1 次の英文の下線部を和訳せよ。
(1)The lives of most
men are determined by their environment. They accept the circumstances amid
which fate has thrown them not only with resignation but even with good will.
They are like streetcars running contentedly on their rails and they despise
the sprightly motor vehicle that dashed in and out of the traffic and speeds so
jauntily across the open country. I respect them; they are good citizens, good
husbands, and good fathers, and of course somebody has to pay the taxes; but I
do not find them exciting.(2) I am fascinated by
the men, few enough it is true, who take life in their own hands and seem to
mould it to their own liking. It may be that we have no such thing as free
will, but at all events we have the illusion of it. (3)At a cross-road it
does seem to us that we might go either to the right or the left and, the
choice once made, it is difficult to see that the whole course of the world’s history
obliged us to take the turning we did.
(京都府立大)
2 次の英文の下線部を和訳せよ。
Most scientific theories reject common
sense. They call on evidence beyond the reach of our senses and turn over the
observable world. They disturb assumed relationships and shift what has been
solid into metaphor. The earth now only seems fixed. Such major theories
tax, offend, and cheer those who first encounter them, although in fifty years
or so they will be taken for granted, part of the apparently common-sense set
of beliefs which instructs us that the earth revolves around the sun whatever
our eyes may suggest. When it is first advanced, theory is at its most fictive.
The awkwardness of fit between the natural world as it is currently
perceived and as it is presumably imagined holds the theory itself for a time
within a scope akin to that of fiction.
(横浜市立大)
3 次の英文(A), (B)を読み、それぞれの下線部の意味を日本語で表せ。
(A)
A prudent employer
would take the time to analyze the incentives workers might list as their
reasons for working ― and most importantly, the order in which
they list them. A recent study disclosed that money was number seven on such a
list. Topping it was satisfaction in performing the job. Obviously, that
good feeling one gets from having accomplished something is still the best
reward for hard labor. But workers also need to know they are doing their job
well, and the major deficiency within management today is the failure of
telling them so.
(B)
It is good when
someone speaks out about an issue that troubles a group, because then it can ― must ― be
faced. I know from experience that the habit of avoiding controversy can in
the end cause far more trouble than it avoids, because strong feelings,
unexpressed, don’t die but build up. They can accumulate other resentments that
might otherwise be unimportant. In the end, if we are not to be possessed by
hidden ill-feeling, we have to listen to one another.
(大阪大)
4 次の英文を読んで、下線部(1)(2)(3)(4)を日本語に直せ。
(1)It is wrong to believe that there
are, or ought to be, exact rules by which we can tell art from what is not art,
and that, on the basis of these rules, we can then grade any given work
according to its merits. Deciding what is art and grading a work of art are
separate problems; if we had an absolute method for distinguishing art from
non-art, this method would not necessarily enable us to measure quality. People
have long been in the habit of compounding the two problems into one; quite
often when they ask, “Why is it art?” they mean, “Why is it good art?”
Yet, (2)all systems for rating art so far proposed fall short of being
completely satisfactory; we tend to agree with their authors only if they
like the same things we do. If we do not share their taste, their system seems
terribly rigid to us. This brings us to another, more basic difficulty. (3)In
order to have any rating scale at all, we must be willing to assume that there
are fixed, timeless values in art, that the true worth of a given work is a
stable thing, independent of time and circumstance. Perhaps such values
exist; we cannot be sure that they do not. We do know, however, that opinions
about works of art keep changing, not only today, but throughout the known
course of history. Even the greatest classics have had their ups and downs, and
the history of taste ― which is part of the history of art ― is a
continuous process of discarding established values and rediscovering neglected
ones. (4)It would seem, therefore, that we cannot escape viewing works of
art in the context of time and circumstance, whether past or present. How
indeed could it be otherwise, so long as art is still being created all around
us, opening our eyes almost daily to new experiences and thus forcing us to
adjust our sights?
(大阪女子大)
5 次の英文の下線部を和訳せよ。
There are two kinds of genius. One is
the kind of person that you or we would be just as good as, if only we were a
lot more clever. There is no mystery about how their
minds work, and once what they have done is explained to us we think we could
have done it, if only we had been bright enough. But the other kind of
genius is really a kind of magician. Even after what they have done is
explained to us, we cannot understand how they did it.
(京都府立大)
6 次の下線部の意味を日本語で言い表しなさい。
(1)Democratic education is a difficult
ideal to achieve. Its basic principle is that of equality, yet children are not
equally gifted. (2)In the past some psychologists argued that only a
lack of parental enthusiasm for education and a lack of competent teachers
created seeming differences in the abilities of pupils. But (3)regardless
of the ultimate cause of unequal abilities ― whether
they are inherited or the result of outside influence ― it is
hard to deny that they exist.
