東京科学大学（旧東京工業大学）
英文和訳問題集

My biology teacher explained that we would see cells, the basic unit of life. And there they were: neat arrays of box-like cells, all stacked up in orderly columns. [How impressive it seemed that the growth and division of those tiny cells were enough to push the roots of an onion down through the soil], to provide the growing plant with water, nutrients and anchorage.

Cells come in an incredible variety of shapes and sizes. Most of them are too small to be seen with the naked eye. Some cells in our bodies are huge ― individual nerve cells can each be about a metre long. [Startling as all this diversity is, what is most interesting for me is what all cells have in common.] Scientists are always interested in identifying fundamental units, the best example being the atom as the basic unit of matter.

Most people tend to think of interruptions as originating from another person or from our devices. But we observed a strange phenomenon. One of the most surprising results in our research is that [people are nearly as likely to self-interrupt due to something internal in them as to be interrupted by something external to them.]

When you start getting external interruptions, it's like driving on a country road and then turning onto a busy highway. [In the same way that driving on a congested highway is different from that peaceful country road, when you face interruptions, the cognitive operations you use, and even your goals, change.]

To resume an interrupted task, people have to reconstruct their task schema, goals and thought processes. It takes time and effort to reconstruct our mental model of the task. Interruptions can linger in your mind, creating static interference. [It is no wonder, then, that at the end of a busy day, especially with external interruptions, you feel drained.]

Aloys John Maerz and Morris Rea Paul developed color charts and published A Dictionary of Color in 1930, containing 7,056 colors. One disadvantage of using the Dictionary, however, was that [some of the neighboring color samples on the charts looked so similar that it was difficult for examiners to specify which named color on the chart corresponded with the color of the product.]

In setting color standards for canned fruits and vegetables, the USDA used the color charts of Maerz and Paul. Like the Lovibond device and other colorimeters, [the standardization of color description based on numbers as well as alphabets provided investigators with common vocabularies, allowing them to communicate more efficiently.]

A data analyst for the Cambridge Police Department noticed a pattern of thefts at a local café. Sevieri believed that if they could teach a machine "the process of how an old-time analyst worked," [an algorithm could detect patterns of crimes that would otherwise take the police weeks or months to catch], if they could be detected at all.

The Cambridge police had previously identified two crime series between November 2006 and March 2007. When the algorithm analyzed past crimes, it determined these supposedly separate crime series were actually connected. The time lag could be explained by more people being home during the winter holidays; [the geographic shift was a response by the perpetrators to having been observed while carrying out a prior burglary.]

The communication model views messages as travelling between senders and receivers, like radio signals. ["At the heart of this is the idea that communication happens when the uncertainty of the receiver of the message is reduced."] This model captures some important ideas about how communication works.

A use of language that has nothing to do with communication is when we use language to think out loud. Sometimes I talk to my cat, but she can't understand human speech. ["I'm so used to using language to communicate that I still use it in circumstances where communication is impossible."]

Mathematicians are pattern searchers. Mathematics is the science of spotting and explaining patterns. [It's this ability to spot a pattern that gives humans an edge in negotiating the natural world], because it allows us to plan into the future.

The Ancient Babylonians discovered clever tricks to help with calculations. Although the Babylonians were tapping into an algebraic way of thinking, they were far from having the language to articulate what they were doing. They did not write down why this method always gave the right answer. It worked and that was good enough. [The curiosity to come up with a way to explain why it always worked would come later.]

To argue that a technology somehow changed society would entail a technology that radically changed the direction of society. But this simply never happens. Most technology companies do not introduce new technology but new ways to use ideas that already exist. They spend time and money on market research ― determining where society already wants to go. [Only once this direction is determined do they tailor a new product to meet that need.]

Later in history, Europe's leap forward was facilitated by moveable type, a Chinese invention. The Europeans could make that invention work for them because, unlike the Asians and Arabs, they had an alphabet that was well suited for moveable type. [This also meant that Europeans got to write history the way they wanted it to be read.]

Over the centuries, the credentials needed to carry out scientific research have been in flux. Only recently has science become an occupation. [In earlier days, science was something for those with the luxury to dedicate their leisure time or spiritual time to follow their curiosity.] In the 1600s, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a cloth merchant, discovered microorganisms.

Today, with the internet and smartphones, millions of people share their observations and help process data. Across the world, citizen scientists have discovered endangered monk seals recolonizing the Mediterranean Sea. Looking across history, [what's revealed is that in many areas of study the only way to keep advancing the frontiers is for scientists to collaborate, not just with each other, but with everyone.]

According to the "cooking hypothesis," the advent of cooked food altered human evolution. By providing a more energy-dense and easy-to-digest diet, it allowed our brains to grow bigger and our guts to shrink. Raw food takes much more time and energy to chew and digest. [Once cooking allowed us to expand our cognitive capacity at the expense of our digestive capacity, there was no going back:] Our big brains and tiny guts now depended on a diet of cooked food.

