people. What appears to be a food shortage may, in fact, be an
uneven worldwide distribution of economic power. These differentials represent
an ever-growing number of hungry people. The result is famine in some parts of
the world, most notably on the Indian subcontinent and some countries of
【感想】
ついに問題を解くスピードに頭の中での整理が追いつかなくなりました。先週１週間で６学部の問題を解いたので，内容が全く混乱して，何を読んだのかも覚えていません。三重大学は問題は重量級でした。医学部も含んでいるということで，難易度はかなり高いようです。内容が社会的，科学的なものに限られ，ここでは，エッセーや随筆，あるいは小説が得意な人にとっては読みにくい内容だったと思います。もっとも，３番は頻出テーマ。１番の猫も結構好まれていて，猫に関する英文も数多くの問題集で扱われています。
２番はTIMEからの出題。TIMEは購読だけは長いことしていますが，読むことはほとんどなくて，写真を見るだけ。一時Time
AlmanacというCDが発売されていて，過去数年間の全文検索ができました。そのCDの発売がなくなり，インターネット上で全文を読めていましたが，この記事を読もうとしたら課金される，とのこと。Newsweekと同じ状態になってしまいました。だんだん，印刷記事についてはそんなふうになっていくのでしょう。問題構成は総合大学の二次試験としては典型的なものでした。
科学的な英文をかなりの比率で読み進める必要があります。
（２００３年３月１７日）
Ⅰ
In 1896, a man found gold
near the
To reach the
Once over the mountain
passes, prospectors, as these miners were called, built boats and made their
way across lakes and down rivers. Many lives were lost, but those who lived came
to the mining town of
From the
→【大意】
知らないことが多すぎるので，有名な（？）クロンダイクのゴールドラッシュについては初耳でした。どこかで聞いたり，見ても忘れてしまっているのだと思いますが。そこで，おもしろく読めました。特に牛乳１杯を高額な金額で売ったり，新聞が貴重だったり。その時代，その時代，才覚にいる人がいるもんだと感心しました。
Ⅱ
It's exciting when a pet
parrot says her first word, especially if it's your name. Some parrots have
even learned prayers or entire poems. However, when a parrot talks, does it
have any idea of what it is saying? Is a parrot just an unthinking mimic, or
are parrots smarter than we think? Can they understand the meaning of what they
say?
According to researcher
Irene Pepperberg, unlike most other animals, parrots have vocal tracts that let
them copy human speech easily. Pepperberg also says that parrots learn to
communicate with others in the wild by imitating the adult birds. That helps to
explain the behavior of pet parrots that repeat what their owners say. However,
talking does not necessarily mean understanding.
Pepperberg set up an
experiment at
When Pepperberg shows
Alex a key, Alex says "key.” Then Pepperberg hands it to him. Alex is only
rewarded when he correctly names things. Pepperberg said that no one had
believed that a parrot could name things. Now, Alex can identify more than a
hundred things, from paper to pens. Alex also learned the names for colors,
shapes, and materials. After he was taught individual words for things, the next
step was to combine two ideas, not just to say "pen" but to say
"blue pen."
After years of learning,
Alex has gotten a little bored. He'll name a key, take it in his beak, and
throw it on the floor. Sometimes during a session of naming the same things, Alex
asks for something different. For instance, if he is shown too many keys, Alex
may say, "I want cork!' The curious bird may also say, "You tell me
what's that!" when shown a new thing.
If asked about the color
of new things, Alex does much more than his usual performance. He easily adds
words such as "blue" and "green" to the names. To keep Alex
happily naming, Pepperberg often goes to the toy store to pick up different
figures and animals.
Some people say
Pepperberg's experiment doesn't prove that a parrot can use language.
Pepperberg replies that although Alex doesn't use language exactly the same way
as people do, he does use words to express ideas. (417 words)
→【大意】
これは英語教育界では富に有名な話。増進堂の英語ⅠNew Streamの７課，文英堂の英語ⅠUnicornの３課，青山学院２００２年度経営，と登場します。「動物と言語」はかなり人気のある分野です。
Ⅲ
Every Friday night
something strange happens on the avenues and streets of
Already, Friday Night
Fever is a famous legend. David Miles, the president of the California Outdoor
Roller-skating Association, said 'We're thinking of bringing a group to
The Fever is so unusual
that some social scientists now go along each week to do research. They wonder
if they are witnessing the future of their country. Here, all kinds at people
meet and interact. Andre Baron, an electrician from the suburbs, says "I
come here to make friends, male and female." He has been skating since May
1999, when friends at work teased him about not getting enough exercise.
After three whistle
blasts, the skaters set off at
To provide an escort to
the weekly event, two years ago
The skating began in 1993
but got a tremendous boost two years later during a general strike. For nearly
a month the Metro subway and other forms of mass transit in
→【大意】
ロスアンゼルス・タイムズの記事のようです。
神田外語の英文は全て４１０語台。すばらしく語数をそろえています。英文の程度，量に配慮している表れと評価できます。設問もほぼパラグラフの内容を問うもの。各長文に２題ずつ語彙力をみる問題が付されていますが，語彙力だけならこの方がはるかに受験生の負担は少ないはずです。しっかりとした文脈がありますから。
神田外語は読む力を見ることに主眼を置いて，４０題，リスニングがありますが，出題の意図がしっかりしていて好感が持てる問題でした。
http://www.mornews.com/pdfarchive/2000/May/20/5-20-00%20A17.pdf
（２００３年３月１５日）
Ⅲ
As I walk down the
street, I quite often get the blues. The reason is that the stores lining the
road are on the decline and bookstores, particularly, are folding one after
another. Privately run stores are being
forced out of business as large-scale retail stores with sprawling lots invade
their territory. It is no longer rare to see ”shuttered roads," a term
that describes shopping districts with a conspicuous number of closed and
shuttered stores. Large-scale retail stores are undoubtedly convenient for
customers. However, person-to-person rapport is weakened in exchange for this convenience
- -- a loss to the customers that is by no means insignificant. The fact that a
number of small to mid-sized bookstore are on the verge of extinction weighs
particularly heavily on me.
The serious situation in
which the nation's bookstores now find themselves was unexpectedly highlighted
by the results of a recent study on reading levels in
What has caused the drop
in students' Japanese language skill? A predominant 39 percent of the teachers
polled said the problem can be blamed on adults and teachers who do not read books
as much as they used to. Most teachers, when asked to identify the root of the
problem, wrote: "I don't read books." Take a look at the people
around you on the train and it is obvious the number of readers is on the
decline. Instead, what stands out is the number of people staring at the
screens of their cell phones, absorbed in pressing the keys. In the past, commuters
used to be immersed in manga and were laughed at for providing a curious and
typically Japanese scene. The number of such commuters appears to have
decreased.
Japanese people will not be
able to improve their language skills unless they read books, and language is
the first foundation of any country's culture. Once, the Japanese education
system sought to teach all Japanese to read and write and use an abacus.
Each person can come to
reading in his or her own way. In my case, it was with a book my parents bought
me when I started primary school. I have forgotten the name of the book, but I
still clearly remember the joy of carrying it home. If people stop reading,
bookstores will have no option but to close their shutters. And if there are no
neighborhood bookstores, the opportunity for experiencing happiness like that I
felt as a child will be lost. Of course, books are available not only from
bookstores - homes, schools and libraries in each district also provide the opportunity
to rend. Be that as it may, the fact that bookstores are fading away is still
symbolic.
What will the decline in
the Japanese people's language skill mean for the country in the next
generation? This thought occurs to me every time I walk down the street, and I
have a hard time raising my spirits. (665)
→【大意】
結構な量です。英文も易しいのですが，生徒には難しいと思います。
こうした内容（おじさんが，若者に対して説教する）は面白みがなくて，すぐに忘れてしまいそうです。「大学入試の英文は初老の男性が題材を選定している」
Ⅳ
You remember that line of
Robert Burns about seeing ourselves as others see us? I wonder how many of us
have suddenly experienced that--- have suddenly, as it were, been made to
regard ourselves from outside, through the eyes, perhaps, of a foreign friend?
I am not sure that the experience is wholly to be commended but let me give you
two examples of what I mean.
An African chief, a man
whom I had met in his own country in
The next picture is even
more searching. A girl from
Those are true stories.
