東北大学
英文和訳問題集

Many university faculty will not see themselves as 'teachers' (at least, not in the school sense), but rather more broadly as 'educators' offering education in a more holistic and comprehensive way. [This pushes responsibility to the student to decide on the extent to which they will embrace that learning opportunity.]

Add the above health consequences up, and a proven link becomes easier to accept: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span. The old maxim "I'll sleep when I'm dead" is therefore unfortunate. [Adopt this mind-set, and you will be dead sooner and the quality of that (shorter) life will be worse.]

The truth is that we know very little about what preliterate societies knew or believed. But they left behind ample evidence of their attention to the movements of the Sun and the phases of the Moon. [And we can be sure that whatever questions they asked of the heavens were very different from those that motivate space exploration today.]

In 1980, people with a four-year college degree earned, on average, 64 percent more than people without a degree. Now that figure is nearly 100 percent more. Among Americans with a BA degree or more, about 5.8 percent live below the poverty line; among those with just a high school degree, the figure is 22 percent. [Education has never been more essential to economic survival.]

For students from low-income backgrounds, the obstacles of unanticipated financial needs or navigating unfamiliar systems aren't simple. They are often the beginning of a painful journey of the degradation of their dignity. [Facing financial problems not of their own making, these students feel anxious about failing to live up to the high expectations of the many people who have helped them get to where they are.]

As I will explain, algorithms excel by their ability to be unstructured, to thrive amid complexity and randomness and to respond effectively to changes in circumstance. [By contrast, ironically, it is we humans who tend to seek conformity and straightforward patterns in our thinking, hiding away from the complex realities which machines simply approach as another part of the overall data set.]

Writing, early people would learn, could contain much more information than human memory could and contain it more accurately. [It could carry thoughts much farther than mere sounds could ― farther in distance and in time.] Profound thoughts born in a single mind could spread and endure.

Just as print is essential to the creation of nations, ... print helps transform these regional, class, or family foods into a national cuisine ― that is, a creation that helps define a nation in the eyes of its own members or of the world. [First and foremost are cookbooks, which both bring together separate foods into coherent wholes, and also refine what might once have been a whole series of different versions into a single accepted dish.]

A formula where all the relations are fixed is like a mechanism, and every mechanism allows instant translations. [Just as a car could not run if there were no machine inside it translating gasoline into movement on wheels, so no thought or action that takes place in milliseconds could work so fast if there were no mechanism behind it.] Our fast thoughts must be mechanisms in order to be fast.

A lack of certainty is therefore part of the deal with empirical truth. ... If we want to know about the world then there is potentially no end of discoveries ― for ourselves or the entire human race ― that might force us to alter our opinions. [What we hold to be true is constantly open to being tested, which makes the truths that pass the test more reliable.]

An individual device or thing connected to the Internet increases the power of that particular device ― and often adds substantial value for the person using it. However, the ability to connect devices into a vast network ― essentially the Internet of Things ― rapidly increases the possibilities and capabilities. [For instance, a light switch that is Internet enabled not only allows a homeowner to program on and off times with a smartphone and manually control it from the same phone, but it also can be connected to software that analyzes electrical consumption across all lights in the house and, by offering recommendations, save money.]

So how do we make decisions? Well, largely through a process based on intuition. Think about the times when you had a sense about something, even though you couldn't quite explain it. [Can a junior staff member handle a tough project? You can't imagine it working out without some disaster. Better give the job to someone else.] Why is a customer late with a payment? You have a hunch that the customer may be having a cash flow problem.

Once we recognize a pattern, we gain a sense of a situation: We know what cues are going to be important and need to be monitored. We know what types of goals we should be able to accomplish. We have a sense of what to expect next. ... [The more patterns and action scripts we have available, the more expertise we have, and the easier it is to make decisions.] The patterns tell us what to do and the action scripts tell us how.

As Dr. Gray points out in his book Free to Learn, children start school at ever-younger ages. ... The school day has grown longer, and now there are renewed calls to extend the school year. Along the way, opportunities for free play within the school day have largely been eliminated. [Not only has the school day grown longer and less playful, but school has intruded ever more into home and family life. Assigned homework has increased, eating into time that would otherwise be available for play.]

Free play is the means by which children learn to make friends, overcome their fears, solve their own problems, and generally take control of their own lives. It is also the primary means by which children practice and acquire the physical and intellectual skills that are essential for success in the culture in which they are growing. [Nothing that we do, no amount of toys we buy or 'quality time' or special training we give our children, can compensate for the freedom we take away.]

The story illustrates the invisibility of the family work of aunts and uncles because specific terms to describe what they do are not in common usage. [We have no common terms by which to describe our expectations of aunts and uncles or their typical activities and to differentiate them from the expectations and activities of other family members such as parents or grandparents.]

The Aunties and Uncles Cooperative Family Project Ltd. is a program developed to service disadvantaged children in Sydney, Australia. The program matches adult volunteers with children typically from single-parent families headed by women. The adult volunteers agree to spend one weekend per month with their assigned child and are expected to help build the child's self-esteem and confidence. [The program staff refers to volunteers as aunties and uncles and the children who are served by the program as nieces and nephews. At least some of the volunteers come to think of the families they are assigned to as extensions of their own families.]

