Ⅰ
Polar bears, the magnificent
animals that can only be found in certain areas of the Arctic Circle have just
been added to the list of endangered species by the United States Government,
according to an article in The Beaufort
Gazette. Recently, the U. S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne gave a
presentation showing the tough situation that the polar bear is facing as sea
ice melts because of global warming.
Extremely important for the
habitat and survival of the polar bear, Arctic sea ice has been melting at a
fast rate over the past few decades.
There are an estimated 25,000 polar bears that will officially be
considered threatened according to the new definition provided by the
Endangered Species Act.
The issue of the protection
of the polar bear is meant to raise awareness of the circumstances that the
animal is coping with. However, Mr. Kempthorne was blunt in saying that the Endangered Species Act
"is not the right tool to set U. S. climate policy," due to the fact that it
will not stop any company from drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean.
There are many
environmentalists who question whether or not the increased protection of the
polar bear will result in a slowdown in Arctic ice melt-down. "They're trying to make this a threatened listing in name
only with no change in the world's environment and that's not going to fly,"
said Jamie Rapport Clark of Defenders of Wildlife and a former director of the
U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Some people believe that the
listing of the polar bear on the Endangered Species List will not prevent sea
ice from melting due to global warming. In 2007, the Arctic ice was 39 percent below
the average levels between 1970 and 2000. Since 1979, Arctic sea ice melting in the
summer months has been dramatic. According to scientific research,
approximately two-thirds of all polar bears will then disappear by 2050-due to
melting sea ice. Although the polar bear
population across the Arctic from Alaska to Greenland doubled from about 12,000
to 25,000 since 1960, scientists currently predict a major population decline
of polar bears caused by the loss of their essential habitat. This is all the more reason to work towards
dealing with the problem of global warming.
(378 words)
Ⅱ
People lie for several
reasons. First, they do not tell the
truth in order to make others think well of them or to protect themselves from
embarrassment or disapproval. One girl
in a research study on lying in modern society told her friend that a
particular boy still liked her, although she knew that this was no longer the
case. She felt ashamed that he had lost
interest in her, and she did not want to tell this to her friend.
Second, people lie in order
to gain an advantage over others. For
example, applicants may exaggerate their current salary during a job interview
in order to get a higher income in their next job.
Third, people lie to avoid
punishment. For example, children may
not tell their parents that they took a cookie before dinner, in order not to be
penalized. All the lies mentioned so far
are self-oriented, and are intended to make the liar appear better or to gain
personal advantage. One researcher's
study on lying found that approximately half of the lies which people told were
self-oriented.
Fourth, people also lie to
make others look better or lies are told to help another person. For example, a pupil tells the teacher that
her friend is ill, although she knows that her friend is absent from school for
a different reason. In another case,
Judy told her friend, Sally, that she would soon stop being angry and find a new
and kinder boyfriend after her old boyfriend had left her. The girl said this untruth to boost her
friend's mood and self-confidence. These
lies are other-oriented. Approximately
25% of the lies that people tell fall into this category.
Fifth, people tell what I
call "social lies" to keep their personal and professional
relationships running smoothly. People
who do this seem to feel that their conversations and other social interactions
with others could easily become uncomfortable, rude, and troubled if people
always tell each other the truth. In
order to maintain a proper relationship with colleagues, they feel it is better
to say that you are busy when they invite you to lunch than to say that you
don't like them and therefore don't want to go out for lunch with them. Similarly, a husband might choose to comment
positively about his wife's dress that he really dislikes when he knows that
she bought it on sale and so cannot return it to the shop. (407 words)
Adapted from: Vrij, Aldert. Detecting
Lies and Deceit: The Psychology of Lying and the Implications for Professional
Practice. Chichester: Wiley, 2000.
こちらも一般的。嘘についての英文はいくつか目にしたような。実は，最近作った長文問題集にも「嘘を見抜く」といった感じの関西大学の問題を収録しておきました。やはり，印象には残りづらい。
（2009年4月3日（金曜日）
【大問１】
A continuing
decline in the number of neighborhood supermarkets has made it harder for
millions of New Yorkers to find fresh and affordable food
within walking distance of their homes, according to a recent city study.
The shortage of nearby supermarkets is
most severe in minority and poor neighborhoods.
According to the
food workers union, only 550 decently sized supermarkets ---each occupying at
least 10, 000 square feet ---remain in
the city. In one corner of southeast
Queens*, four supermarkets have closed in the last two years. Over a similar period in East Harlem*, six
small supermarkets have closed. "Two more are on the brink in this area," local
officials said.
In fact, the
trend is not confined to poor neighborhoods. The supermarket
closings result from rising rents and slim returns, among other things. They have forced residents to take buses or
cabs to the closest supermarkets in other areas. In many places, residents said, the lack of competition
had led to rising prices in the remaining stores.
The decrease of
easily available fresh food has prompted city and state officials to call
several task forces* to examine its possible effect on the public health.
"Many
people in low-income neighborhoods are spending their food budget at discount
stores or pharmacies where there is no fresh produce," said Amanda Burden,
the city's planning director. "In
our survey, a significant percentage of them reported that they had not eaten
fresh fruit or vegetables for a day or two. That really is a health crisis in the city."
To spur
supermarket growth, officials could consider offering city-owned property,
providing economic incentives, or relaxing requirements.
"We have to
determine why the stores are closing and what the barriers are," Ms. Burden said. "Stimulating the investment of
supermarket owners in these communities is essential to the future of the
city," she adds. (309語)
本英文はNew Yorkのスーパーの消失。ソースは判明。New York Times 2008年5月5日付けの記事 The Lost supermarket: A Breed in Need of Replenishment.ほぼ原文通りで，記事全体の半分ぐらいです。→ 出典 Notes.
大問２
Robots are still
far from being the chatty companions seen in science-fiction movies. But some toy robots are becoming more than just
sophisticated machines. One recent trial
product, though only 17 centimeters tall, has as many as 17 motors to move its limbs, making it
surprisingly flexible. According to
James Kuffner, a professor of robotics, a robot could imitate most human movements
if it had twenty or more motors. It is no accident that such a
robot has a humanoid* shape. A human
shape has an appeal," he says. "A dish-washer will only wash dishes, but
a humanoid robot can do more. " Among the things that they do is having a
fight. Professor Kuffner says that in
Japan and South Korea, the centers of the toy-robot industry, people often have
toy robot battles.
