大阪大学
英文和訳問題集

Often, the social and mental health benefits facilitated through participation in sport exceed those achieved through participation in other leisure-time or recreational activities. Notably, these benefits are observed across different sports and sub-populations (including youth, adults, older adults, males, and females). [However, the evidence regarding sports participation at the elite level is limited, with available research indicating that elite athletes may be more susceptible to mental health problems, potentially due to the intense mental and physical demands placed on elite athletes.]

Paradoxically enough, to understand how verbal messages do their sociocultural work in communication, we need to think about the nonverbal practice of pantomime. This silent performance art form consists entirely of movements of the body and its various parts in an otherwise seemingly empty space. [From the flow or sequence of such movements, the mime's spectators come to see that the sequence of body and facial movement is tracing some culturally coherent event or recognizable experience in a specific frame of objects, populated physical spaces, and social situations that are "virtually" present.]

[Rain forests may be known as the planet's lungs, but it's when standing before the seas, with their crashing waves and ceaselessly cycling tides, that we feel the earth breathe. The ocean, say scientists, is the source of all life on earth. It is also, say philosophers, the embodiment of life's greatest terror: the unknown and uncontrollable.]

[Ask almost any painter or sculptor, famous or not, why they do what they do and they'll give you the same answer: it's a compulsion. Ask them what advice they might have for an aspiring artist and they'll probably caution you not to attempt a career as one unless you feel you have absolutely no other option.] The seasoned artist knows, usually through bitter experience, that making art can be a miserable, endless cycle of frustration and disappointment. The French artist Paul Cézanne, perhaps the greatest painter of the modern era, died in 1906 thinking he had failed.

An average person on planet Earth today acquires most of their energy from the plant kingdom: more than 80 per cent of humanity's calorie intake consists of various kinds of grains and produce. [The remaining calories come from the animal kingdom ― roughly a tenth from meat, including animal fat and organs, and the rest from eggs and milk, and seafood. The meat we eat also comes from nature ― although this is no longer strictly true now that much of the world's meat production looks more like industry than nature.]

Ideas about creativity are as old as humanity even if the word 'creativity', in English at least, has been documented only since the 19th century. This is because the act of creating something is a defining characteristic of human beings. [Historically, our appreciation for creative individuals has changed and, at different moments in time, certain individuals, professions, or activities have been more easily recognized as creative than others. But the general fascination for what makes creative people 'stand out' and what fuels their capacity to innovate remains constant through the ages.]

[Many owners identify what they think is a dog's "guilty look", but science has shown that this is actually a reaction to the owner's body language at that moment. Guilt is a relatively complex emotion. The dog is simply worried that it's about to be punished, without knowing what it's done wrong.]

[The notion that religion is a force produced by cultural evolution, and that it primarily exists to produce functional benefits to individuals and groups can explain why religions are in decline in some parts of the world. As human societies created nations, and devised mechanisms for self-governance, the gods who were so effective at enforcing group norms and ethical behavior through punishment were no longer as necessary.]

One of the oddest aspects of American culture is our general dismissal of commensality. [Most human cultures have considered food preparation and consumption, especially consuming food together, as essential to family, tribal, religious, and other social bonds. Some people would go even further and say that as social creatures, eating together makes us more socially adept and indeed happier human beings.] However, in our highly individualistic society the value of eating and drinking together is probably honored more in the breach than in the observance.

In language, the relationship between the form of a signal and its meaning is largely arbitrary. For example, [the sound of "blue" will likely have no relationship to the properties of light we experience as blue nor to the visual written form "blue," will sound different across languages, and have no sound at all in signed languages. No equivalent of "blue" will even exist in many languages that might make fewer or more or different color distinctions.] With respect to language, the meaning of a signal cannot be predicted from the physical properties of the signal available to the senses. Rather, the relationship is set by convention.

[Perhaps the most defining feature of deep friendship is "doing for," as when my friend has my back in a combat situation, or brings me soup or medicine when I'm sick. Only strong bonds, built through embodied mutual activities, have the power to motivate real sacrifices. But it is unclear why online "friends" would bother to do the hard work of friendship.]

Attention restoration theory looks at the two main types of attention that humans employ: directed and undirected attention. [Directed attention requires us to focus on a specific task and block any distractions that may interfere with it. For instance, when we are working on a math problem, or engrossed in reading a literary passage or in assembling or repairing an intricate mechanical object, our brains are totally dedicated to the task at hand, requiring our direct undivided attention.] After we complete the task we often feel mentally fatigued or drained. Conversely, when we are outdoors, we may enjoy observing patterns or a sunset, clouds, flowers, leaves or a beautiful meadow, which call on our undirected attention.