Industrial cooking has taken a substantial toll on our health. Corporations cook very differently from how people do. They tend to use much more sugar, fat, and salt. So [it will come as no surprise that the decline in home cooking closely tracks the rise in obesity and all the chronic diseases linked to diet.]

Telling time is a bidirectional problem. [A stopwatch triggered at the start of a marathon provides a continuous measure of how long the marathoners have been running,] but it tells us nothing about how much time they spent at the starting lineup waiting for the race to begin.

As they unfold, interesting activities seem to fly by because we are not thinking about time. So your first tour of the 2,500-year-old Parthenon may fly by, but that five-hour wait in the airport will drag along. [Retrospectively, the duration of those activities is estimated in part based on the number of events stored in memory.]

Chelsea Himsworth's research on Vancouver's rats has made her reconsider the age-old labeling of rats as invaders that need to be completely fought back. They may instead be just as much a part of our city as sidewalks and lampposts. [We would all be better off if, under most circumstances, we simply left them alone.]

A significant finding from the project is that not every rat in V6A carried the same disease. Rat families are generally confined to a single city block, and while one block might be wholly infected with a given bacteria, adjacent blocks were often completely disease-free. ["Disease risk doesn't really relate to the number of rats you're exposed to as much as it does to which family you interact with,"] says Robbin Lindsay.

In broad strokes, [Krasnow and Mehr's new theory fleshes out the field's general consensus about how lullabies may have originated.] Shannon de l'Etoile cites a theory that infant-directed songs evolved out of the need for "hands-free parenting."

Humans use various means to calm infants: Rocking and carrying, for example, can lull an infant to sleep. "Songs are not a unique solution for soothing infants," Trehub says. [Trehub doubts that the need to soothe infants pushed vocalizations to evolve into lullabies.]

In Philip K. Dick's novel and the movie Blade Runner, bounty hunters try to find and destroy renegade replicants ― engineered beings with android brains. In fiction, the one solitary gap that remains between humans and androids is emotional: empathy. The story is powerful because [it breaks down even this one final distinction, leaving us to question the extent of our human rights and liberties.]

One experience that has always remained with me involves my undergraduate research robot, Vagabond, exploring the central quadrangle at Stanford University. Our goal was to create a navigation program that would enable Vagabond to travel anywhere in the quad, and [we had gone so far as to measure and map, by hand, the complete layout of the area] ― the position of every hallway, curb, and pillar down to the nearest centimeter.

By random mutations, some individuals must have developed a nervous system in which the discovery of novelty stimulates the pleasure centers in the brain. [It is possible that children who were more curious ran more risks and so were more likely to die early than their more passive companions.] But it is also probable that human groups that learned to appreciate the curious children among them were more successful.

In most individuals entropy seems to be stronger, and they enjoy comfort more than the challenge of discovery. A few are more responsive to the rewards of discovery. But we all respond to both of these rewards; the tendencies toward conserving energy as well as using it constructively are simultaneously part of our inheritance. [Which one wins depends not only on our genetic makeup but also probably on our early experiences.]

A far more important factor that spurred the origin of farming was population stress. Feeding additional mouths would have put foragers under pressure to supplement their gathering efforts by cultivating edible plants. Once begun, such cultivation set up a vicious circle because the incentive to cultivate is amplified when larger families need to be fed. [It is not hard to imagine farming developing over many decades or centuries in much the same way that a hobby can turn into a profession.]

Pioneer farmers domesticated certain plant species by selecting plants that were larger and more nutritious as well as easier to grow, harvest, and process. [Within generations, such selection transformed the plants, making them dependent on humans to reproduce.] For example, the wild progenitor of corn has just a few, loosely held seed kernels.

Spelling also lacks the automaticity we associate with handwriting or typing. [Whether we are spelling the words correctly or not, our hand/fingers can often perform the task without the brain paying any special attention.] The clearest case is when we write our signature. We do it in a single action, and do not think out the name 'letter by letter'.

By the end of the 19th century, teachers were becoming dissatisfied with this approach. They were trying to teach rules that clearly did not work. [Words were being spelled in isolation, regardless of their meaning and context.] The spelling lists were teaching children words they did not want to use in their writing.

Dolphins are something truly different. They "see" with sonar with such phenomenal precision that they can tell from a hundred feet away whether an object is made of metal, plastic, or wood. They're a kind of alien intelligence sharing our planet ― [watching them may be the closest we'll come to encountering creatures from outer space.]

Dolphins are extraordinarily garrulous. Not only do they whistle and click, but they also emit loud broadband packets of sound called burst pulses to discipline their young and chase away sharks. [Scientists listening to all these sounds have long wondered what, if anything, they might mean.]