They have stuck in my mind because I have just returned to live in
→【大意】
この英文は私が高校時代（！！）に読んだ英文です。教えた覚えはありません。They carried umbrellas like spears
といった部分が印象的で，そのところだけ覚えています。ただ，今英文を読むと，駅はヴィクトリアとありますので，鉄道のようです。私は地下鉄のことばかりだといつの間にか記憶が変わっていたのでしょう。都会に行って，歩いている人たちを見ると，私はさながらこのアフリカの酋長のような気分になってしました。村で１５年過ごしたこともあって，この酋長の感想は私のものとかなりの部分でオーバーラップしていたものと思います。
さて，この英文の原典ですが，絶対見つかるはずと思いかなりがんばりましたが，唯一掲載していると思われるWeb
Citeはパスワードが必要で閲覧できませんでした。問題の最後にタイトルを選ぶ問題がありましたが，この答えと思われる選択肢はAs
others see usこれをキーワードに探してみると，バートランドラッセルのエッセー集に突き当たりました。
そこで，出展の確認をと思い。「バートランド・ラッセルのホームページ」（ラッセル研究者と愛好家のためのホームページ）の作者へ，ぶしつけでしたが，問い合わせてみました。答えは，Noでした。
理由その１）ラッセルはこのような英文は書かない。（専門家のお言葉です）
２）ラッセルはアフリカで長期滞在していない。
１）については私ではだめですが，２）については自分でも確認できたはず。不明を恥じます。ということで，この懐かしい英文の出典を確認するには３０年前の教科書を見るしかありませんが，そんなものあるはずがありません。大変残念です。
（２００３年３月１６日）
From the far north to
The largest financial
switchover in history made a smooth start. Few problems affected the launch of
"The euro is a
victory for
The arrival of the notes
and coins in 12 of the European Union's 15 states marks the bloc's most ambitious
project, giving Europeans proof that they share more with their neighbors than
just an accident of geography. In general, the appearance of the euro was
greeted with excitement around
→【大意】
長文問題はこれだけです。これは週間ＳＴという日本語注つき週間英字新聞からとられた記事のようです。これで，私の担当した大学だけで，英語学習用週間英字・日本語新聞(朝日ウィークリー，毎日ウィークリー，ＳＴと３誌からの引用となりました。このレベルの英文は時事性もあり，難易度も適当で出題しやすいことがわかります。
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/01/01/euro.wrap/
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/shukan-st/articles/nm20020111/nm20020111text.htm
ところでこの英文は空所補充５題。内容に関して５題。４択の語法，単語問題が１５題，会話５題。そして，誤文指摘が１０題ありました。この誤文指摘が難解というか，癖があるというのか，出題者の意図がはっきりしない問題でした。それまで，比較的平易な問題を出題していたのに，ここに来て，難易度がつりあわないような問題や，意図がわからない英文に出くわしました。
解答作成の場合，こういうときはできるだけ自分で解決しますが，校閲者に「疑問解決用紙」という書式で疑問点を明らかにすることがあります。そこで，私は次のような疑問を出しておきました。
第５問が全体に釈然としません。テスティングポイントが曖昧で，問題が意味不明になっている感じです。全体を確認していただければ，もしかしたら自分では気づかない勘違いがあるかもしれません。特に次の４問をお願いします。
33 Mr. Beckham was at his desk, the one under the door.
「ベッカム氏はドアの近くの机についている」ぐらいの意味になり，underがおかしいと思いますが，それをby, nearにする必然性もありません。
なんか，勘違いをしてますか？
34 To give his lack of experience, this failure need not surprise us.
「彼の経験不足を考慮に入れれば，この失敗は驚くにたらない」
ぐらいの意味だと思いますが，Givenが答えに間違えはないような気がしますが，need notも気に入りません。doesn't でいいような気がします。
36 Mr. Tanaka has gone in up the civil service exams.
「田中さんは公務員試験を受けた」
gone in up ではなくgone in forだと思うのですが，こんな熟語を他の問題のレベルからすると出題するのだろうか？もっと簡単なところがおかしいのではないか？という気もしますが…
37. The train to Oxford leaves on every hours.
前置詞toも気に入りません。それ以上にonが気に入りません。ここには下線が施されていないので，訂正できません。on every hourという形で，「１時間ごとに」という意味が成立しなければなりませんが，これも例が少なくて，自信がもてません。インターネットの検索では１６００件ほどあり，on every hourで「１時間ごとに」という意味で使われているようです。cf. The shows start at 7:00 P.M. and occur on every hour with the last show starting at midnight.という例もあるので，大丈夫ですが。恥ずかしいことに私には初耳でした。
以上の問題も含めて，全体に問題が悪問に近い感じ。ご確認いただければ幸いです。
（２００３年３月１４日）
Ⅰ
The largest lake in the
western
Although the
The
(199 words)
→【大意】
Ⅱ
(A) Doctors in
Marcus was swimming at the beach with some friends when he was pulled
out by the sea currents. He couldn't swim very well and soon went under
the water. His friends searched for him; lifeguards at the beach found
his body about 20 minutes later.
He was taken to
They were right. This is
the first time that anyone was listed as "dead" for so many hours and
came back to life. Marcus is in good condition, and doctors expect him to have
only slight problems from this event. (163 words)
→【大意】
どちらも長文というには短い英文でした。
テスト形式としては洗練されており，いろいろな問題をごちゃごちゃと入り混ぜた問題ではなく，一つのポイントに絞り込んだ問題でした。
Ⅰはパラグラフの概要をとらえることを主眼として，パラグラフ毎の主題を問う問題３題，英文全体の趣旨を問う問題１題でした。Ⅱはパラグラフごとのつながりを問うもので，問題ではパラグラフがバラバラになっていていて，その正しい順序を問うものでした。
残りは環境問題のパンフレット。この4Rの最初の単語を入れるものでした。実は次の問題は迷いました。
( ) and fix things rather than throwing them away and buying new
things.
候補はrebuildとreuseです。reuseがいい気もしますが，順序が気に入りませんでした。
Fix and reuse thingsならば「直して，再利用」となりますから，すっきりしますが，「再利用して直せ」では，順番が違います。4Rのためにこのようになっていますが，空所補充にしてしまうと，整合性に欠ける気がしました。
第３問は船の時刻表を読むTOEICのような試験。会話問題がかなりありますが，最後の会話はへん！ＪａｃｋとMr.Jonesの会話ですが，Jackは「英語の上手になりたい」とMr.Jonesに頼みます。Mr.Jonesは「映画を見るだけでは不十分だから，英会話の本を買って勉強しろ」と言います。いったいJackは何人で母国語は何語なんでしょうか？Jackでなくて，SusumuでMegumiでもよかったのに，と思いました。
（２００３年３月１４日）
(3) The family party was
in full swing when the phone rang. Dr Craig answered it. He listened carefully
for a moment, then said, 'I’ll come right away.’ ‘Do you have to go out? his wife
asked. 'If it is an urgent case, I have to go,' Dr Craig answered. 'If I should
be late, please wait up for me.' Dr Craig drove into the night. If I don't
hurry, he thought, I might be too late. The thought made him drive faster.
After driving for an hour, he arrived at a house. All the lights were on. If all
the family is up, the doctor thought, the situation must he serious. A woman
opened the front door immediately. 'Thank God you've come, doctor,' she cried.
'It's my daughter.' A sleepy child of about six appeared in a nightdress. 'I
told her,' her mother said, 'Go to bed, or I'll fetch the doctor". See,'
she shouted at the child. 'I've done it. Here's the doctor!' (166 words)
→【大意】
(5) One way to reduce food waste is to ensure that less food is left uneaten. But how well do restaurants respond to customers' requests for smaller portions?
“We can reduce the amount of rice when an individual customer requests it, but it is difficult to serve just half a piece of meat in our entrees,” says an official at the Denny's chain of restaurants.
An official at Seiyo Food Systems echoes that concern. "It is hard to serve smaller portions of anything other than our rice plates," the official says.
Some restaurants offer half-size servings or small servings of rice, soups and salads, but almost none offer small-portion meals for adults with a small appetite.
So-called children's plates are mostly limited to elementary school students, but the Skylark and Gusto chains began serving kiddy meals to adults three years ago. The stores let customers over the age of 60 order kiddy plates at the normal price for children, while charging an extra 200 yen for junior high school students and people aged up to 59.
'We are catering to elderly customers who want to eat a balanced meal but cannot finish everything on an adult-sized plate,' says a company spokesman. (200 words)
→【大意】
う～ん。感想がない！非常に平易なことは確かですが，笑い話も小話程度。「お子様ランチ」はなんかの記事を書き換えたのでしょうが，日本の固有名詞デニーズ，スカーラーク，ガストとか。そいえば，Seiyo Food Systemsは近くにないので知りません。
知っている人にはあたりまえすぎますね(^_^;;）
（２００３年３月１３日）
L. A. Hill, the author of
the following passage, wrote a lot of short stories. He was very good at
writing short stories which are seasoned with wit and humor, using expressions
easy to understand. Readers will enjoy the wit and humor expressed between the
lines in his stories. In the following passage the author tells about a funny
puzzle which a wife has for her husband in order to make him understand that he
does not listen to her.
Fred thought he was a
very clever man, and he was particularly proud of his skill in mathematics, but
as often happens with people who have perhaps too high an opinion of
themselves, he was impatient, and seldom listened to what others were saying. He
was particularly bad about listening to his wife, and she often complained bitterly
about this.
Then one day she had an
idea. When he came home from work, she said, "Fred, I've got an amusing
puzzle for you."