By 2026, he
estimates, consumer robots should be able to perform many tasks of daily life
that people find hazardous or unpleasant. A leading company in robot design and research
has the prospect that a robot of the size of a typical twelve-year-old can do most household
tasks. The obstacles to building a robot
of that size have to do with weight and cost. As robots get larger, they need more gears to
move, making them heavier and more expensive.
Robots may also
start to look more human, adding facial features and delicate hands, but that
poses a psychological problem---the odd impression that robots make on people
if they look too human. Indeed, if you come
closer to something human that actually is not a human, it can be frightening. However, Professor Kuffner says that there is
nothing to fear. If a robot comes to be
a menace, "we can just take out the batteries," he says. (292 words)
こちらはもっと短め。実はテキストに採用するにはこのくらいの語数が穏当。350語を超えると長め。400語が上限という感じですから，英文の易しさも考慮して歓迎すべき題材です。こちらも出典が判明。同じくNew York Times 2008年1月５日付け。Not Exactly the Jetsons, but Getting closer. このJetsons「宇宙家族ジェットソンズ」というアニメは有名でしょうか？本当の記事のほうがおもしろいのですが，入試英文の通例として固有名詞の排除が行われているので，Hondaの名前が消えてしまいました。
笑っていいとも増刊号で何回かロボットが扱われており20～30万円で結構な動きをするロボットが発売されているのは知っておりましたが，その筋では有名なことですね。
【2009年4月1日】
A computer scientist at the University of
Melbourne is leading a new international mission to digitally preserve
thousands of the world's endangered languages. Linguists estimate that 90% of
the world's 6,000 languages will die before this century is out. Most of these
languages are not written down and so their cultures, which have developed over
many centuries, will disappear forever.
Steven Bird has recently joined the
university from the University of Pennsylvania, where he led a team working on
language technologies---computer software which can communicate using natural
language. Last month he was back in Philadelphia to start OLAC, the Open
Language Archives Community. OLAC is an international network of 25 digital
archives in six countries, currently holding over 30,000 items: dictionaries,
grammars, field-notes, text collections and recordings. The network is growing
rapidly, as more scholars collect and upload their materials. Bird works on this
effort with Dr Gary Simons, vice president of the largest linguistic research
organization in the world.
"We live in a unique period in human
history," says Bird, "between the beginning of the digital era and
the end of a great many of the world's languages. It is easy to collect and
spread vast amounts of linguistic data in the form of audio and video
recordings and written documents. We just have to collect the data once, then
it becomes available to all future generations, whether it be scientists, or
native people wanting to learn the language of their ancestors. But the window of opportunity is shutting
fast.”
Unfortunately, digital preservation faces
huge problems. Most digital media and storage formats go out of use within five
years, and must be continually changed to current media and formats. A lot of
linguistic data is stored in Microsoft formats which cannot be opened (even by
Microsoft software) 5-10 years later. "Linguists who store data this way
are just turning endangered languages into endangered data." Nevertheless,
Bird is optimistic: "Our new software for creating dictionaries and for
getting recordings into a written form is able to store them with Unicode
encodings and with XML markup. These open standards will ensure that the digital
information can always be read.”
Despite this optimism, more funding is
urgently needed. In their recent book entitled Vanishing Voices published by Oxford University Press, Nettle and
Romaine say that: 'Few people seem to know or care that most of Australia's 250
languages have already disappeared and few are likely to survive over the long
term." Since 1998, the Australian Research Council has funded just 13
projects on Australian languages. We need a large number of linguists, equipped
with digital recording and storage technologies, and able to train native
people to contribute. We also need funding for digital archives. Today, most
archives can't keep up with the pace of new materials arriving on the doorstep.
For example, the Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive in Canberra has
24,000 hours of recordings which are being digitized at the rate of 100 hours
per month. Only 3% of these materials have been changed into written form. In
addition, once speakers of the languages die the materials cannot be
understood.
Australia is in a unique position: we have
2,000 languages in our region (Southeast Asia and the South Pacific), most of
which are virtually unknown to science. According to data collected by
Ethnologue.com, the most comprehensive online database of the world's
languages, Australia has more critically endangered languages than all other
countries combined (see Fig.1). In other countries, it is easier to get
funding. Over the last fifteen years Bird has attracted $17 million in research
grants from the UK and US governments. Just last year, a British charitable
fund has set aside over $50 million for a massive language documentation project.
Bird's own fieldwork was conducted in
Cameroon, West Africa. Cameroon is a country with 270 distinct languages. Bird
is very excited about being the first person to investigate an unstudied
language. Using specialized hardware and software he created several large
electronic databases containing thousands of speech recordings, analyzed the languages,
co-authored the first dictionary for one of the languages, and worked with
others on the development of 10 new writing systems. In Australia he hopes to
work closely with Australian linguists and native scholars on new technologies
to support the digital preservation of Australia's languages.
(739 words)
電通大の担当は初めて。結構分量が多いことに少し驚きました。ただ，単答形式の問題が多いので，与しやすかったと思います。単語は制限されているので，ほぼ受験勉強で習う単語で対処できるでしょう。絶滅する言語＋デジタル化，という点が目新しい。工学系単科大学ということもあり，好感の持てる題材の選択だと思います。デジタル化には興味がありますが，これは一つの言語をデジタル化するとなると本当に大変だと思います。気が遠くなるような作業が待っていますね。
Did you ever wonder what makes some people
become friends and others not? According to Dr. Leonard Zunin, whether or not
people become friends is at least partly determined by the way they interact
when they first meet, that is, in their first "contact." In his book Contact: The First Four Minutes, Zunin
discusses contacts with "strangers, friends, lovers, children, bosses, . .