In December 1877, Thomas Edison made history by recording 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' on his phonograph and playing it back. This was not just 'an epoch in the history of science', it was a revolution for the human voice. [Before then, hearing someone talk was exclusively a live experience: you had to be listening as the sounds emerged from the speaker's mouth. We can read the text of great speeches that predate the phonograph, like Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, but how exactly the president delivered the lines is lost forever.] The phonograph captured the way things are said, and this can be just as important as the words themselves.

In recent years, study after study examining exercise and weight loss among people and animals has concluded that, by itself, exercise is not an effective way to drop pounds. [In most of these experiments, the participants lost far less weight than would have been expected, mathematically, given how many additional calories they were burning with their workouts. Scientists involved in this research have suspected and sometimes shown that exercisers, whatever their species, tend to become hungrier and consume more calories after physical activity.]

Growing older is an activity we are familiar with from an early age. In our younger years upcoming birthdays are anticipated with a glee that somewhat diminishes as the years progress. [Our younger selves feel that time moves slowly, whereas, with advancing years, time seems to fly at an ever-quickening pace. And late in life, or when a person is faced with a terminal illness no matter what their age, the sense of a finite amount of time remaining becomes acute, and there may be a renewed focus on making the most of one's allotted time in life.]

Culture is the location of values, and the study of cultures shows how values vary from one society to another, or from one historical moment to the next. But [culture does not exist in the abstract. On the contrary, it is inscribed in the paintings, operas, fashions, and shopping lists which are the currency of both aesthetic and everyday exchange. Societies invest these artefacts with meanings, until in many cases the meanings are so "obvious" that they pass for nature.] Cultural criticism denaturalizes and defamiliarizes these meanings, isolating them for inspection and analysis.

[The advantage of the scientific approach over other ways of knowing about the world is that it provides an objective set of rules for gathering, evaluating, and reporting information, such that our ideas can be refuted or replicated by others. This does not mean that intuition and authority are not important, however.] Scientists often rely on intuition and assertions of authorities for ideas for research. Moreover, there is nothing wrong with accepting the assertions of authority as long as we don't accept them as scientific evidence.

Animals that are active at night usually have large eyes that let them make use of any available light. [With owls, the eyes are so big in comparison to the head that there is little room for eye muscles, meaning owls can't move their eyes. Instead, owls must move their entire head to follow the movement of prey. However, having fixed eyes gives owls better focus, with both eyes looking in the same direction.] And even though it seems that owls can twist their head completely around, most owls turn their head no more than 270 degrees in either direction.

Human beings are good at finding all the ways in which to be creative within prescribed limits ― painting inside a rectangular frame, writing in iambic pentameters or composing a sonnet. [Scientists sometimes like to study how that creativity occurs, what it achieves, and where else to look for inspiration. Many artists are nervous about scientific analysis. They fear its success, worried that art might lose its power, or they might be diminished, if the psychological roots of their work and its impact on us were exposed.]

From a broad range of early cultures, extending back to about a million years, natural objects began to be used as tools and implements to supplement or enhance the capacities of the hand. [For example, the hand is capable of clawing soil to dig out an edible root, but a digging stick or clam shell is also capable of being grasped to do the job more easily, in a sustainable manner, reducing damage to fingers and nails.]

[When top sprinters line up for a major final, psychological rather than physical differences could decide who takes gold. In contests won or lost by hundredths of a second, athletes need every advantage they can get. So being able to handle pressure and manage the accompanying emotions is critical.]

[When a chimpanzee gazes at a piece of fruit or a gorilla beats his chest to warn off an approaching male, it's hard not to see a bit of ourselves in those behaviors and even to imagine what the animals might be thinking. We are, after all, great apes like them, and their intelligence often feels like a diminished ― or at least a familiar ― version of our own.]

Of the total energy produced on Earth since the industrial revolution began, half has been consumed in the last twenty years. Disproportionately it was consumed by us in the rich world; we are an exceedingly privileged fraction. [Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American. We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet's other citizens.]

Humor is the broad term used to describe situations, characters, speech, writing or images that amuse us. [At the physical level, it is no more than an involuntary response to a stimulus ― laughter. Although we can imitate this in social contexts where we feel an obligation to be polite, genuine laughter comes upon us spontaneously; it is beyond our control.] It may be a motor response, but we seek out experiences that will result in laughter, and if we don't get the physical reaction, we don't feel that we have been amused.

One of the basic facts which characterizes the nature of human association is the existence of rank differences between individuals and groups in all human societies. [We cannot fully understand the social life of human beings unless we take into consideration how these rank differences influence their interactions and pattern their social relationships. Of course, the importance of rank differentiation varies greatly from one society to another and from time to time, but most societies have a well-structured and fairly evident rank order.]