"Oh, yes," he
answered. '
“But I suppose you won't
listen to what I'm saying." Helen went on, turning away and beginning to
prepare the dinner.
"Of course, I'll
listen!" Fred answered angrily." I always listen to what you have to
say," he went on untruthfully.
“All right then,' Helen
went on. 'This is a mathematics puzzle."
Fred smiled scornfully,
thinking, "she couldn't find a mathematics puzzle that I couldn't solve in
a flash."
"Well," Helen
began, "imagine that you're the driver of a bus. There are 42 people in
it, and at the first bus-stop five get off, and eight get on. At the next bus-stop
nobody gets off, but three more get on. Now the question is, 'What's the name
of the driver of the bus?"'
Up to this time Fred had
been smiling scornfully at the simplicity of the puzzle. "Even stupider
than I'd expected!” he thought. But now he became angry. "The driver of
the bus?" he asked. "How should I know what his name was?"
"There you are!"
his wife answered. "I told you that you never listen to what I say. I told
you at the beginning of the puzzle that you were the driver of the bus." (375
words)
→【大意】
L.A. Hillは私が学生時代（うん十年も前！）に会話のテキストでやった著者。いまだに人気があるようで，「平易でまとまりがあり，それなりに面白い」英文の種というのは次から次へと出てくるようではないようです。英語がほとんどできなかった私はこのL.A.
Hillの英文を２０数個全て覚えた記憶があります。それこそ道を歩きながら復唱していました。授業の冒頭に数名が指名されて，みんなの前で暗誦，というのもありました。英語の虫だった頃が懐かしく思い出されます。
全体に問題は平易。
（２００３年３月１３日）
Ⅰ Whether work should be placed among the causes of happiness or among the
causes of unhappiness may perhaps be regarded as a doubtful question. There
is certainly much work which is exceedingly irksome, and an excess of work
is always very painful. I think, however, that, provided work is not excessive
in amount, even the dullest work is to most people less painful than idleness.
There are in work all grades, from mere relief of tedium up to the profoundest
delights, according to the nature of the work and the abilities of the
worker. Most of the work that most people have to do is not in itself interesting,
but even such work has certain great advantages. To begin with, it fills a good many hours of the day without the need of deciding what
one shall do. Most people, when they are left free to fill their own time
according to their own choice are at a loss to think of anything sufficiently
pleasant to be worth doing. And, whatever they decide on, they are troubled
by the feeling that something else would have been pleasanter. To be able
to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and
at present very few people have reached this level. Moreover, the exercise of choice is in itself tiresome. Except to people with unusual initiative it is positively agreeable to
be told what to do at each hour of the day, provided the orders are not
too unpleasant. Most of the idle rich suffer unspeakable boredom as the
price of their freedom from drudgery. At times they may find relief by hunting big game in Africa, or by flying round
the world, but the number of such sensations is limited, especially after
youth is past. Accordingly, the more intelligent rich men work nearly as hard as if they
were poor, while rich women for the most part keep themselves busy with
innumerable trifles of whose earth-shaking importance they are firmly persuaded.
Work, therefore, is
desirable first and foremost, as a preventive of boredom, for the boredom that
a man feels when he is doing necessary though uninteresting work is as nothing
in comparison with the boredom that he feels when he has nothing to do with his
days. With this advantage of work another is associated, namely that it makes
holidays much more delicious when they come. Provided a man does not have to
work so hard as to impair his vigor, he is likely to find far more zest in his
free time than an idle man could possibly find.
The second advantage of most paid work and of some unpaid work is that
it gives chances of success and opportunities for ambition. In most work
success is measured by income, and while our capitalistic society continues,
this is inevitable. It is only where the best work is concerned that this
measure ceases to be the natural one to apply. The desire that men feel
to increase their income is quite as much a desire for success as for the
extra comforts that a higher income can procure. However dull work may
be, it becomes bearable if it is a means of building up a reputation, whether
in the world at large or only in one's own circle. Continuity of purpose
is one of the most essential ingredients of happiness in the long run,
and for most men this comes chiefly through their work. In this respect those women whose lives are occupied with housework are much less fortunate
than men, or than women who work outside the home. The domesticated wife
does not receive wages, has no means of bettering herself, is taken for
granted by her husband (who sees practically nothing of what she does),
and is valued by him not for her housework but for quite other qualities.
Of course,this does not apply to those women who are sufficiently well-to-do to
make beautiful houses and beautiful gardens and become the envy of their
neighbours; but such women are comparatively few, and for the great majority
housework cannot bring as much satisfaction as work of other kinds brings
to men and to professional women. (703 words)
英文が古いか，比較的新しいかは一般的な人を指すときになんとなくわかります。これは明らかに古い英文。綴りがイギリスで，どうも貴族と一般労働者を念頭に入れたような仕事のやりがい，といった論調。最後の女性についても，一体いつの時代なのか？という気がしてきます。インターネットで簡単に検索できましたが，なんと１９３０年に出版されたバートランド・ラッセルのThe
Conquest of Happinessという論考。最近，この注つきが出版されたようで，そんなこともあって出題の英文にしたのでしょう。中国の大学入試やら高校の英語参考書がWebにUpされているようで，そこでこの箇所の英文が見つかりました。
http://www.ecp.com.cn/dy_l/dy_l8/ca13866.htm
→【大意】
Ⅱ
Your contract with a
writer may expire for different reasons; boredom, lack of conviction, disgust,
irritation, frustration, panic. You may consciously decide you have had enough
with a particular book or you may drift into abandoning it on the shelf and
always picking up something else instead. Perhaps you have a quick riffle
through the remaining pages just to see whether you want to renegotiate your
contract--- if there's an interesting plot development you might give it
another chance --- or you might peek at the last page to check whether your
predictions proved right.
If you feel out of your depth you may leave a book
thinking that you have failed. If hundreds of other people have read and
enjoyed this book, why don't you? Is there something wrong with you? Are you in
some way inadequate as a reader? This feeling of failure can be very damaging
and could make you feel less like taking a risk next time. Leaving a book
partway through will often result in a sense of unfinished business. This can
be positive if you go on mulling over the book and thinking about how it's
affected you even though you didn't finish it. But the sense of unfinished
business can be undermining if what you are really feeling is failure and
defeat.
Understanding the
contract between the writer and the reader and your own reading curve on
particular books will help you to analyze why you give up. It is very important
not to feel it is your fault. If you think of parallel experiences where
personal taste drives your choices, there is no implication of failure. If you
go to buy a new outfit you try on a lot of outfits before finding the one that
suits you. If you decide it doesn't suit you when you get homes you don't
immediately begin to doubt your abilities. If you go out to dinner and choose
something from the menu that you don't like, you kick yourself for the waste of
the occasion and the money but you don't feel emotionally or intellectually
inadequate.
It is often assumed that
people only give up on difficult' books. This is another of the restrictive
labels attached to reading. The reading population is unhelpfully divided into
those who read 'popular' books and those who read 'difficult' books. The truth
is most people read both and one person's 'popular' is another person's
'difficult', Giving up on books is not just to do with difficulty, it is to do
with whether the writer is reaching you. It is impossible to predict which
writers will speak to which readers. Give a group of six people six books and
you will always be surprised by who liked what.
A comment from somebody
else can open up a book you thought was closed to you but there will always
remain some books which don't hit the mark.
This won't necessarily be to do with the type of book, it can happen across all
types: classics of the past, current genre fiction, new experimental writers.
You must recognize and
respect your importance as the reader and that you have a right to your own tastes
and preferences. To be a good reader, it's not the number of books you finish,
it's the risks you are willing to take, the quality of engagement you offer in
the contract with the writer. If you do come across a book you can't get on
with, let it go easily without self-recrimination. There are plenty more fish
in the sea. (594 words)
こちらの英文は全くヒットしませんでした。
読書論ですが，わからなかったり，途中で読書に挫折するのは必ずしも読者が悪いのではない。著者と気持ちが通じ合わないだけだ，といった論調。
なぜ，経済学部受験生にこんな英文を読ませるのでしょうか。
この３番はもっとひどい問題です。ことわざの意味を答えさせるものです。
アナクロニズムの問題としかいいようがありません。
さらにこんなのもありました。
If you go to buy a new outfit you try on a lot of outfits before finding he one that suits you.