. teachers, politicians-the whole cast of characters in your individual
world." But the most interesting part of his argument is the idea that the
first four minutes of contact can be crucial in determining how the rest of the
interaction and perhaps the whole
Part of Zunin's research consisted of
observing strangers interact. These observations made it clear that four
minutes was the average time which passed before these strangers decided to
continue the interaction or to separate. For example, when two people are
introduced for the first time, it is normal for them to chat for a few minutes
before moving away to talk to someone else. Although most people are behaving
unconsciously, they would feel uncomfortable and impolite if they did not spend
those first few minutes interacting with the new person, but they do not feel
required to spend longer than 3-5 minutes. They will only continue the contact
if there is some reason to do so.
What does that mean for the average person? A
relationship can only develop if both people are interested in pursuing it. So,
how can you let someone know that you are interested? If you want to start new
friendships, Zunin says, "Every time you meet someone in a social
situation, give him [or her] your undivided attention for four minutes."
Perhaps you have been, for example, at a party. You are introduced to a man who
spends his time looking over your shoulder or around the room instead of at you
as though he were looking for someone more interesting to talk to. Zunin's
findings suggest that you will lose interest in that person because of his
behavior, and you will not bother to seek his friendship. In other words, it is
important to give your full attention for the first four minutes of contact
with anyone you would like to make into a friend.
Finally, Zunin claims that the first four
minutes of contact are important even for family members. Because we have a
long history with members of our families, they will understand and forgive us
if we do not always behave as they would like. Nevertheless, if you haven't
seen your family for a while, it is unwise to immediately begin talking about
problems and complaints when you first see them. If you talk instead about
pleasant subjects, they are more likely to be happy with you and to be able to
deal well with the problems later.
If you have your doubts about the usefulness
of Dr. Zunin's advice, at least try his suggestion. The next time you are at a
party or other social gathering, do your best to seem self-confident,
attentive, and happy with yourself during the first few minutes of contact. You
may find it well worth the effort. (517 words)
こちらも穏当なレベルの英文。最初の４分が大事だ，というのはちょっと印象的。これまでのいろいろな人との出会いを思い返しながら，パーティなど社交の場は得意としませんが，４分しか持たない人が大変多いので，きっと私はつまらない人間だと思われているのだろうな，と思って読んでおりました。確かに４分ぐらいすぎるとそれ以上話を続けるのが結構つらい場面というのは多いと思います。４分でその人のことがわかれば，面接時間が10分程度でも十分機能しているということでしょうか。
【３月２７日（金）】
Descendents of the Maya
living in Mexico still sometimes refer to themselves as "the corn people. "
The phrase is not intended as metaphor. Rather, it's meant to acknowledge their
abiding dependence on
this miraculous grass,
the staple of their diet for almost nine thousand years. Forty percent of the
calories a Mexican eats in a day comes directly from corn, most of it in the
form of tortillas. So
when a Mexican says "I am "maize" or "corn walking," it is simply a statement
of fact: The very substance of the Mexican's body is to a considerable extent a
manifestation of this plant.
For an
American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain, yet one
that is also rooted in a field of corn, not to think of himself as a corn
person suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism. Or
perhaps a little of both. It does take some imagination to recognize the ear of
corn in the Coke bottle or the Big Mac. At the same time, the food industry has
done a good job of persuading us that the forty-five thousand different items
or SKUs (stock keeping
units) in the supermarket–––seventeen thousand new ones every year–––represent
genuine variety rather than so many clever rearrangements of molecules
extracted from the same' plant.
You are
what you eat, it's often said, and if this is true, then what we mostly are is
corn - or, more precisely, processed corn. This proposition is susceptible to scientific proof: The same scientists
who glean the composition of ancient diets from mummified human remains can do
the same for you or me, using a snip of hair or-fingernail. The science works
by identifying stable isotopes of carbon in human tissue that bear the signatures, in effect, of the
different types of plants that originally took them from the air and introduced
them into the food chain. The intricacies of this process are worth following,
since they go some distance toward explaining how corn could have conquered our
diet and, in turn, more of the earth's surface than virtually any other
domesticated species, our own included.
After
water, carbon is the most common element in our bodies - indeed, in all living things on earth. We
earthlings are, as they say, a carbon life form. Originally, the atoms of
carbon from which we're made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide
molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to
support life–––the carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids–––is by
means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon
atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form
the simple organic compounds that stand at the base of every food chain. It is
more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air.
But
corn goes about this procedure a little differently than most other plants, a
difference that not only renders the plant more efficient than most, but
happens also to preserve the identity of the carbon atoms it recruits, even
after they've been transformed into things like Gatorade and Ring Dings and
hamburgers, not to mention the human bodies nourished on those things. Where
most plants during photosynthesis create compounds that have three carbon atoms, corn makes
compounds that have four: hence "C-4," the botanical nickname for
this gifted group of plants, which wasn't identified until the 1970s. The C-4 trick represents an
important economy for a plant, giving it an advantage, especially in
areas where water is scarce and temperatures high. In order to gather carbon
atoms from the air, a plant has to open its *stomata, the microscopic orifices
in the leaves through which plants both take in and exhaust gases. Every time a
stoma opens to admit carbon dioxide, precious molecules of water escape. It's
as though every time you opened your mouth to eat, you lost a quantity of blood.
Ideally, you would open your mouth as seldom as possible, ingesting as much
food as you could with every bite. This is essentially what a C-4 plant does. By
recruiting extra atoms of carbon during each instance of photosynthesis, the
corn plant is able to limit its loss of water and "fix"––that is,
take from the atmosphere and link in a useful molecule ––significantly more
carbon than other plants.
The
trick doesn't yet, however, explain how a scientist could tell that a given
carbon atom in a human bone owes its presence there to a photosynthetic event
that occurred in the leaf of one kind of plant and not another-in corn, say,
instead of lettuce or wheat. The scientist can do this because all carbon is
not created equal. Some carbon atoms, called isotopes, have more than the usual
complement of six
*protons and six *neutrons, giving them a slightly different atomic weight. C-13,
for example, has six protons and seven neutrons. For whatever reason, when a
C-4 plant goes scavenging for its four-packs of carbon, it takes in more carbon
13 than ordinary––C-3––plants, which exhibit a marked preference for the more
common carbon 12. Greedy for carbon, C-4 plants can't afford to discriminate
among isotopes, and so end up with relatively more carbon 13. The higher the
ratio of carbon 13 to carbon 12 in a person's flesh, the more corn has been in
his diet –– or in the diet of the animals he or she ate. (As far as we're concerned,
it makes little difference whether we consume relatively more or less carbon 13.