[With their eyes fixed on the future and guided by new international standards, architects and city planners are not only seeking to construct environmentally friendly buildings, but also redeveloping entire urban spaces to make the most of limited natural resources, to reduce our impact on the environment and to improve the well-being of city-dwellers.] The dream of economically, socially and ― importantly ― environmentally sustainable cities is here.

[It is true that science requires analysis and that it has fractured into microdisciplines. But because of this, more than ever, it requires synthesis. Science is about connections. Nature no more obeys the territorial divisions of scientific academic disciplines than do continents appear from space to be colored to reflect the national divisions of their human inhabitants.]

[One way in which we evade responsibility for our actions is to hide behind the advice of others. Indeed, one of the main reasons we ask other people what they think is that we hope they agree with what we want to do, and so provide external validation for our choice. Lacking the courage of our own convictions, we seek strength in those of others.]

[Education as a right, rather than a privilege, was a feature of the last years of the nineteenth century. This was partly a consequence of economic change; only when the national economy could afford to educate all the young, and dispense with their labour, could compulsory education become a reality.]

[Every good scientist is a skeptic ― the very premise of scientific inquiry is to not believe something unless there is compelling evidence for it and against all reasonable alternatives. The problem is that scientists aren't always skeptics in equal measure.]

The fundamental reason why exceptional creativity and genius tend to elude institutional training is that they arise from many elements, such as motivation and personality, whereas schools, colleges, and universities focus chiefly on only one element: intelligence. [Whatever intelligence consists of ― and there is still no consensus after a century of intelligence testing ― it does not appear to be the same as creativity. Intellectual skills and artistic creativity surely do not mutually exclude each other, but neither do they necessarily accompany each other.]

Like Galileo, Newton stressed the importance of comparing theories and models with experiments and observations of the real world, and always carried out relevant experiments himself, whenever possible, to test his ideas. This is so deeply ingrained as part of the scientific method today that it may seem obvious, even to non-scientists, and [it is hard to appreciate the extent to which, even into the seventeenth century, many philosophers would speculate about the nature of the physical world in an abstract way, without ever getting their hands dirty in experiments. The classic example is the argument about whether two different weights dropped from the same height at the same time would hit the ground together.]

The ability to recognize individuals can convey significant benefits to social animals. [In humans, the capacity to recognize different faces is crucial for making individual behavior predictable for other members of a group ― for keeping track of who is aggressive, bold or wise ― and so for knowing everyone's place in a family or society.] Moreover, there is strong evidence that primate brains contain specialized modules for face processing and recognition.

In a democratic culture people are inclined to believe that it is presumptuous to claim to have better taste than your neighbor. [By doing so you are implicitly denying his right to be the thing that he is. You like Bach, she likes U2; you like Leonardo, he likes Mucha; she likes Jane Austen, you like Danielle Steel. Each of you exists in his own enclosed aesthetic world, and so long as neither harms the other, and each says good morning over the fence, there is nothing further to be said.]

Culture is not something in opposition to biology; rather, culture is the form that biology takes in different communities. [One culture may differ from another culture, but there are limits to the differences. Each must be an expression of the underlying biological commonality of the human species. There could not be a long-term conflict between nature and culture, for if there were, nature would always win; culture would always lose.]

What is cinema and what is a film? A mere hundred years old, the cinema has ― in its different manifestations ― become at once so obvious and so ubiquitous that one hardly appreciates just how strange a phenomenon it actually is. [Not only an extraordinary entertainment medium, a superb storytelling machine, it also gives a kind of presence and immediacy to the world unparalleled elsewhere, and undreamt of before the cinema was invented. Nothing else seems to give such intense feelings; nothing involves people so directly and tangibly in the world out there and in the lives of others.]

We live in a world densely populated by humans in close communication with one another over the surface of the earth. More and more, the world looks like a single society, a "global village." But in fact, human society consists of a great many groups, as different from one another as the city dwellers of New York, rice farmers of India, and aboriginal hunters of northern Canada. [People differ not only in their daily occupations and material wealth, but also in the ways in which they view the world around them. This multitude of perceptions is directly related to cultural diversity around the world, a diversity that is rapidly shrinking.]

From the point of view of popular culture, science often seems like little more than a hatchery for technology. [While most educated people will concede that the scientific method has delivered centuries of fresh embarrassment to religion on matters of fact, it is now an article of almost unquestioned certainty, both inside and outside scientific circles, that science has nothing to say about what constitutes a good life.]