下線部の語の意味に最も近い語句を選びなさい。
1) ensemble 2)hat 3)group 4)uniform
答えは1)のensemble。受験生がいったいこの語をどういう場面で習うと思っているのでしょうか。この語はいわゆる単語帳にはありません。大学入試には私のデータベースではそれでも１件ありました。
「アンサンブル」と昔，私の母が言っているのを思い出しましたが，現在でも使われているのでしょうか？
→【大意】
【感想】
私立の問題は作問者の個性が強く繁栄されます。それでも，経済なら経済的な題材を扱う（たしか，中央大学はそんな感じがあったような…，それでも発音問題が異常に多いような…）姿勢が少しは必要だと思いますが，青山学院はあまりに文学的。久しぶりにといていて腹が立ってきました。もう少し，受験生の立場に立って問題を作って欲しいものです。来年の受験生にも影響を与えるのですから。原文が７０年前のものだとわかったらショックを受けるでしょうし，英語の先生はそんな人なんだ，と思うことでしょう。
（２００３年３月１１日）
(A) Throughout the world, about 60,000 square kilometers of land become
desert each year. This means that a huge area of land, almost equal to
the islands of Kyusyu and
In 1996, the Desertification Treaty was put into effect, and since then,
a small number of countries have been moving forward with plans of action
at the local level. However, worldwide awareness of desertification remains
rather low and funds are scarce. It remains to be seen whether or not
長文というにはあまりに短い１５０語。これに設問が４題付されています。基本的な設問で迷わないと思います。原文はMainichi Weeklyの記事からのようです。
http://www.mainichi.co.jp/edu/weekly/essay/01/0217/
この英文をかなり易しく書き換えています。
(B)
Bananas are an
inexpensive fruit, which can be bought at supermarkets for around 200 yen per
hunch. But for many years, they were considered to be a luxury fruit in
The status of bananas
changed dramatically in the latter half of the 1960s, as
同じ分量の英文。やはり易しい英文で，設問はほぼ第３段落だけです。昔はバナナが高級な果物だったなんて想像もつかないでしょうね。我が家でも買ったバナナが誰も食べずに１本，黒くなっています。アメリカのドラマや漫画を最初に見て，それから初めて本物のバナナを見た私は（年がばれる！！），本当にマンガのように滑って転ぶのかやってみました。同じことをやった子どもが全国に無数いたと思います。チーズとバナナはアメリカ文化の象徴で，どちらもどんなものか本当に不思議に思っていました。（いつの時代の，どこの人なんでしょう？）
こちらも極めて易しめ。
Ⅳ My life in the Maldives
since July, 2001 has been completely different from anything I have experienced
in more than two decades of living in Japan.
The first difficulty I
met was the Dhivehi language. I often felt sad because I couldn't understand
what people were saying to me, and I couldn't get people to understand what I
was trying to say. But because we couldn't understand each other, I tried even harder
to listen to what they were saying to me. I listened with my heart to try to
understand other people's feelings. By looking into each other's eyes as we
spoke, we were able to communicate in a way that went beyond words. It's
strange, but when I think about it now, it seems that the distance between us
was shorter when we weren't able to understand each other's actual words.
The second difficulty was
the food. All of the food in this country is spicy. I don't like spicy foods
very much, so at first, whenever I was invited to the home of a Maldivian
family for dinner, I worried about the food, although I was happy for the
invitation. Over time, however, I have gotten used to it. Recently I have
started to think that the spicy Maldivian food tastes good.
The third difficulty for
me was the national character of the people, who, to put it positively, are easygoing.
My job is to provide guidance for kindergarten teachers. I once got the
kindergartners together and put on a classroom demonstration for the teachers.
But some of them left the room because, they said, it was their break time!
After experiencing a number of laughable mistakes, I am now more fond of the
people of
My term here will end in
eight months. I want to make much of each day, so that the Moldivians and I can
continue to learn from each other, and to make new discoveries. (343 words)
出典は確認できませんでしたが，おそらく，同じような高校生向け週間英字＋日本語解説の新聞記事からだと思われます。昔はＳＴを購読していましたが，現在は何も読まず。こうした英文を読んで，材料を仕込むことも有効かもしれません。
【全体の感想】
４択問題２０，会話３題，長文３題（内容把握２題，空所補充１題）所与時間６０分ということで適正な問題量と適正な内容でした。７０％はやはりとる必要がありそうです。
ところで，１題迷いました。
A: How is your studying gong?
B:Ten days ( ) time to prepare for the final exams.
（Ａ：勉強はどう？ Ｂ：１０日じゃ，期末試験の準備には短すぎるよ）
①are too short ②is too short a ③are too a short ④is too short
この問題には２つのポイントがあることがわかります。一つはten daysを複数とするか，単数とするか。timeは冠詞をとるのか，とらないのか。
これは，「時間，距離をひとつの固まりと考える場合は単数扱い」といった文法規則がどこかにあったはずですが，手元の総合参考書では簡単には見つかりませんでした。さらにtimeは無冠詞の場合もあり，in
such a short timeというように冠詞がつくこともあります。従って明らかに語順が違う③は除外できても，①②④は確定できませんでした。実際，複数で受けている英文もいくつかみつかってしまいました。インターネットの検索で"too
short a time"で検索をかけたところ１万４千件ほどヒットし，"are
too short time"はその１０分の１ぐらいだったので，②を正解にしましたが，いずれにしろそれほどありふれた表現とも言えず。疑問を持った問題です。
（２００３年３月８日）
(A) The first
celebrations in honor of mothers were held in ancient
In the United Stales,
Mother's Day was first proposed in 1872 by Julia Howe. Howe, who wrote the
famous song "Battle Hymn of the Republic,' thought of Mother's Day as a
symbol of peace, and she held Mother's Day meetings in Boston, Massachusetts,
every year.
Anna Jarvis of
Although she never became
a mother herself, Jarvis began writing to politicians to persuade them to make
Mother's Day a national holiday, and eventually she was successful. In 1914 President
Woodrow Wilson officially announced that Mother's Day would be a national
holiday to be held every year on the second Sunday in May.
However, people began to
use the day to make money, and the holiday became so commercialized that Jarvis
eventually tried to stop a Mother's Day festival in 1922. She was even arrested
for disturbing the peace at a reunion party for mothers where women were selling
white carnations to raise money. The while carnations were Jarvis's symbol for
mothers. “This is not what I intended," Jarvis said 'I wanted it to be a
day of thanks, not for making money.”
By the time of her death
in 1948, at age 84, Jarvis was saddened and disappointed that she was unable to
stop the commercial, or money-making aspects of the holiday that she herself
had founded. Shortly before she died, Jarvis told a good friend that she was
sorry she had ever started Mother's Day. She spoke these words in a hospital
where her room had been filled with Mother's Day cards from all over the world.
Today, both because of
and in spite of Jarvis's efforts, many celebrations of Mother's Day are held throughout
the world. Although they do not all fall on the same day, countries such as
この英文は次の英文（結構有名な英文のようです）をもとに書き下ろしたと考えられます。「母の日」の歴史，ということで，どこかで読んだような題材でした。「リパブリック賛歌」がBattle Hymn of the Republicだとは知りませんでした。
http://www.top-education.com/HOLIDAYS/specialdays.asp
→【大意】
(B) To French
photographer and environmentalist Jerome Hutin, the blue mushrooms in the
Australian state of
It was not the first time
a photographic trip to a forest had left Hutin deeply impressed. Since 1998 he
has visited places including Italy, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Australia, New
Zealand, and India to photograph ancient trees, some as old as 10,000 years. In
Hutin has always loved
nature and wildlife, and he combined that love with photography in 1998.
Realizing that old trees are respected and worshiped in many cultures, he believed
that photographing them would help people understand the importance of
protecting the forest giants and the ecosystem surrounding them.
'By showing people my
pictures of old trees, I would like to educate them on the importance of
protecting the environment," he said. However, it is not an easy task. In
many places, he has seen clear evidence that old forests are disappearing, and
excessive garbage and pollution are damaging a delicately-balanced ecosystem.
According to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, the global rate of
destruction of forests averaged nine million hectares per year during the
1990s.
Last September, the World
Resources Institute reported a widespread decline in the condition of the
world's ecosystems. The study showed that nine percent of the world's tree
species face extinction, and destruction of tropical forests probably exceeds
130,000 km2 per year, with 30 percent of the world's original forests having
been converted to agriculture. But Hutin is still hopeful, as he has met many
people in the world who share his love of nature. To inform and encourage
others to act against the destruction of nature, he plans to hold a
photographic exhibition showing life-size images of trees, using a slide
projector.
"Many people do not
have the opportunity to see such old trees. By showing life-size images, people
can understand the magnificence of these trees and know what's happening to
them," he said. He is calling on businesses, organizations, and
individuals to support his project, which will cost about $5 million. “It may
sound like a lot of money, but we spend so much on weapons. Why not spare some
money for this project?" he asked.
(484 words)
インターネットのおかげで，いろいろなことが簡単に調べられるようになりました。以前でしたら，フランス人Hutinの読み方なんかわからなかったと思いますが，現在では，ユタンと表記されることがあることがわかります。どうもこの英文は書き下ろしのようです。突然英文にNagayaが出てくるのも不自然。
(c) Although primarily
used in
Seeds from the guarana
plant are usually removed from their shells and dry-roasted. Then, they are
crushed until they become a fine powder, mixed with water, and pressed into a
paste. The paste is then shaped into short 'sticks" and dried. These
sticks, which have little smell, but a sharp, bitter taste (like chocolate, yet
without being so oily), are then finely sliced and put into water. Today,
Historically, the sterns,
leaves, and roots of guarana have been used as a fish-killing drug in Central
and
Guarana's power to reduce
our appetite is thus due to its caffeine content, which is responsible, too,
for a feeling of an increase in energy. Guarana can also be found in some
weight-reducing products, but it should be used with great care by people
suffering from heart disease. It seems that there are no harmful effects from
using guarana over a long period. However, those sensitive to coffee may expect
similar reactions from guarana, such as minor stomach and nerve problems.