)
One
would expect to find a comparatively high proportion of carbon 13 in the flesh
of people whose staple food of choice is corn -Mexicans, most famously. Americans
eat much more wheat than corn - 114 pounds of wheat flour per person per year,
compared to 11 pounds of corn flour. The Europeans who colonized America
regarded themselves as wheat people, in contrast to the native corn people they
encountered; wheat in the West has always been considered the most refined, or
civilized, grain. If asked to choose, most of us would probably still consider
ourselves wheat people, though by now the whole idea of identifying with a
plant at all strikes us as a little old-fashioned. Beef people sounds more like
it, though nowadays chicken people, which sounds not nearly so good, is
probably closer to the truth of the matter. But carbon 13 doesn't lie, and
researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of North
Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in
the North who are the true people of corn. "When you look at the isotope
ratios," Todd Dawson, a Berkeley biologist who's done this sort of
research, told me, "we North Americans look like corn chips with legs. "
Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the
animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding
corn to livestock as a *sacrilege); much of their protein, comes from *legumes;
and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar.
So that's us: processed
corn, walking.
(1209語)
久しぶりに勉強になりました。入試英文をじっくり読むという機会はそれほどないので，このような英文に出会って，少し新しいことを学ぶことは喜ばしいことです。新しい，といってもちっとも新しくないでしょうが，私のように学生時代にかじったことぐらいしか知識がなく，その後，じっくり学習する機会もなければ同位元素とは何か，といった単純なことでも，このような英文で格闘して学習すると，なんか身についている気分になってうれしいです。
問題２
Five Methods I Have Used to
Banish Worry
By Professor William Lyon Phelps
I. When
I was twenty-four years old, my eyes suddenly gave out. After reading three or
four minutes, my eyes felt as if they were full of needles; and even when I was
not reading, they were so sensitive that I could not face a window. I consulted
the best oculists in New Haven and New York. Nothing seemed to help me. After
four o'clock in the afternoon, I simply sat in a chair in the darkest corner of
the room, waiting for bedtime. I was terrified. I feared that I would have to
give up my career as a teacher and go out West and get a job as a lumberjack. Then
a strange thing happened which shows the miraculous effects of the mind over
physical ailments. When my eyes were at their worst that unhappy winter, I
accepted an invitation to address a group of undergraduates. The hall was
illuminated by huge rings of gas jets suspended from the ceiling. The lights
pained my eyes so intensely that, while sitting on the platform, I was
compelled to look at the floor. Yet during my thirty-minute speech, I felt
absolutely no pain, and I could look directly at these lights without any
blinking whatever. Then when the assembly was over, my eyes pained me again.
I thought then that if I could keep my mind
strongly concentrated on something, not for thirty minutes, but for a week, I
might be cured. For clearly it was a case of mental excitement triumphing over
a bodily illness.
I had a similar experience later while
crossing the ocean. I had an attack of lumbago so severe that I could not walk.
I suffered extreme pain when I tried to stand up straight. While in that
condition, I was invited to give a lecture on shipboard. As soon as I began to
speak, every trace of pain and stiffness left my body; I stood up straight,
moved about with perfect flexibility, and spoke for an hour. When the lecture
was over, I walked away to my stateroom with ease. For a moment, I thought I
was cured. But the cure was only temporary. The lumbago resumed its attack.
These
experiences demonstrated to me the vital importance of one's mental attitude. They
taught me the importance of enjoying life while you may. So I live every day
now as if it were the first day I had ever seen and the last I were going to see.
I am excited about the daily adventure of living, and nobody in a state of
excitement will be unduly
troubled with worries. I love my daily work as a teacher. I wrote a book
entitled The Excitement of Teaching. Teaching
has always been more than an art or an occupation to me. It is a passion. I
love to teach as a painter loves to paint or a singer loves to sing. Before I
get out of bed in the morning, I think with *ardent delight of my first group
of students. I have always felt that one of the chief reasons for success in
life is enthusiasm. (521 words)
Ⅱ. I have found that I can crowd worry out of
mind by reading an absorbing book. When I was fifty-nine, I had a prolonged nervous breakdown. During
that period, I began reading David Alec Wilson's monumental Life of Carlyle. It had a good deal to
do with my *convalescence because I became so absorbed in reading it that I
forgot my *despondency,
Ⅲ. At another time when I was
terribly depressed, I forced myself to become physically active almost every
hour of the day. I played five or six sets of violent games of tennis every
morning, then took a bath, had lunch, and played eighteen holes of golf every
afternoon. On Friday nights I danced until one o’clock in the morning. I am a
great believer in working up a tremendous sweat. I found that depression and
worry *oozed out of my system with the sweat
Ⅳ I learned long ago to avoid the folly of
hurry, rush, and working under tension. I have always tried to apply the
philosophy of Wilbur Cross. When he was Governor of Connecticut, he said to me:
"Sometimes when I have too many things to do all at once, I sit down and
relax and smoke my pipe for an hour and do nothing. "
Ⅴ. I have also learned that patience
and time have a way of resolving our troubles. When I am worried about
something, I try to see my troubles in their proper perspective. I say to
myself: "Two months from now I shall not be worrying about this bad break,
so why worry about it now? Why not assume now the same attitude that I will
have two months from now?"
大問１とは違って標準的な内容。アメリカではよく売れているNon-fictionのベストセラーもの。
The
basic mystery about ant colonies is that there is no management. -A functioning
organization with no one in charge is so unlike the way humans operate as to be
virtually inconceivable. There is no central control. No insect issues commands
to another or instructs it to do things in a certain way. No individual is
aware of what must be done to complete any colony task. Each ant scratches and
prods its way through the tiny world of its immediate surroundings. Ants meet
each other, separate, go about their business. Somehow these small events
create a pattern that drives the coordinated behavior of colonies.