When dolphins are in trouble, they display a degree of connectedness rarely seen in other animal groups. If one becomes sick and heads toward shallow water, the entire group will sometimes follow, which can lead to mass strandings. Marino says, "and [the only way to break that concentration may be to give them something equally strong to pull them away.]"

Richard Connor has identified three levels of alliances within dolphins' large, open social network. Males form pairs and trios, and are also members of larger teams. Two dolphins can be friends one day and foes the next. Alliances seem to be situational and extremely complicated. [The need to keep track of all those relationships may help explain why dolphins possess such large brains.]

[It has become the norm to cut library services whenever a community or state runs low on funds.] The fact that it's been there for so long, taken for granted, and is free ― that leads some people to see it as worthless, a faceless victim.

Troy, Michigan, sought support for its library through a tax increase of 0.7 percent, but voters turned it down twice. Finally a last-gasp third vote was planned for August 2. Library supporters sought help from the Leo Burnett advertising agency. [The agency reasoned that if the same 19 percent of voters turned out for the next election, the results would be the same.]

The cities weren't much safer than the wilderness at nightfall. If you found yourself on the streets at night, it would be logical to assume that everyone you met wanted to rob or kill you. After nightfall, "[clashes of all sorts became likely when tempers were shortest, fears greatest, and eyesight weakest,]" says Roger Ekirch.

We are being flooded every day with computational findings, conclusions, and statistics. In op-eds, policy debates, and public discussions, numbers are presented with the finality of a door slammed shut. In fact we need to know how these findings were reached. [Even figuring out where a number came from is a challenge, let alone trying to understand how it was determined.]

Computers can store vast amounts of data accurately, organize and filter it, carry out blindingly fast computations, and beautifully display the results. The goal of better decision making is behind the current excitement surrounding big data. [The field of statistics has been addressing the reliability of results derived from data for a long time, with many successful contributions.]

Over a period since the Second World War, a faith in the durability of social relationships and trust in institutions has weakened. The culture of globalization is that of acute "short-termism." [It is not just that social life is speeding up with technological advances, nor that people are in a great hurry to live life to the fullest.] It is rather that contemporary women and men now calculate that things ― including human relationships ― do not last for long.

Flexible capitalism is "flexible" only in as far as its workers and consumers accept the dictates of a post-hierarchical world, accept that they must strive to be ever-more flexible, and accept the abandonment of traditional models of work and standard definitions of success. [This is a redefinition of success away from past achievements and towards future flexibility and readiness to embrace change.]

In his new book, Why Only Humans Weep, Vingerhoets argues that none of these explanations is sufficient. It seems that only humans produce emotional tears, and only in humans do crying behaviours persist into adulthood. [The challenge is to explain why, given that tears also run the risk of signalling our presence to predators, animals that threaten us.]

Quite often ― as when people cry when driving alone ― our tears catch us unawares, prompting us to become upset where perhaps no upset is called for. [In such cases, it seems, tears are mother to the emotion rather than the other way round.]

Over the course of this field expedition, Buckley will collect dozens of cores, slide each one into a clear plastic tube, and ship them to his lab at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. [Once he's back at the lab, he will sandpaper each core until it's shiny smooth, which enables him to take microscopic measurements of its rings.] Then, by analyzing the rings from many trees, he will identify common patterns.

Few historians have considered climate change's effects on Angkor. The standard explanation for Angkor's demise is that its ruling elite simply abandoned the city when economic activity shifted southward. [Lieberman stands alone among prominent historians in that he has suggested for years that climate change hastened Angkor's collapse.]

Every language is learnt by the young from the old, so that every living language is the embodiment of a tradition. That tradition is in principle immortal. Languages change, as they pass from the lips of one generation to the next, but [there is nothing about this process of transmission which makes for decay or extinction.] Like life itself, each new generation can receive the gift of its language afresh.

Use of a given language is an undeniable functioning reality everywhere; [above all, it is characteristic of every human group known, and persistent over generations.] It provides a universal key for dividing human history into meaningful groups.

Every person you've ever known has biological parents, as does every bird, salamander, or shark you have ever seen. [Technology may change this, thanks to cloning or some yet-to-be invented method, but so far the law holds.] To put it in a more precise form: every living thing sprang from some parental genetic information.

But where do our lineages stop? Did the bozos stop at the humorless couple? Does my lineage stop at my great-great-grandparents? Does it stop at the first humans? Or does it continue to 3.8-billion-year-old pond scum, and beyond? [Everybody agrees that their own lineage goes back to some point in time, but just how far back is the issue.]

Humans have a dedicated neural architecture for detecting facial features, including the presence of eyes. This "gaze detection" served as an important evolutionary tool in ancestral environments. What's interesting is that this system largely involves brain areas that are not under voluntary control. [Experiments have shown that people are unable to inhibit responses to gaze even when instructed to.]