Besides being healthy and
refreshing, guarana, like coffee, is a beneficial crop for the farmers of the
Amazon region. Because it is a large, rapidly growing plant which can grow
between rows of other crops, it increases their harvest as well as their
income.
英文３題最後はガラナの紹介。ガラナに関する情報が断片的にとり挙げられています。わかりやすい英文でしょう。この英文の最初の部分，the herb called guaranaはちょっと不自然。「～という…」という形では圧倒的に不定冠詞が多くて，定冠詞が来る例が極めてまれです。書き下ろしだとすれば，英文を間違えた可能性があります。
cf. A company called Malley's sensed the Australian need for a portable beer cooler in 1950.
【全体の感想】
問題は無理がないものです。長文も迷うものはなく，適切な問題でした。全体としてはやはり７０％ぐらいの成就率が必要でしょう。（２００３年３月６日）
Wolong, home to about 10
percent of all
Now scientists know why
the animals are disappearing. A team led by .Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at
Once the scientists had
identified the problem, the cause became obvious: tourism. Chinese authorities
say 30,000 tourists visit each year; a local paper says it's more like 140,000
a year. Everybody agrees that tourism has risen markedly since the panda
reserve was created.
The problem is not the
tourists in themselves, but the industry that has sprung up to service them-
The biggest cause is smoked pork, a special food in the region. 'In the past,"
says Liu, who grew up in
Although logging is
illegal, locals have managed to clear away vast areas of forest at low
altitudes. A few years ago, they started going higher up the mountainsides,
closer to where the pandas live. It doesn't take much to disturb the sensitive
bears. Making the problem worse, the population of local residents swelled 70
percent between 1975 and 1995, to 4,260
It is not uncommon for
residents who live near reserves to compete for resources with endangered
species. The challenge for conservationists is to provide locals with a way to
benefit from tourism that doesn't destroy the local hahitat. In Wanglang
region, for instance, local farmers serve as tour guides, sell handmade crafts
and stage cultural performances. "You have to help local people find ways
to earn a living," says Karen Baragona, a panda expert at the World
Wildlife Foundation. "You can't do conservation in a vacuum”
(489 words)
所与時間が６０分ということもあり，長文はこれだけ。一読して雑誌・新聞記事とわかります。この原点は見つかりませんでしたが，どうも，２００１年４月５日に配信されたニュースを様々なメディアで報道したもののようです。この英文は書き換えられており，より原文に近い形で２００２年度明治大学・法学部から出題されていました。
入試英文ではかなりの部分を省略し，観光対パンダの生息域の保護といった二項対立になっていますが，もとの記事を読むと，世界最大，環境保護の決定打として設置された保護区が，そのもくろみに反して，うまく機能していない。と保護区の存在意義，あり方に視点を置いているようです。本英文もそうですが…
→【大意】
【全体の感想】
ある講習会の席上で，予備校講師が日大と新潟大学の問題を褒めていました。それ以来この２校の問題には好感をいだいているのですが，（人にいわれてそう思うのは主体性がないのですが…）極めて標準的な問題でした。たぶん，７０％ぐらいはとらないと合格できないでしょう。
ところで，最後に会話問題がありますが，これは少しへん！
設定：男性がいなくなった猫を探しながら近所を歩いている。１０代の女子が家から出てくる。二人はお互いを知らない。彼が女の子の家の前を通り過ぎるときに，丁寧に挨拶をした。
女の子：今日は暑いですね。
男性：えぇ。
女の子：（ ）
男性：えぇ。あそこです。猫を探しているんだけど。１週間もいなくて。ここら辺で見た，っていう人がいたんですが。
といった調子で会話が続きます。なぜ，女の子である必要があるのでしょうか。なぜ，見知らぬ人に話か書けるんでしょうか。（男性から女の子ならまだ理解できます！）そしてこの会話が結構続きます。女の子はどこかへ出かけるのではないでしょうか。それともこの男性に関心があるのでしょうか。
男性はmanとだけありますが，あとで弟か兄の話がでて，猫の名前も兄弟と同じ名前にしたとあります。それでは，２０代の男性なのでしょうか。女性はteenagerと書いてあります。若い男性はmanというのは性差別？
とにかく設定が不自然だと，英語のテストだから読み進めるものの，素朴な人なら疑問だらけの現実感のない会話のような感じがします。
（２００３年３月４日）
The deep linguistic and
cultural connections between war and sports have been much noted over the
years, and it is no great revelation to say that recent events have illuminated
those connections with a startling intensity. But if I leave aside the obvious
similarities of terminology. American sports and American military activity
have been strikingly paired since September 11. As silly or meaningless as sports
can seem in certain lights, there's no question that they can also be
singularly expressive of
the cultural moment. For instance, even if the timing was not intentional, the
coincidence of the
Sports and war have
always been paired in their roles in making boys into me.. A famous Englishman
once remarked that
Over the decades, the
technology of football ??? like the technology of war???advanced; and in more
recent years, the sport has taken to the air. As much as three quarters of the
territory gained in a given football game is won with “bombs" and
"surgical strikes" (i.e., swift and precise attacks) and short
passes. If you're not a football fan and this still sounds familiar, that's not
surprising. You're probably thinking of
President Bush himself
is, somewhat notoriously, the country's First Fan. He rose to prominence in
出典はprospectという雑誌の２００１年１１月１９日号
Sports: War Games
雑誌からとられる場合は大概前年の６月から７月ぐらいまでです。そうでない場合も時にはありますが。そこで，時事的なテーマに注目するなら，半年くらい前までの英文をチェックすることになります。
今回はそれよりさらに前でしたが，現在のイラク情勢などを考えるとかなりタイムリー。ブッシュの危険な性向にまで触れて，入試問題としてはきわどい感じです。
ところで，今回は問題で大変てこずりました。
次のような問題です。
Walter Camp, the father of American football, spoke of football teams as 'armies," of the kicking game as “artillery work," and of coaching as "generalship."
(2)このofと同じ用法のofを含むのは
1. There are eight parts of speech in the language.
2. There is a rumor of his resignation.
3. There was a lot of money in the bag.
4. There will be a speech of enormous importance.
私の勘違いもあり，「正解なし」としそうでした。ちなみに，本文中の単語をそのまま用いて次の英文を完成しなさい。というのもありました。
a. It is no great revelation to say that George Bush is the country's First
Fan.
b. It is not (s ) at all to say that George Bush is the country's First
Fan.
正解として用意した答えはsurprisingだと思われますが，startlingという語もあり，これもＯＫ。
そんなことから入試問題作問者の力を疑っていたところがあります。
原文を比べればわかりますが，間違いに近い書き換えもありました。
【原文】 But even leaving aside the obvious similarities of terminology,
【入試英文】But if I leave aside the ovious similarities of terminology,
原文ならば譲歩の意味に素直に解釈できますが，書き換えではeven ifとしなかったので，極めて曖昧な英文になっています。これは改悪というべきです。そんなわけで，問題も質も英文も粗悪な部類。暇があれば，実際の問題にあたってみてください。
→ 【大意】
第２問
Ⅱ By the 1920s it was
thought that no corner of the earth fit for human habitation had remained
unexplored.
It was a relief when the natives came in
sight, the men ... in front, armed with bows and arrows, the women behind
bringing stalks of sugarcane. When he saw the women, one of the native carriers
told me at once that there would be no fight. We waved to them to come on,
which they did cautiously, stopping every few yards to look us over. When a few
of them finally got up courage to approach, we could see that they were utterly
thunderstruck by our appearance. When I took off my hat, those nearest to me
backed away in terror. One old man came forward with open mouth, and touched me
to see if I was real. Then he knelt down, and rubbed his hands over my bare
legs, possibly to find if they were painted, and grabbed me around the knees
and hugged them, rubbing his bushy head against me ... The women and children
gradually got up courage to approach also, and presently the camp was swarming
with the lot of them, all running about and jabbering at once, pointing to
....everything that was new to them.
That
"jabbering" was language--- an unfamiliar language, one of eight
hundred different ones that would be discovered among the isolated highlanders
right up through the 1960s. Leahy's first contact repeated a scene that must
have taken place hundreds of times in human history, whenever one people first
encountered another. All of them, as far as we know, already had language. No
mute tribe has ever been discovered, and there is no record that a region has
served as a "cradle" of language from which it spread to previously
languageless groups.