From Ants at Work by Deborah Gordon
（３月２４日）
In his short story "Silence," Leonid Andreyev specifically contrasts stillness, "the mere absence of noise," with silence, "which means that those who kept silent could have spoken if they had pleased. " Being silent thus involves more than just absence of action, since the things about which we are silent are in fact actively avoided. The careful absence of race labels in current American liberal discourse, for example, is indeed the product of a deliberate effort to suppress our awareness of race. Ironically, such deliberate avoidance may actually produce the opposite result. As Bing Crosby notes toward the end of the film The Country Girl upon suddenly realizing how close his wife and best friend have actually become, "there is only one thing more obvious than two people looking longingly at each other and it’s two people avoiding it.”
Like silence, denial involves active avoidance. Rather than simply failing to notice something, it means a deliberate effort to refrain from noticing it. Furthermore, it usually involves refusing to acknowledge the presence of things that actually beg for attention, thereby reminding us that conspiracies of silence revolve not around those largely unnoticeable matters we simply overlook but, on the contrary, around those highly noticeable matters we deliberately try to avoid.
That explains the increasingly common use of the image of an elephant to represent the object of such conspiracies. There is a handbook for helping children of alcoholics, An Elephant in the Living Room, which portrays alcohol abuse as a big elephant whose strong presence in alcoholic families' lives is denied by their members:
Imagine an ordinary living room–––chairs, couch, coffee table, a TV set, and, in the middle, a LARGE GRAY ELEPHANT. . . . Imagine also the people who live in this house: a child, along with a mother and/or father and maybe some sisters and brothers. All members of the family have to go through the living room many times each day and the child watches as they walk through the room very . . . carefully . . . around . . . the . . . ELEPHANT. Everyone avoids the swinging trunk and enormous feet. Since no one ever talks about the ELEPHANT, the child knows that she's not supposed to talk about it either. And she doesn't. Not to anyone.
Like the king's naked body in "The Emperor's New Clothes," the "elephant in the room" is certainly visible to anyone willing to simply keep one's eyes open. Thus, if anyone fails to notice it, it can only be as a result of deliberate avoidance, since otherwise it would be quite impossible not to notice it. Indeed, to ignore an elephant is to ignore the obvious.
The
"elephant in the room" symbolically indicates any object or matter of
which everyone is definitely aware yet which no one is willing to publicly
acknowledge. As such, it has become the most common cultural
representation of the open secrets around which conspiracies of silence
typically revolve.
Almost
paradoxically, silence is often covered up by sound. So-called small talk, nervous chat, and "beating around
the bush" are but different forms of
"conspiracies of noise" specifically designed to cover up
uncomfortable silences. So is
"background" music. It was the haunting image of the band that kept playing while the Titanic
was sinking that must have inspired Randy Shilts to title his chronicle
of the silence-ridden AIDS outbreak of the 1980s And the Band Played On. When there is an elephant in the room, we
often find some subject other than what is happening to talk about.
Yet what makes
conspiracies of silence even more dangerous than covering it up is the fact
that the silence itself is never actually discussed among the conspirators. Unlike when we openly agree not to talk about
something "Let’s not get into that", the very fact that the
conspirators avoid it remains unacknowledged and the subtle social pressures
underlying their silence are thus concealed. Everyone understands that something is risky
to speak about, and everyone then avoids discussing the fact that it is risky
to speak. A perfect example of such
silence about silence, or meta-silence, is the secrecy typically surrounding
secrets. As Mark Jordan has so insightfully observed,
"if there is any one 'secret' of homosexuality in the Catholic church, it
is the urgent anxiety that there is something unknown, something frightening,
that must be kept hidden. It is the
fearful effort behind the various arrangements for keeping secrets. The 'secret' is the effort itself. "
Indeed, the
reason it is so difficult to talk about the elephant in the room is that not
only does no one want to listen, but no one wants to talk about not listening. In other words, the very act of avoiding the
elephant is itself an elephant! Not only do we avoid it, we do so without
acknowledging that we are actually doing so, thereby denying our denial.
Like "rules
against seeing rules against seeing," being "forbidden to talk about
the fact that we are forbidden to talk" about certain things, or the fact
that "we do not see what we prefer not to, and do not see that we do not
see," such meta-denial presupposes a particular form of self-deception
famously identified by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four as
"doublethinking," or the ability "consciously to induce
unconsciousness, and then . . . to become
unconscious of the act of hypnosis* you had just performed. " Thus, in the
novel, when someone suddenly assumes Country A's traditional role as Country
B's enemy and the people of Country B set out to immediately destroy any
references ever made to their long-lasting war with Country A, Orwell observes
in the novel that "the work was overwhelming, all the more so because the
process that it involved could not be called by their true names. "
As they develop
over time, conspiracies of silence seem to follow a particular course. For a complete picture of such conspiracies we
therefore need to also examine the pattern they take in society.
In "The
Emperor's New Clothes," although neither the prime minister nor the
emperor's other trusted councilor can actually see the nonexistent fabric, they
nevertheless presume that everyone else besides them, including the emperor,
can, and therefore praise it repeatedly to protect their reputation. Their utterly dishonest declaration, however,
in turn leads the emperor to conclude that he must be the only one who cannot
see it. "What!" thinks the
emperor, looking at the empty loom*, "I can't see a thing! Why, this is a
disaster! Am I stupid? Am I unfit to be emperor?" And yet, "It is
very lovely," he says aloud, thereby practically helping cause a vicious
circle* of inevitably wrong assumptions. Thus, as the story continues, all the
councilors, ministers and men of great importance stare and stare and see no
more than what the emperor has seen. Yet
they nevertheless say the same thing that he has said, “It’s lovely.”
Similarly, when
one staff member witnesses another ignore a loud and clear statement in a
meeting, for example, the impression that it is unimportant may be mutually
reinforced by the second staff member's neglect. Indeed, a vicious circle may be generated in
which each conspirator's denial strengthens the others', their mutual silence
thereby increasingly spreading as yet a third and then a fourth person join the
conspiracy. "Silence," notes
Paul Simon, "like a cancer grows," which is indeed how an entire
society may come to altogether deny its leaders' inability, cruel acts, and
urgent environmental disasters.
The intensity of
silence is thus influenced not only by the number of people who work together
to maintain it but also by the length of time they manage to do so. Despite the likelihood that a silence would be
interrupted the longer it lasts, it instead tends to become more prohibitive as
time goes on.