(4)Inborn ability
can be fostered by good teachers, but it may also be revealed without the
benefit of formal education. Abraham Lincoln had only one year of
schooling. The only book his family owned was the Bible, and (5)he himself said about his early surroundings that
they provided “absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education.” He
taught himself grammar and mathematics and then, in his early twenties, began
to study lawbooks. He was 27 when he passed the bar
examinations and first began to practice law. This was the educational
foundation of the most admired American president.
inborn＝生まれつきの the bar
examination＝弁護士試験
(福島大)
7 次の英文の下線部の意味を日本語で表せ。
Four and a half billion years ago, the
earth was formed. Perhaps a half billion years after that, life arose on the
planet. For the next four billion years, life became steadily more complex,
more varied, and more ingenious, until, around a million years ago, it produced
mankind ― the most complex and ingenious species of them all. Only six or
seven thousand years ago ― a
period that is to the history of the earth as less than a minute is to a year ―
civilization emerged, enabling us to build up a human world, and to add to the
marvels of evolution marvels of our own: marvels of
art, of science, of social organization, of spiritual attainment.
(大阪大)
8 次の英文を和訳せよ。
Boys, unlike their sisters, have one, simple ambition where clothes
are concerned. They like to be indistinguishable from all other boys in the
school. To be distinguishable is not to be distinguished. It will make them an
object of comment and very possibly of scorn.
(奈良女子大)
9 次の英文の下線部を和訳せよ。
(1)Few
things are so clear in the mind of a three-year-old as
the knowledge of his or her own gender. Being aware that you are a girl or a
boy seems to be a fundamental step in learning who you are. Which
is why children of this age are comically sensitive to any hint of sexual
ambiguity. A little girl will refuse to go out if her hair is cut so
short that she looks “like a boy”. There are adult men who can still recall the
mortification of being ridiculed, at the age of four, for wearing a frilly
shirt or pink underpants, or some equally damning bit of “feminine” apparel.
(2)Nobody
who has visited a nursery could fail to notice the difference between the
behaviour of boys and girls and the determination with which they enforce that
difference. Tiny children certainly do choose activities which are a kind of
caricature of grown-up male and femaleness.
(大阪外語大)
10 次の英文の下線部を和訳せよ。
An individual person is unique and valuable. This value we place on
the individual finds expression in a cluster of ideas and attitudes. People
should be treated as ends in themselves and never merely as means. One person’s
loss is not necessarily justified by someone else’s gain. People have rights.
And, linked to these ideas (psychologically if not logically) is the pleasure
we take in human variety, and a preference for a society in which individuality
flourishes.
（大阪大後期）
11 次の英文の下線部を和訳せよ。
All
human communities have involved animals. (1)Those present in them always
include, for a start, some dogs, with which our association seems to be an
incredibly ancient one : we have lived together and helped each
other for a long time. But besides them an enormous variety of other creatures,
ranging from reindeer to foxes and from elephants to shags, has for ages also
been domesticated. Of course they were largely there for use ― for
drought and riding, for meat, milk, wool and hides, for feathers and eggs, as
catchers of small harmful animals or as aids to fishing and hunting.(2) In
principle, it might seem reasonable to expect that
these forms of exploitation would have produced no personal or emotional involvement
at all. From a position of ignorance, we might have expected that people
would view their animals simply as machines. (3)If we impose the sharp
distinction made by some philosophers between persons and things, and insist
that everything must be considered as simply one or the other, we might have
expected that they would be viewed quite clearly as things. But in fact, if
people had viewed them like this, the domestication could probably never have
worked. The animals, with the best will in the world, could not have reacted
like machines. They became tame or domesticated, not just through the fear of
violence, but because they were able to form individual bonds with those who
tamed them by coming to understand the social signals addressed to them. They
learned to obey human beings personally. They were able to do this, not only
because the people taming them were social beings, but because they themselves
were so as well.
（東大後期論文改題）
12 次の英文の下線部を和訳しなさい。
The word
‘Idealism’ is used by different philosophers in somewhat different senses. We
shall understand by it the doctrine that whatever exists, or at any rate
whatever can be know to exist, must be in some sense mental. (1)This
doctrine, which is very widely held among philosophers, has several forms, and
is advocated on several different grounds. (2)The doctrine is so widely
held, and so interesting in itself, that even the briefest survey of philosophy
must give some account of it.
Those
who are unaccustomed to philosophical speculation may be inclined to dismiss
such a doctrine as obviously absurd. (3)There is no doubt that common sense
regards tables and chairs and the sun and moon and material objects generally
as something radically different from minds and the contents of minds, and as
having an existence which might continue if minds ceased. We think of
matter as having existed long before there were any minds, and it is hard to
think of it as a mere product of mental activity. But whether true or false,
idealism is not to be dismissed as obviously absurd.
(Bertrand Russell : The Problems of Philosophy)