As in every other case,
the language spoken by Leahy's hosts turned out to be no mere jabber but a
medium that could express abstract concepts, invisible entities, and complex
trains of reasoning The highlanders consulted each other intensively, trying to
agree upon the nature of the light-skinned beings. The leading opinion was that
they were ancestors that came back to this world with renewed bodies or oilier
spirits in human form, perhaps one that turned back into skeletons at night.
They agreed upon an empirical test that would settle the matter. "One of our
people hid," recalls one of the highlanders, "and watched them going
to excrete. He came back and said, “Those men from heaven went to excrete over
there.' Once they had left many men went to take a look. When they saw that it
smelt bad, they said, 'Their skin might be different, but their shit smells bad
like ours.'"
The universality of
complex language is a discovery that fills linguists with awe, and is the first
reason to suspect that language is not just any cultural invention but the
product of a special human instinct. Cultural inventions vary widely in their
sophistication from society to society; within a society, the inventions are
generally at the same level of sophistication. Some groups count by carving
lines on bone and cook on fires lit by spinning sticks in logs; others use
computers and microwave ovens. Language, however, ruins this correlation. There
are Stone Age societies, but there is no such thing as a Stone Age language.
Earlier in this century the anthropological linguist Edward Sapir wrote, 'When
it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd,
Confucius with the headhunting savage of
こちらのほうが，英文は長いものの，易しめ。テーマも言語で親しみやすいと思いますが，「言語は本能だ」という主張ですので，この一部の英文ではなかなか，読み込めないと思います。最初のニューギニアの原住民との遭遇だけにしておけばわかりやすかったと思います。問題も記号式で，取り組みやすいものでした。
出典はThe Language Instinct , Steven Pinker (Harper/Perennial, 1994)
→【大意】
（２００３年３月２日）
【１】
One day my dad stood up
and blood poured out of his mouth. We rushed him to the hospital. The doctors
said something had burst in his intestines. He was sent home, but a few days
later it happened again. After the third time, the doctors said that if it
happened again, it could kill him.
We'd always known Dad
might need a liver transplant--- we just didn't think it would be so soon. But
suddenly he and Morn were flying to see the transplant surgeons at a medical
center in
The doctors also told my
parents about an operation called a living-donor partial transplant. Instead of
using a dead person's liver, they replace the sick liver with a part of a
healthy, living person's liver. Livers grow back, which is why this can be
done.
Unfortunately, only about
one in three would-be donors is a match. My mom wasn't, so my brother and
sister and I discussed which of us should volunteer. Chris has a family to
support; it seemed too risky. Becky and I were both willing to try, but she was
slimmer, which is usually better for the procedure. When the doctors started operating,
however, they found two of her veins had joined together, making the operation
too dangerous. Becky was fine; she just couldn't be the donor.
After we found out about
Becky, I went straight to
When the doctors finally
called, the news wasn't good; my dad and I were both overweight, and this might
cause serious problems. A high percentage of fat in a donor's liver makes it
harder for it to survive in a recipient's body, especially if he's overweight,
too. If I wanted to be the donor, I'd have to lose about 14 kilos; my dad would
have to lose 9 kilos. I didn't mind. I knew I could do it.
As soon as we got home,
my mom started buying healthy food and made me special meals to take to my job,
as a nurse's assistant. And I started swimming. In the beginning I could barely
do a few laps. But I pushed myself, and by the end I was up to 100 laps a day!
In 10 weeks I lost a1most 18 kilos---down from 100 to 82. The doctors were so
proud of me! But it wasn't what I looked like on the outside that was
important; it was what was inside that mattered. I'd had about fifteen percent liver
fat: after I lost the weight, it went down to two percent.
When it was time for the
operation, all I could think about was what the pain would be like --- I was
scared. The last thing I remember was watching the needle go in my arm; then I
was being woken up. The pain was pretty bad. I had a huge tube down my nose and
throat that made it hard to breathe. After two days they made me stand up. I
was bent over, my stomach was really painful and my legs hurt a lot. But I had
to walk--- that was the best way for me to recover.
When I first saw my scar,
I felt the pain even more. It was very long and swollen. It will always remind me
of what I went through. I learned some big lessons: how precious life is, and
how really, really important it is to take care of your health.
I'm much better now,
though I get tired more easily than I used to. I took a few weeks off from work
but now I'm back. I always wanted to have a job that would make a difference---and
now, especially, I want to take care of patients better. I know what it means
to be nursed through pain and sickness. And I've kept the weight off, as has my
dad. He is doing great! The recovery is
actually easier for the recipient than for the donor. Dad was used to feeling bad,
so as soon as the transplant was over, his body started rejoicing. If was like,
"Hey, I'm doing better. Whoo-hoo!” Everyone says my name, Angel Molina, is
symbolic--- I’m my father's angel. But I don’t think of myself that way. Anyone
should be willing to do what I did. In the end, I really don't think it was a big
deal. (845 words)
８４５語と総語数はかなりですが，短文が多く，難易度はそれほどではありません。
インターネットで検索したところ，出典に近いNews Letterが見つかりました。
これはこの英文ではIとなっているAngel Molinaが生体肝移植を受けた病院から出されている記事のようで，転載自由となっています。
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center News
これはかなり信頼のおける記事だと思います。入試英文はこうした情報をまとめて書き下ろしたと考えられます。（原文では体重は40ポンド減らすとあり，常識的に考えてメートル法では表記しないはずです）
このニューズレターを読み進めると細かいことで，違いがあります。たとえば，体重の減量目標は当初から４０ポンド（１８キロ）のようでした。血管が重なって移殖ができないのは母親で，姉のBeckyはcross-over duct（導管の交差）のようです。これも細かいですが，肝臓の脂肪率は３％まで落ちたとあり，入試英文の２％と食い違います。
News letterは父の日の直後の手術ということで，「父への父の日のプレゼント」といったアプローチです。問題そのものは穏当だと思います。本文の内容を４０字，１５字，４０字とまとめる問題が出題されており，やはり書く問題です。
→大意
【Ⅱ】
(1) The hanko is
The hanko is the result of a 5,000-year-old technology. There are some problems concerning the security of hanko, but Japanese are unlikely to give up using hanko because of its great cultural importance. The most secure forms of hanko are kept for banking or housing deals, while ready-made varieties are used for such everyday tasks as taking delivery
of packages. It is one of the first things people look for on any document to make sure that everything is official, reliable and trouble-free. (154 words)
下線部訳で，本文全体は軽く読めば，単語力さえあればできると思いますが，受験生には厳しいかもしれません。
(2) There has long been a
superstition among seamen that dolphins will save drowning men by pushing them
to the surface, or protect them from sharks by surrounding them defensively.
Biologists have pointed out that, however intelligent they may be, it is
probably a mistake to believe that dolphins have their own motives to save
human life. When they have pushed ashore
an unconscious human being, it is much more likely that they have done it out
of curiosity or for sport, as in riding the waves made by a ship. If, as has been
reported, they have protected humans from sharks, it may have been because
curiosity attracted them and because the smell of a possible meal attracted
sharks. Dolphins and sharks are natural enemies. It is possible that on such an
occasion a battle occurred between them, with the sharks being driven away or
killed. (146 words)
この英文をインターネットで検索したところ，２つのサイトがヒットしました。いずれも中国の英語のテストあるいはテキストでした。
いずれも中国語でいったいどんなサイトなのかもわかりません。英語のテキストであることはわかるのですが。やはり，発信は英語でするべきですね。それでなければ，所詮日本という閉じた世界にいるだけかも。
出典もわかりました。
Window in the Sea (Ralph Nading Hill)
１９５７年出版ということでちょっと古いんじゃないの？という感じ。
【全体の印象】
経済としては書かせる問題が多い感じ。２番が下線部訳ですし，４番は完全英作文。受験生が比較的少ないためでしょうか？英文のテーマは経済学部の生徒が読むにはちょっと，という感じ。今年これで５校目ですが，テーマの分類がほとんど「家庭→健康・医療」に入りそう。共立女子の小説は今となっては懐かしく，ほとんどエッセー風です。３番の語法はあまりに基本的で，高校２年の段階で全てできなければならないでしょう。 （２００３年２月２７日）
１． Memory for faces is an important feature of human life and society since
a human face can help identify an individual's gender, age and race. It is not clear
whether animals recognize or remember faces since smell has such a major role
in their lives. But generally it seems that very few animals recognize faces. Most
people, on the other hand, remember up to a thousand faces fairly easily and
can recall some of their names, though it must be added that this number falls
off with advancing age, partly due to the number of faces encountered and
partly to the other reasons for loss of memory. With an effort, people can
learn to remember about two-thirds of 10, 000 different photographs of faces.
This should be compared to human language, where up to 100. 000 words can be
remembered. Things are made easier by the fact that there are fifty basic types
of face, which is the core of police identification of criminals: about 50 per
cent of all convictions in court are grounded on line-ups or eyewitness
testimonies based on remembering a face.
There are some people who are better at recognizing faces than
others, and are also better at identifying paintings and attributing them to
the correct painter. And, not surprisingly, memory is much better for familiar faces
of friends and celebrities than for unfamiliar faces, and is naturally reduced
by tiredness or stress.