This is largely
a result of the inherently accumulating nature of silence. Like any other form of denial, silence is
self-reinforcing, and the longer we remain silent, the more necessary it
therefore becomes to cover our silence with further silence. Today's silence will make it harder to break
it tomorrow.
Indeed,
"elephants" usually grow with time, their size hence reflecting their
age. The longer we pretend not to notice
them, the larger they appear in our minds. As a child of Holocaust survivors describes
the silence surrounding his parents' painful past, "every year it grew
taller and I came to be more and more aware of its presence, and of how odd it
was that we never spoke of it, since it dominated the landscape.”
Given this, how
long can people keep pretending not to notice the elephant in the room before
it becomes too large (and its presence, therefore, too obvious) to ignore? Is there, in fact, anything that can stop such
a seemingly endless spiral of denial? Indeed, what actually does bring
conspiracies of silence to an end?
This is how Hans
Christian Andersen tells the dramatic scene of "The Emperor's New
Clothes":
"But he doesn't have anything on!" cried a
little child. "Listen to the
innocent one," said the proud father. And the people whispered among each other and
repeated what the child had said. "He doesn't have anything on. There's a little child who says that he has
nothing on. " "He has nothing on!" shouted all the people at
last.
Paradoxically,
although the pressure to participate in conspiracies of silence increases as they become larger and larger,
the opportunities to end them increase as well. In other words, as the silence becomes heavier
there are also more chances that it will be broken. Indeed, as the way 'The Emperor's New
Clothes" ends seems to suggest, if even a single person is unwilling to
deny the elephant's presence, he may ultimately lead an entire group of
conspirators to acknowledge it publicly.
Like silence
itself, however, breaking it is a group endeavor that involves an entire social
system. The first person who mentions
the elephant in the room only begins the process of acknowledging its presence
and, as the father of the little boy in "The Emperor's New Clothes"
helps remind us, someone else must then follow him. Indeed, for a conspiracy of silence to actually
end, there ultimately need to be no more conspirators left to keep it alive.
As we might
expect, to fight against the group pressure to keep the silence one usually
uses the weight of numbers in order to break it as well. The situation of being in a minority and
facing the majority's pressure to maintain a conspiracy of silence becomes more
evident as the number of conspirators increases. However, as more people join the silence
breaker, the balance of the situation may ultimately shift and reach a "tipping point"
where the increasing social pressure on the remaining conspirators to also
acknowledge the elephant's presence eventually overcomes the social pressure to
keep denying it.
Before that can
happen, however, those conspirators must be ready to hear the child's
announcement that the emperor has no clothes. Needless to say, in order for its presence to
be acknowledged the elephant has to be actively noticed. This presupposes pulling it out of the
"background" and turning it into a "figure" of conscious
attention. Calling attention to what is
being ignored therefore requires the active reversal of figure and background. Breaking conspiracies of silence, in other
words, implies foregrounding the elephant in the room. (1922 words)
幸い原典が見つかったので，多少は気分が楽になりました。
（３月２４日）
Ⅰ
History suggests that a burst of creative
inspiration, or even the solution to a puzzling problem, can spring from the
unconscious work of sleep.
Dmitry Mendeleev credited his discovery of
the periodic table to a dream that showed him where to place the elements. Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz was
able to see the ring shape of benzene in a vision of a snake biting its tail. And Otto Loewi, the Nobel Prize winner, said
the idea for his prizewinning frog-heart experiment that proved the concept of
chemical neurotransmission came to him in a dream.
Loewi famously woke up in the middle of the
night to write down his idea, then went to bed and woke up hours later, unable
to make sense of his own handwriting. Only when he went to sleep the next night did
the idea return to him in a second dream.
"This time I did not take any
risk," he later wrote. "I got
up immediately, went to the laboratory, made the experiment on the frog's
heart, and at five o'clock the chemical transmission of nervous impulse was
proved. "
Were these exceptional cases merely lucky
accidents or the most notable examples of sleep's ability to open the door to insight?
Dismiss them if you choose. But the
strongest explanation offered by science is that sleep and dreams have powerful
effects on the organization and storage of memories that we're only now
beginning to understand. Our ability to
get to information stored in our memories - both consciously and unconsciously –––
is a crucial part of problem solving, and getting to those memories is apparently where sleep comes
in.
During sleep, the brain does a lot of heavy
lifting. Memories are brought together. Things that we've seen during the day are made
into new solid memories. And information
is moved from short-term storage to long-term storage, where it can be accessed
later for the task at hand. Studies that
examine patterns of brainwave activity during sleep and dreaming have hinted at
this strongly, but it's also been illustrated in more direct ways.
One of the best examples was a 2004 study in
the journal Nature that involved
training several groups of college students to carry out a memory experiment. Each student learned two rules for converting
a string of eight numbers into a new string of numbers, and each group was
tested once after training and then again eight hours later. No one was told, though, that there was a
third, hidden rule that could reduce the steps in the calculation, allowing the
problem to be solved immediately.
Sixty percent of the students who were
allowed to sleep in the interval figured out the hidden rule. But only 22 percent of those who stayed awake
-some through the night, others through the day -discovered it. At the same time, another group that slept for
eight hours without being trained was never able to figure out the rule,
suggesting that sleeping helped only if memories of the task were formed first.
What the study demonstrated pretty convincingly is that new memories are manipulated during sleep in a way that stimulates insight, which then filters into consciousness. - How this happens, or which brain regions are involved, is not clear. Scientists have learned that explicit memory tasks are usually associated with deep stages of sleep. But some evidence suggests that insight is acquired in dreams, which occur in the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep. It may be that both contribute to the process in different ways.
Whatever the mechanisms behind creative
sleep, if a crucial exam or a big presentation is before you, or a complicated
problem is weighing on your mind, it
might be best to sleep on it.
Ⅱ
Reflection may be the pivotal way we learn. Consider some of the ways of reflecting:
looking back, dreaming, talking it out, watching last week's game, asking for
advice, going on retreats–––
even telling jokes. Jokes are a way of
making whatever-it-was understandable and acceptable.
Unfortunately, too often it is people's
failures that get them to reflect on their experiences. When you're going along and everything is
working well, you don't sit down and reflect, which is exactly the moment when
you should do it. If you wait for a
giant mistake before you reflect, two things happen. One, since you're down, you don't get the most
out of it, and two, you tend only to see the mistake, instead of all the
moments in which you've also been correct.
