大学入試長文読解

When Americans are asked about their culture or culture in general, they generally do not have very solid responses. To be sure, they almost always have a response, but their responses, more often than not, suggest that there is little real understanding of culture or the role it plays in their lives ― or the lives of anyone else. Nearly all of them readily admit they have rarely thought much about it. In the eyes of some, culture simply refers to the place where one is born or is that which makes us human. Most Americans in fact see culture as related to tradition, heritage, nationality, or a way of life. For still other Americans, it is what characterizes those "other" people "out there" somewhere else in the world. It is common to hear culture associated with family or some racial grouping people recognize or to which they are assigned. Fortunately, only a few Americans continue to suggest that it is a biological term or something associated with the performing...

Disparities in incomes and living standards are the outcome of a striking attribute of economic development ― its unevenness across space. Somewhat unfairly, prosperity does not come to every place at the same time. This is true at all geographic scales, from local to national to global. Cities quickly pull ahead of the countryside. Living standards improve in some provinces while others lag behind. And some countries grow to riches while others remain poor. If economic density were charted on a map of the world, the topography at any resolution would be bumpy, not smooth. Location remains important at all stages of development, -but it matters less for living standards in a rich country than in a poor one. Estimates from more than 100 living standard surveys indicate that households in the most prosperous areas of developing countries ― such as Brazil, Bulgaria, Ghana, Indonesia, Morocco, and Sri Lanka ― have an average consumption almost 75 percent higher than that of similar h...

In rich countries the advertising slogan "There's an app for that!" has become a description of reality: online stores for applications that run on smartphones now boast hundreds of thousands of apps and billions of downloads. More surprisingly, the words have started to ring true in the poor world as well. Since mobile phones have become widespread there, services that go beyond voice and text messages are multiplying ― facilitating everything from transferring money to identifying fake goods and logistics to the mapping of natural disasters. To be sure, these services still only number in the hundreds and most are delivered via simple mobile phones. But should they take off, their impact could be momentous for the development of poor countries. They make bad physical infrastructure less of a problem; they connect the world's poor to the digital economy; they help them learn; they give them a voice; they cut out middle-men. Yet for mobile services to have the t...

Some have likened the calendar to a clock; this is, of course, a mistake. A calendar hangs by my desk but there is no way I can tell the date just by looking at it. The calendar is more abstract; it is a systematic way of naming the days by allocating each to a year and a month and maybe a week. It enables us to label the days in the past and in the future and to arrange them all in order. If we know the date of two events we know which was the earlier and which the later; the calendar enables us (1 )to make or impose unambiguous commitments for the future; without a calendar, a diary would be a muddle. In another meaning of the word, a calendar is an almanac, a program of future events or a record of past events, each assigned to a day or a year. The calendar is thus a human invention. If I want to know the date, I may refer to a newspaper or the radio or look at my calendar; I could ask a friend. If I were on my own, however, like Robinson Crusoe, I would have to remember the d...

Of the personal memoirs of Hiroshima that I know―which are those that have been translated from the Japanese―all but (1)one have this in common, that they are gatherings of images rather than continuous narratives. And one can see why this might be the form those memories would take. These books are by men and women who were there, under that burst of apocalyptic light and heat, and who witnessed the utter strangeness of the event and its aftermath. They looked on a scene more radically unfamiliar and more desolate than any battlefield: the dead more hideous, the surface of the earth more utterly devastated. Nothing was recognizable, neither persons nor places: children did not recognize their parents, people returning to their neighborhoods couldn't find where their own houses had stood, or even their streets. As for the order in time that continuity in a story implies, where was it? What could be expected or predicted in this annihilated place? How could there be a tomorrow? ...