Identifying faces usually involves attaching a name to the face,
the faces being easier to remember than the names. In tests of long-term memory
for faces, it turns out that people remember 70 per cent of the faces they have
seen over the past fifty years, but can identify only 20 per cent of the names.
The recall of names is linked to verbal memory system. But the memory for faces
is a function based on those cells that engage in face recognition. These cells
are sensitive to the characteristic features of a face and provide information
about gender, age, health, and so on. This information is crucial to social
interaction.
Leonard da Vinci, a great Italian artist of the Renaissance, discussed
memory for faces in his book on painting, advising artists to divide a face into
four parts ---forehead, nose, mouth, and chin --- to enable them to remember
their models at a single glance. More recently, psychologists have examined in
detail the process of face recognition, which is a skill that starts at a very
early age. Babies at birth can see only vague images, but their vision rapidly
develops and they soon prefer to look at a picture of a face rather than an
abstract scene. The first sight most babies have is usually of people, and they
soon learn to interpret expressions and moods.
Originally, research on face recognition was largely based on the
reports about people with various brain injuries, whose troubles ranged from loss
of vision to being unable to identify close relatives or recognize themselves
in the mirror. Memory for faces is found to be more accurate than for objects such
as houses, vehicles and animals. In recent years, the understanding of the
mechanism and strategy for face recognition has been much improved. The
strategy employed for identifying faces has been adapted to computers and will
soon be utilized as part of the security system at entrances to buildings, in
banks and in airports. (569 words)
東京理科大・工学部は試験時間６０分ということで，長文はこれだけです。理科大は語法・文法問題が多いくて，ために使わせてもらっています。
今回は「顔の記憶」といったテーマ。記憶のメカニズムの説明でもあれば，新味もあるし，勉強にもなりますが，前半の名前より顔の方が覚えやすい。生涯に会った７０％の顔を覚えている，といったところは「確かにその通り」といった経験の追認にか過ぎず。名前と顔の記憶場所は違う，というのもその通りだろうとしか覚えず。要するに英文としては面白みに欠けました。
この問題が虫食い状態になっており，空所が１０箇所。下線部の意味を問うたり，動詞の変化形を書かせたり，典型的な「総合問題」高校の定期試験のような問題でした。
ちなみに５番の並べ替え問題は日本語があるものの次のような感じ。
Statistics show that the estimated (1 people killed 2. all over 3. on the
rise 4. in wars 5.number of 6. the world was ) in the twentieth century.
この6 のthe world wasは区切りとしてはめちゃくちゃ。約束違反です！！！それにこの問題にはミスがあり，元の問題はin
the riseで当日，on the riseに訂正したようです。なぜ，inとonと間違うのか。自分で英文を書いてから，問題にしたのでしょうか？もとからある問題ならこんな間違いはしないはずですが…
正解は
the estimated number of people killed in wars all over the wold was on
the rise in the twentieth century
これを句に区切るとすれば，
the estimated number of people / killed in wars / all over the wold /
was / on the rise / in the twentieth century
ぐらいが最小単位のはず。そういった句単位のまとまりを無視した並べ替えは，教育上全くよろしくないと思います。 （２００３年２月２６日）
→【大意】
Ⅰ
Listening to a gardening
program the other day, I was struck by something the expert said about a
particular type of potted plant. Do not water it once it has come into bu&.
he advised. Cause it to feel stress, and it will produce more, and more beautiful,
flowers.
Surely this advice is
against everything that we are told by doctors. Stress is bad for us, they say.
Stress is the cause of all sorts of diseases. Stress caused by overwork
sometimes results in early death. Newspaper and magazine articles tell us how
to reduce stress, or how to avoid it altogether. No one has a good word for stress.
And yet, I asked myself if stress is good for plants, can there possibly be any value for us in it? The longer I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that there is. Without a certain degree of tension and stress, we are apt to become lazy and neglect our duties. All students know that they should study regularly throughout the year, and then be able to face examinations without fear. In fact, most students leave this study till the last possible moment, and then hastily try to make up for lost time.
Many of us, likewise, put
off dealing with our problems until the deadline approaches. Every year I
resolve that I will write all my Christmas cards and letters ahead of time, and
avoid a last-minute rush; and every year I find that once again I have left it
too late for me to finish comfortably. Only when the tension increases do I
start working seriously to get the job done.
In other fields too, when satisfaction enters in, creativity and curiosity
go out of the window. What has been called "divine discontent"
--- a creative dissatisfaction with the present situation, whatever it
is---produces progress. And that dissatisfaction is one type of stress.
Thus, it seems to me, a
certain degree of stress is necessary for human progress. Just how much is
good, and how much is harmful, is the problem.
These of us who are
employed by a company whose policies demand long periods of stressful activity are
to be sympathized with, since too much stress is counterproductive. Those of us
who are self employed may have more freedom to choose our own best level of
stress. In either case, we need some preparation before the period of stress in
order to be able to succeed.
So, like the potted plant
in question, if we are watered sufficiently to begin with, and then left to
struggle for a while on our own, we too may produce more and better flowers
than one who, over-protected, has never had to try. (455 words)
残念ながら出典は確定できませんでした。「花が芽を出したら，水を与えずに花にストレスを与えるときれいな花を咲かせる植物がある」といった部分には多少の新味がありますが，適度なストレスは創造的な仕事の源であり，ストレスがないと創造性や好奇心がなくなる，といった点はそれほど珍しい内容ではなく，入試英文としては典型的な内容。面白みに欠けます。
→【大意】
Ⅱ
Visitors to Britain are often surprised by the strange behavior of the inhabitants. One of the worst mistakes is to get on a bus without waiting your turn in the line. The other people in the line will probably complain loudly! People respond to someone getting ahead in a line in an emotional way. Newspaper headlines describe anger at people who pay to bypass a hospital waiting list to get an operation more quickly. Standing in line is a national habit and it is considered polite or good manners to wait your turn.
In recent years smoking has received a lot of bad publicity, and fewer British people now smoke. Many companies have banned smoking from their offices. It is less and less acceptable to smoke in a public place Smoking is no longer allowed on the London underground, in cinemas and theaters and most buses. It is considered bad manners to smoke in someone's house without asking " "
On the other hand, in some countries it is considered bad manners to eat in the street, whereas in Britain it is common to see people having a snack while walking down the road, especially at lunchtime. The British may be surprised to see young children in restaurants late at night because children are not usually taken out to restaurants late at night and, if they make noise in public or in a restaurant, it is considered very rude. About one hundred years ago, it used to be said “Children should be seen and not heard" since children did not participate at all in public life. In recent years they are playing a inure active role and they are now accepted in many pubs and restaurants.
Good and had manners make up the social rules of a country and are not always easy to learn because they are riot often written down in books. These rules may also change as the society develops; for example, women did riot go into pubs at. the beginning of the 20th century because it was not considered respectable behavior for a woman. Now both women and race drink freely in pubs and women are more integrated into public life.
We may think that someone from a different country is being rude when their behavior would be perfectly innocent in their own county. Social rules are an important part of our culture as they are passed down through history. The British have an expression for following these “unwritten rules”: When in Rome, do as the Romans do. (422 words)
異文化理解を扱った典型的な入試テーマ。イギリス人は行列好き。イギリス人の立ち食いは国によっては行儀が悪い。マナーは国によって違う，という趣旨ですが，よく読むと，原文を削除したなどのために議論が行ったりきたりで，まとまりがありません。たとえば最後のまとめに，「郷に入ったら郷に従え」ということわざをひいて，異文化への理解を求めていますが，その前の文は他のマナーも認めよ，と言っています。それなら，たとえイギリスにいても，他国の人のマナーについて理解すべきではないか？見た目のわかりやすさと，論理のねじれが印象的です。
こちらも出典はわかりませんでした。
→【大意】
【問題は全て記号式，英文は標準で設問も適切だと思います。１番の長文の問題が多く，これを乗り越えるとかなり楽。１番のテーマはPolestarという教科書で扱っていますので，それを学習した受験生には大変楽だったはず。３番は会話。これも素直。最後に並べ替えの問題がありますが，これは並べかえた後，特定の順番の記号をとうもので，日本語のついていますが，最近の受験生ではあまりできたとは思いません。問題全体は標準的なものでした。】（２００３年２月２２日）
A researcher at the
One of the things we
wanted when we moved back to
I walk to town nearly every day when I am at home. I go to the post office or library or the local bookshop, and sometimes, I stop at a coffee shop for a cappuccino. All this is a big part of my life and I wouldn’t dream of doing it other than on foot. People have got used to this curious and eccentric behavior now, but several times in the early days passing neighbors would slow down and ask if I wanted a life.
“But I’m going your wary,” they would insist when I politely ( Y ). “Really, it’s no bother.”
“Honestly, I enjoy walking.”
“Well, if you’re absolutely sure,” they would say and depart reluctantly even guiltily, as if they felt they were leaving the scene of an accident.