It's true. Most of us are shaped more by negative
experiences than by positive ones. A
thousand things happen in a week to each of us, but most of us remember the few
lapses rather than our triumphs, because we don't reflect. We merely react. Playwright Athol Fugard* said that he worked
his way out of a depression by starting every day thinking of ten things that
gave him pleasure. Thinking of the small
pleasures around one –––the glow of the morning light on the ocean, the fresh
roses, the drink waiting at the end of a morning walk, even the dog that wants
to be. fed - is a much better way to deal with a perceived failure than to spend
time thinking about it. When you're
down, think of the things you have to look forward to. When you manage to get over the
shock of a failure, you’ll be prepared to ponder on the failure.
In fact, mistakes contain powerful lessons––but
only if we think them through calmly, see where we went wrong, mentally revise
what we're doing, and then act on the revisions. When great batters strike out in a baseball
game, they don't linger for a moment over the setback, but instead set about to
improve their stance or swing. And great
batters do strike out –––Babe Ruth** not only set a home run record, he set a
strikeout record as well. Think what a
great batting average is: . 400. This
means a great batter fails to get a hit more than half the time. Most of the rest of us, on the other hand, are
paralyzed by our mistakes. We're so
haunted by them, so afraid that we're going to do the same thing again, that we
become fearful of doing anything. When
horseback riders are thrown, they get back on the horse, because they know if
they don't, their fear may stop them. Most of us have lesser fears to face, but most
of us have to cope with them through thought, before we act again. Reflection comes first, and then positive
action. Reflection permits us to process
our feelings, understand them, resolve our questions, and get on with our work.
The point is not to be the victims of our
feelings, jerked this way and that by unresolved emotions, not to be used by
our experiences, but to use them and to use them creatively. Just as writers turn experiences from their
lives into novels and plays, we can each transform our experiences into
something practical and usable. Isak
Dinesen*** said, "Any sorrow can be borne if we can put it in a story. "
Your total experience becomes your life, and that base is solid and sound to
the degree that you have reflected on it, understood it, and arrived at a
workable resolution.
青山学院に引き続きパソコンの環境整備に忙しくて，こころここにあらず。東京工業大は初めての担当です。この大学の特徴は日本語を英語にする部分がかならず含まれていること。英文は決して易しくないと思いますが，これでも英文レベルはセンターレベル。私にはそうは思えません。このレベルの入試問題は各予備校からも正解例が発表されています。各社各様。私はできるだけ原文の構造に忠実に直訳に努めています。
【3月15日】
【Ⅰ】
By the late nineteenth century, economists
realized that the ethic of hard work and self-restraint that had helped to
industrialize America had serious drawbacks now that most industries had the
capacity for mass production. If everyone waited patiently to be rewarded for
their hard work, who would buy the new products? Between 1870 and 1900, the
amount of advertising multiplied more than ten times. Giant department stores
were built to display new consumer items for urban residents, while rural
residents were exposed to the delights and temptations of mail-order catalogs.
The word consumption increasingly lost its earlier meaning of destroying,
wasting, or using up, and came instead to refer in a positive way to the
satisfying of human needs and desires.
Historians may debate the beginning of the
consumer culture, but they agree that by the 1920s a new mentality was
widespread. As a newspaper commented: "The American citizen's first
importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer."
Stores and manufacturers aimed to sell products by promoting ever-increasing
desires for "a better way of life." Soap makers, for instance, were
advised to sell not just cleaning products but "afternoons of
leisure."
Since women were thought to buy more than
three-fourths of all personal goods, much of the consumer campaign was aimed at
them. Many books laid out various ways to make women accept the concept of
"creative waste." The vices involved in consumerism were socially
acceptable enough so that theft by women was increasingly thought of as a
disease kleptomania instead of a crime. The virtues of
consumption allowed a little interference by the market. As "purchasing
agent for the home," the housewife was told, she had the chance to create
a space where each member of her family could find personal fulfillment.
Consumerism highlighted women in another way
as well. By the early 1920s, advertisers had discovered that they could also
profit by appealing to the sexual feelings of men. Marketing specialists soon
found that pretty little girls, as well as attractive women, appealed to these
feelings. There was the added bonus that little girls, unlike women in that
period, could be shown in various states of nudity.
The real growth in consumer culture, like
the expansion of married women's employment, began during the 1950s.
Advertising increased by 400 percent between 1945 and 1960. It was a growth
rate faster than that of the GNP. As an advertising researcher explained,
"We are now confronted with the problem of permitting the average American
to feel moral ... even when he is taking two vacations a year and buying a
second or third car. One of the basic problems of prosperity, then, is to
demonstrate that the pleasure-seeking approach to life is a moral, not an
immoral one."
In the 1950s, patriotism, freedom, and
consumption became interchangeable ideas, continually reinforced through the
magic of television. Consumption has been emphasized as an American ideal ever
since. Recently, an American taken prisoner in Iraq, told the New York Times
how his experience made him "appreciate my freedom, the things we take for
granted. We can watch television, change channels. We have choices."
By 1965, the advertising industry launched a
"creative revolution" involving the sexualization of objects and
ideas that were formerly off limits. In one ad, for instance, the Statue of
Liberty modeled underwear. Few people charged the makers of such ads with
disrespect for America: They were selling private enterprise, after all, not
registering a political protest.
It was largely as a marketing device that
the social unrest of the middle to late 1960s and the spirit of protest from
the generation coming of age during this period found their way into the genres
of television entertainment. The fashion industry translated the 1960s revolt
into a series of statements about
individual identity. For
example, a cigarette ad featuring a confident, long-legged woman in tight jeans
and boots, with the voice-over "You've Come a Long Way, Baby,"
transformed women's demands for equality into the right to smoke and wear sexy
clothes. In the 1970s, the increasing number of women in the labor market,
along with the entry of younger workers who had been influenced by the protests
against the Vietnam War, led business to seek such new marketing techniques.