The word 'conversation' comes from the Old French word 'conversed ('con' means 'together'), which means 'to keep company with', and this implicit meaning is important - conversation is keeping company through words. It is at the heart of social interaction. It is always done with others, even if those others are imaginary people inside your own head. Another word we use to describe conversation is 'dialogue', which comes from the Greek word 'dialogos', a word made up of two parts: 'dia', which means 'between two', and 'logos', which means 'word'. Dialogue then means the speaking that passes backwards and forwards between two or more people. Conversation is vital to our development and fulfilment as human beings. Relationships are formed and developed through talk, in groups of two or more. Conversations are not necessarily about anything very important. (1)Sometimes the act of talking and communic...

1 June 2009: Air France flight 447 is cruising from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it hits a tropical storm in the mid-Atlantic. Minutes later, the Airbus A330 flies into the ocean, killing all 228 people on board. On a sunny July morning four years later, a flight approaching San Francisco airport smashes into the sea wall just ahead of the runway, causing the entire tail section to break off and sending the fractured fuselage cartwheeling across the airstrip. Three people died and dozens were injured. These different incidents appear unrelated, yet they share a tragic similarity: the pilot of each plane believed his flight control systems would automatically prevent the aircraft from stalling or flying too slowly to stay airborne. They were wrong. It turns out that this type of mix-up is a major contributor to a number of air crashes. And the situation is ( A ). With more things becoming automated, pilots can get confused when something goes seriously wrong, losing track of where...

I Would You Kill the Fat Man? is the title of a recent book about a set of moral problems that philosophers like to ponder, and psychologists to put to their experimental subjects. In the standard form, you are on a bridge overlooking a railway track. You see a trolley speeding along the track and, ahead of it, five people tied to the rails. Can these five be saved? There is a very fat man leaning over the railing watching the trolley. If you were to push him off the bridge, he would tumble down and smash onto the track below. He is so obese that his bulk would bring the trolley to a shuddering halt. Sadly, the process would kill the fat man. But it would save the other five. (You cannot stop the trolley by jumping yourself; only the fat man is heavy enough.) Would you kill the fat man? Most people are shocked by the idea of pushing the man to his death. But alter the scenario a bit, and reactions change. People are more likely to pull a lever that would switch the trolley onto ano...

Many of today's respected thinkers argue that our efforts to fight climate change and other environmental perils will all fail unless "we do something" about population growth. One recently declared that, "in the last 200 years, population growth has been exponential. The world population doubles every forty years," ( A ) For a start, there is no exponential growth. In fact, population growth is slowing. For more than three decades now, the average number of babies being born to women in most of the world has been in decline. Globally, women today have half as many babies as their mothers did, mostly out of choice. They are doing it largely for their own good and the good of their families, not because it helps the planet. Here are the numbers. Forty years ago, the average woman had between five and six kids. Now she has 2.6. This is getting close to the replacement level, which, allowing for girls who don't make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. Half ...

What began as a minor trash, problem in space has recently developed into something very serious. Many experts now regard the problem of space junk as a real threat to the future use of space. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of space debris―including broken satellites, discarded rocket parts, and tools lost by astronauts―now crowd the space surrounding Earth. A report released recently by the Space Security Index, an international research consortium, identified space debris as a primary issue. Such objects, it declared, could do serious damage to working spacecraft if they were to hit them, and might even pose a risk to people and property on the ground if they fall back to Earth and are large enough to survive reentering the atmosphere. Similar recognition of the trash threat in space emerged in the national space policy of the United States revealed by President Obama in June 2010. Such growing awareness of the space-debris problem builds on harsh warnings issued in past years...

Humanity. Homo sapiens. Mortals. More than 150 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species , society continues to turn to biology to separate man from beast because humans like to believe they are special. But just how special are we really? When scientists first began to examine human DNA in fine detail, many thought it would finally close the question of what makes us human: our uniqueness would be written in the four-letter code that constitutes our DNA. At the time, no one knew how many genes humans had, with some scientists estimating the number to be upward of 150,000 genes, reasoning that such a complex species would need more genes than simpler organisms. As the data was published, it quickly became clear that ( A ) truth. Humans have only around 20,000 genes that code for proteins; one tiny species of roundworm, C. elegans , has 18,500. Furthermore, our genes aren't significantly different from those of our closest animal relatives. Today, it is a pop-s...