People have become so accustomed to using the car for everything that it would never occur to them to employ their legs and see what they can do. The other day, for example, I was in a nearby town waiting to bring home one of my children from a piano lesson when a car stopped outside the local post office and a man about my age popped out and dashed inside(and left the motor running??something else that irritates me excessively). He was inside for about three or four minutes, then came out, got in the car and drove exactly 16 feet. (I had nothing better to do so I measured it by walking) to the general store next door, and popped in again, engine still running.
And the thing is, this man looked really fit. I’m sure he jogs amazing distances and plays tennis and does all kinds of healthy things, but I am just as sure that he drives to each of these activities. It’s crazy. An acquaintance of ours was complaining the other day about the difficulty of finding a place to park outside the local gymnasium, where she goes several times a week to exercise on a walking machine. The gymnasium is, at most, a six-minute walk from her front door. I asked her why she didn’t walk to the gym and do six minutes less on the machine.
She looked at me as if I were simple-minded and said, “But I have a program for the machine. It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust the degree of difficulty.” It had not occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient mature is in this regard. (626 words)
この英文はかなり有名な英文のようです。なんと２００２年のガイド試験の読解問題でもありました。原典はBill Bryson の A Stranger Here Myself
インタネット上にも著者の許諾を得てこの部分の英文が掲載されていました。
Ⅱ
Even smokers themselves
concede smoking isn't a very nice habit. But a 2000 survey by the Health, Labor
and Welfare Ministry found 11.5 percent of Japanese women and 47.4 percent of
men smoked.
Bungaku Watanabe, head of
the
Watanabe was puzzled when
he realized tobacco sales kept growing every year even though Japanese were
kicking the habit in increasing numbers through the 1980s and '90s. He
calculated the number of cigarettes smoked per year in
“It then dawned on me
that the discrepancy could be explained only by assuming there were many
underage smokers who were not included in the statistics,”' Watanabe recalls. In
According to Yoneatsu
Ozaki, an assistant professor at
Watanabe's group
estimates teen smokers are helping the government earn more than 300 billion
yen a year in tobacco tax. But this is a country that bans smoking by kids. One
must conclude that the authorities care more about tax revenues than people's
health-a fact conveniently shrouded in a smoke screen. (355 words)
この問題は一読して日本の新聞に掲載された記事だと推測できます。
アメリカの新聞記事であれば，かなりの確率で原典を見つけることができますが，日本となるとほぼ絶望的。それに過去の記事の検索は有料であることが多いので，彼我の差をずいぶん感じます。ところが，感動的にもこの英文はWeb上に掲載されていました。週間英和（？）新聞Asahi Weeklyの記事でした。
Ⅲ
What is the greatest
invention of the past 2000 years? My
vote is for airplanes, an invention that realizes our old myths. Prehistoric humans found ways of overcoming
water and earth with the inventions of boats and the wheel. The conquest of air did not being by the
twentieth century.
We can now meet other
people anywhere in the world in less than a day’s travel. Thus things foreign and strange have become
familiar. But in my view the actual
intermingling of people has been the most important development.
Furthermore, airplanes
have caused a global change in how we distribute food and other resources. humans are now bound together in a worldwide
economy driven by our interdependence.
Even two hundred years ago no one could have foreseen just how far this
process of resource exchange has gone today largely because of airplanes. (142
words)
空所補充問題ですが，こちらは原文を見つけることはできませんでしたが，種本とおぼしき本は見つかりました。
学習院大学の問題を全部やるのは初めてですが，以前からこのレベルの大学としては文法・語法問題が多く，それも基本的な問題が多いので，この部分の問題だけは授業で扱うこともありました。今年も後半３題が語彙，文法，会話と易しめの問題が続きました。
特徴的なことは書かせる問題が含まれていることです。説明問題，和訳（２５字以内で訳せというのはどういうものか…），作文とありました。これは最近の私立大学の傾向でマークセンス方式だけの入試の限界を感じたためだと思われます。高校現場でも書けない生徒が多く，大学入学しても当然状況は変わらないでしょうから，いわゆる学力低下を大学側も深刻に受け止めているためだと思われます。
今回は長文全ての出典がわかりましたが，１番のように様々な英文のバージョンを読めるのはインターネットならではです。さすが，同じ出典といってもガイド試験の難易度のほうがはるかに上です。
（２００３年２月２０日）
第２問
The striking of the grandfather clock became a familiar sound to Tom, especially in the silence of those nights when everyone else was asleep. He did not sleep. He would go to bed at the usual time, and then lay awake or half-awake for hour after hour. He had never suffered from sleeplessness before in his life, and wondered at it now, but a certain tightness and unease in his stomach should have given him an answer. Sometimes he would doze, and then, in his half-dreaming, he became two persons and one of him would not go to sleep but selfishly insisted on keeping the other awake. From that Tom was positively relieved to wake up again.
Tom had few ideas on the causes and cures of sleeplessness, and it never occurred to him to complain. At first he tried to read himself to sleep with Aunt Gwen’s schoolgirl stories. They did not ever bore him enough for that; but he persevered with them. Then Uncle Alan had found him still reading at half-past eleven at night. There had been an outcry. After that Tom was limited to ten minutes reading in bed; and he had to promise not to switch the bedroom light on again after it had been switched off and his aunt had bidden him good night. He didn’t regret the reading, but the dragging hours seemed even longer in the dark.
One night he was wide awake in the dark as usual with nothing to do. He had borne it for what seemed many nights, but suddenly, though, he could bear it no more. He sat up, threw his bedclothes back with a masterful gesture, and stepped out of bed, though as yet with no clear purpose. He felt his way over to the bedroom door, opened it quietly, and passed out into the tiny hall of the flat. (317 words)
Tom, Gwen, Alanで検索したところ，この出典とおぼしき物語に出会いました。
邦題は「真夜中のパーティー」 Tom's Midnight Garden
入試に小説が登場する比率は「大学入試問題正解」の分析によれば３割。どうしても長い物語からの抜粋には無理があります。この場面も，これからが本番という直前のところですが，最後の段落がいかにもつけたし。物語としての完結性もなく，メッセージーもなく。物語を出典にするのはむずかしいと思いました。
第３問
Arriving from a prairie town of rolling lawns and open driveway, the first feature of Japanese like that made me feel that I was not in America anymore was the “wall” that surrounded nearly each and every house.
To a newcomer like I was then, it was almost as if the Japanese had taken the phrase “a man’s home is his castle” literally. Take a quick look at any street, and there they were: miniature castles.
“I like the walls,” says my Japanese wife. “They made me feel secure” My question is, “Why?”
For [are, enough, high, keep off, not, robber, to the walls] or even block out the curious eyes of neighbors and passersby.
In my first year in Japan, I can remember being awakened by a whispered voice near my window. I rolled over in my bedding to see my neighbor’s young daughter with a group of school friends. She was looking over the wall and reporting on my movements.
“Now he’s turning over. Now he’s making a face. Now he’s sitting up. Now he’s ....run!”
Other times I have had neighbors phone with helpful information like “You’ve left your back window open.” “You’ve got clothes hanging in the rain.” “Why not air out that bedding? It’s been lying in your room for weeks.” How would they know all that unless their eyes had wandered over the castle’s low wall?
The stone walls do not hold back the other senses either. When there is yakiniku sizzling on my neighbor’s tabletop, I can almost taste it. When my other neighbor chooses to talk to her plants at 5 in the morning I feel like I’m right there among the flowers.
“I still like them,” says my wife. “I find them calming.”
Maybe, this is the genetic heritage of an island nation. Japanese have always been “walled in” by the sea. Perhaps it is part of their identity to be closed off from the outside.
(328 words)
こちらはうってかわって，日本滞在のアメリカ人が書いたエッセー。出典はわかりませんが，新聞か雑誌，あるいは教材として書かれたエッセー集からだと思われます。
「塀と日本人」といったちょっとした日本人論。こうしたエッセーをありがたがって聞いたこともありましたが，外から見て「日本人とは～だ」式の論はちょっと食傷気味。しかし，この傾向の英文が入試に扱われる頻度は高く。参考書によっては「日本人論」という１章をさくものもあります。
英文レベルは一応「センターレベル」としました。２００３年度のセンター試験の英文よりは難しいのですが，この英文で「やや難」というわけにはいきません。
「入試問題正解」で難のレーベルがつくのは本当にごくわずか，ほとんどがセンターレベルです。「基礎的」というのはかなりやさしいのですが，「やや難」はかなり難しい英文です。「難」となると高校生が読む英文ではありません！！！というわけでほとんどの英文は「センターレベル」となりますが，実際にはそれより難しいことが多いのです。
文法問題は大変基礎的で，これは高校１年レベル。準英作文がありますが，これは基礎的，でも受験生は書けないはず。入試担当者もそこらへんはよく心得ているようで，おそらく，合否を決めるに充分な差がつくはずです。 （２００３年２月１４日）