The baby-boom generation, by the 1970s,
separated pursuit of the American Dream from its former connection with the
family. Their spending became "less home centered," for example, and
oriented more toward personal recreation. Once the market for costly family
items began to slow, the next growth area had to be the individual: a
refrigerator for the family, but "A Sony of My Owny." Television divided
the family of the 1950s into as many different varieties as possible. The
modern media has not neglected the family; it has effectively targeted distinct
audience segments teenagers, the middle
class, singles, seniors, and working parents
trying to attract their dollars by emphasizing the differences that
require separate images and their own products.
(830 words)
Ⅱ
Less than half a century since Japan became
an advanced industrial nation, it is facing the dangerous and massive
accumulation of its own wastes. What is the reason for this situation?
Things that offer quick or immediate
benefits almost always turn out to be
(1) inefficient in the long run, while things that are rational and
efficient in the long run are generally inefficient in the short term. There
are hardly any exceptions to this rule. Japan's traditional rice-straw culture
of the Edo period seemed unsophisticated and inefficient from the short-term
point of view. Yet its excellence was that it did not cause long-term
disadvantages and problems such as waste disposal and environmental pollution.
Life today is incomparably more convenient
than it was in the Edo period. However, we must become aware that our excessive
consumption today is not only rapidly using up the accumulated wealth built by
our ancestors, but also borrowing against the wealth of our descendants as
well. At the very least, we ought to abandon immediately our so-called
progressive attitude that rejects our ancestors' lifestyle which placed
long-term thinking ahead of short-term convenience.
Clearly, Edo-period Japanese society
incorporated impressive recycling structures. These same recycling structures
may appear to have been irrational and inefficient in the short run. But they
made exhaustive use of the rice crop. And although rice growing was accompanied
by a tremendous amount of physical labor and care, still it was valuable as a
recycling system. The reason that traditional rice agriculture continues today
is because it did not impose the kind of ever increasing burden on the
environment that modern industry does.
(2) Regardless of what people might like to
think, the earth and the life upon it do not exist only for the purpose of
increasing the economic prosperity of human beings. Contemporary civilization
is characterized by systems in which the invention of each new product leads to
ever more massive quantities of waste. The civilization of straw with its
complete recycle systems that produced no pollution was obviously superior by
far. (341 words)
【3月5日】
【Ⅴ】
Communication style refers to the way we use
different strategies to communicate. In all languages, people give compliments,
agree and disagree, praise, ask for favors, make requests, seek clarification,
show that they are listening, etc. The way these things are done, however,
depends on the culture.
A commonly recognized difference in
communication styles within Japan is that between Kansai and Kanto Japanese. It's
not only the words that are different, it's also the style of interaction. Also,
older people and younger people often have different communication styles. Comparing
certain elements of English and Japanese strategies provides clear examples of
different communication styles. In particular, there are differences in directness,
use of silence and cognitive styles.
English speakers tend to be more direct than
Japanese speakers. In a conflict between two residents of the same apartment
complex, for example, English speakers are much more likely to go directly to
the other resident to discuss the problem. Japanese speakers are more likely to
use a go-between---the manager, for example---to avoid direct confrontation. To
English speakers, this may seem sneaky or dishonest, while Americans may seem
overly confrontational or blunt to Japanese. During business negotiations,
English speakers (perhaps Americans in particular) often prefer to "put
their cards on the table", or state their positions clearly. Japanese
speakers are more likely to feel out the other's position indirectly. In
business settings, these differences can create serious problems not only when
negotiating, but also with employee relations, or when dealing with customers.
Related to this is the use of silence. English
speakers tend to be more verbal than Japanese speakers, emphasizing the
speaker's choice of words and counting on that to carry the meaning accurately.
Japanese speakers use silence more, emphasizing the context, and the listener's
ability to fill in that which isn't said directly. The Japanese expression
"listen one and understand ten" highlights that tendency in Japanese
while the English expression "say what you mean and mean what you
say" highlights English speakers' communication style. (343 words)
典型的な入試英文。
内容もごく一般的。多少難しい単語も見受けられますが，入試レベルとしては「基礎」ということで。
【Ⅵ】
According to
legend, tea has been known in China since about 2700 BC. For millennia it was a medicinal beverage
obtained by boiling fresh leaves in water, but around the 3rd century AD it
became a daily drink, and tea cultivation and processing began. Around 800 the first seeds were brought to
Japan, where cultivation became established by the 13th century. The Dutch East India Company carried the first
shipment of China tea to Europe in 1610. In 1669 the English East India Company brought
China tea from ports in Java to the London market. Later, teas grown on British estates in India
and Ceylon reached Mincing Lane, the center of the tea trade in London. Chinese brought tea cultivation to Taiwan in
1810. Tea cultivation in Java began
under the Dutch, who brought seeds from Japan in 1826, and seeds, workers, and tools
from China in 1833. In 1824 tea plants
were discovered in the hills along the frontier between Burma and the Indian
state of Assam. The British introduced
tea culture into India in 1836, and into Ceylon in 1867. At first they used seeds from China, but later
seeds from the Assam plant were used.
Teas are
classified according to region of origin, as in Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian,
and African tea, or by smaller district, as. in Darjeeling and Assam from
India, and Enshu from Japan. Teas are also classified by the size of the
processed leaf: larger leafy grades and smaller broken grades. The most important classification is by the
manufacturing process, resulting in the three categories of unfermented(green),
fermented (black), and semi-fermented (oolong). Green tea is usually produced from the China
plant and is grown mostly in China and Japan. The infused leaf is green, and the liquor is
pale green or lemon-yellow, and slightly bitter. Black tea, by far the most common type
produced, is best made from Assam or hybrid plants. The infused leaf is bright red or
copper-colored, and the liquor is bright red and slightly astringent but not
bitter. Oolong tea is produced mostly in
southern China and Taiwan from a special variety of the China plant. The liquor is pale or yellow in color, as in
green tea, and has a unique smoky flavor.
入試では結構扱われるものの歴史。紅茶の歴史と分類をざっと扱ったもの。あまり新鮮みはないが，標準的。
本年度は，他の仕事も抱えており，最初の問題の到着がいつもより遅れました。大学入試問題を解くようになって15年目を迎えると思います。２月，３月は入試問題と格闘するのがリズムになっているので，今年のように３月になってようやく初めての問題を解くのは初めて。
【2009年3月2日】