[Regardless of what happened at the beginning of time, we know there was a period 13.8 billion years ago when the part of the Universe that we can see today, containing over 350 billion large galaxies and with a diameter of over 90 billion light years, was compressed into a region of space smaller than a single atom.] No life could have existed in such extreme physical conditions, ...

Satellite navigation systems can do all those things, and more, but they're not designed to deepen our involvement with our surroundings. They're designed to relieve us of the need for such involvement. [By taking control of the mechanics of navigation and reducing our own role to following routine commands ― turn left in five hundred yards, take the next exit, stay right, destination ahead ― the systems, whether running in a car, on a smartphone, or a GPS receiver, end up isolating us from the environment.]

Traditional maps give us context. They provide us with an overview of an area and require us to figure out our current location and then plan or visualize the best route to our next stop. Yes, they require some work ― good tools always do ― but the mental effort aids our mind in creating its own cognitive map of an area. [Map reading, research has shown, strengthens our sense of place and sharpens our navigational skills ― in ways that can make it easier for us to get around even when we don't have a map at hand.]

Anime's international success is partly attributable to the fact that it is easily adaptable through dubbing, cutting and editing. [The ease with which animated characters can be dubbed and the way in which dubbing can change cultural differences and contexts does account for some of the speed with which anime has spread.] Increasingly, however, non-Japanese fans of anime are beginning to object to this kind of dubbing.

I arrived in Australia from Russia in 2004 to study for a PhD in linguistics. I made this decision after spending a year as a visiting student at the Australian National University in 2002. [The experience and knowledge I gained in 2002 built up my belief that studying in Australia could be an ideal step, because it would allow me to research the Russian language and culture which are native and dear to me via English, which had been the language of my professional interest in previous years.]

Learning to tone down my manner of expression was more difficult. In Russian it is good to show one's emotional involvement in everything one does. [The strong expressions I used sometimes met with silence or disapproving looks which would make me understand that I had said too much.]

The tendency to seek and invent narrative is a deeply rooted part of human nature. We see stories everywhere we look. [In a classic psychology experiment, people asked to describe a short animation of geometric shapes moving about a screen used language that attributed intention to the shapes, as if the objects were conscious actors: "The red triangle chased the blue circle off the screen."]

For one thing, I attempted to have all broken items repaired. I remember insisting that my husband take me to a repair shop to have a strap reattached to a sandal that I'd bought a month before. The sandals were cheap; I couldn't have paid more than twenty dollars for them. [To my disappointment, I discovered that fixing the shoe would have cost me more than half that price. I gradually learned the same was true of electronics and many other items of daily use.]

Episodic memory may combine with some aspects of semantic memory to make up what is known as autobiographical memory. As the passage from Margaret Forster illustrates, it is often difficult to distinguish which parts of autobiographical memory are based on remembered episodes, and which on knowledge. [In the study referred to above, the adults were not only asked to recall memories, but were also asked to describe things that they knew had happened to them, but could not actually remember.]

Autonoetic awareness, then, is recursive, in that one can insert previous personal experience into present awareness. Deeper levels of insertion are also possible, as when I remember yesterday that I had remembered an event that occurred at some earlier time. [Having coffee at a conference recently, I was reminded of an earlier conference where I accidentally spilled coffee on a distinguished philosopher.] This is memory of a memory of an event.

It is believed that when the newly formed planet Earth cooled sufficiently, rain began to fall continuously. This rainfall filled the first oceans with fresh water. [It was the constant evaporation of water from the ocean that then condensed to cause rainfall on the land, which in turn, caused the ocean to become salty over several billion years.]

Humans have been changing the planet ever since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens began altering the land ― and the plants and animals growing on it ― rather than simply living as hunters and gatherers. Agriculture enabled humans to increase and literally changed the face of the planet; today 38% of the earth's ice-free land has been cleared and cultivated for farming. [But it wasn't until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution around 1800 that human growth and its impact on the environment began to explode, and that's the moment when many scientists believe the age of man truly began.]

In other words, conservationists may be winning the battle for protected areas and losing the war for wildlife. The reality is that in the Anthropocene, [there may simply be no room for nature, at least not nature as we've known and celebrated it ― something separate from human beings ― something pristine.]

While stories of grit have long been associated with self-help manuals and life coaches ..., these new scientific studies rely on new techniques for reliably measuring grit in individuals. As a result, they're able to compare the relative importance of grit, intelligence, and innate talent when it comes to determining lifetime achievement. [Although this field of study is only a few years old, it's already made important progress toward identifying the mental traits that allow some people to accomplish their goals, while others struggle and quit.]

The new focus on grit is part of a larger scientific attempt to study the personality traits that best predict achievement in the real world. [While researchers have long focused on measurements of intelligence, such as the IQ test, as the crucial marker of future success, these scientists point out that most of the variation in individual achievement has nothing to do with being smart.]