【問題５ 長文総合】
以下の英文を読み、( A )から( D )の問いに答えよ。なお、文章中のstratocumulusという単語は「層積雲」を意味する。
Gavin Pretor-Pinney decided to take a break. It was the summer of 2003, and for the last 10 years, in addition to his graphic-design business in London, he and a friend had been running a magazine called The Idler. This title suggests "literature for the lazy.” It argues against busyness and careerism and for the value of aimlessness, of letting the imagination quietly run free. Pretor-Pinney anticipated all the jokes: that ( A )he'd burned out running a magazine devoted to doing nothing, and so on. But it was true. Getting the magazine out was tiring, and after a decade, it seemed appropriate to stop for a while and live without a plan — to be an idler himself in a positive sense and make space for fresh ideas.
So he exchanged his apartment in London for one in Rome, where everything would be new and anything could happen. Pretor-Pinney is 47, tall and warm, with a grey beard and pale blue eyes. His face is often bright, as if he's being told a story and can feel some terrific surprise coming. He stayed in Rome for seven months and loved it, especially all the religious art. One thing he noticed: the paintings he encountered were crowded with clouds.
They were everywhere, he told me recently, “these soft clouds, like the sofas of the saints.” But outside, when Pretor-Pinney looked up, the real Roman sky was usually cloudless. He wasn't accustomed to such endless, blue emptiness. He was an Englishman; he was accustomed to clouds. He remembered, as a child, being charmed by them and deciding that people must climb long ladders to harvest cotton from them. Now, in Rome, he couldn't stop thinking about clouds. “I found myself ア(27) them,” he told me.
Clouds. They were a strange obsession, perhaps even a silly one, but he didn't resist it. He went with it, as he often does, despite not having a specific goal or even a general direction in mind; he likes to see where things go. When Pretor-Pinney returned to London, he talked about clouds constantly. He walked around ア(28) them, learned their scientific names, like “stratocumulus,” and the weather conditions that shape them and argued with friends who complained they were gloomy or dull. He was realizing, as he later put it, that “clouds are not something to complain about. They are, in fact, the most dynamic and poetic aspect of nature.”
Slowing down to appreciate clouds enriched his life and sharpened his ability to appreciate other pockets of beauty ア(29) in plain sight. At the same time, Pretor-Pinney couldn't help noting, ( B )we were entering an era in which we were losing a sense of wonder. New, supposedly amazing things bounced around the internet so quickly that, as he put it, we can now all walk around with an attitude like, “Well, I've just seen a panda doing something unusual online — what's going to amaze me now?” His passion for clouds was teaching him that “it's much better for our souls to realize we can be amazed and delighted by what's around us."
At the end of 2004, a friend invited Pretor-Pinney to give a talk about clouds at a small literary festival in South West England. The previous year, there were more speakers than people in the audience, so Pretor-Pinney wanted an interesting title for his talk, to draw a crowd. “Wouldn't it be funny,” he thought, “to have a society that defends clouds against the bad reputation they get — that stands up for clouds?” So he called it "The First Annual Lecture of the Cloud Appreciation Society.” And it worked. Standing room only! Afterward, people came up to him and asked for more information about the Cloud Appreciation Society. They wanted to join the society. “And I had to tell them, well, I haven't really got a society,” Pretor-Pinney said. So he set about ア(30) one.
He created a simple website with a gallery for posting photographs of clouds, a membership form and a bold manifesto. (“We believe that clouds are unjustly insulted and that life would be infinitely poorer without them,” it began.) He also decided to charge a membership fee and issue a certificate in the mail. He did these things because he recognized that joining an online Cloud Appreciation Society that existed in name only might appear ridiculous, and he wanted to make sure that it did not seem ( イ ).
Within a couple of months, the society had 2,000 ア(31) members. Pretor-Pinney was surprised and delighted. Then, Yahoo placed the Cloud Appreciation Society first on its 2005 list of Britain's “Wild and Wonderful Websites.” People kept clicking on that link, which wasn't necessarily surprising, but thousands of them also clicked through to Pretor-Pinney's own website, then paid for memberships. Other news sites noticed. They did their own articles about the Cloud Appreciation Society, and people followed the links in those articles too. Previously, Pretor-Pinney had proposed writing a book about clouds and had been rejected by 28 editors. Now he was an internet sensation with a large online following; he got a deal to write a book about clouds.
The writing process was ア(32). On top of not actually having written a book before, he demanded perfection of himself, so the work went slowly. But The Cloudspotter's Guide, published in 2006, is full of joy and wonder. Pretor Pinney surveys clouds in art history, poetry, and modern photography. In the middle of the book, there's a cloud quiz. Question No. 5 asks of a particular photograph, “( C )＿＿＿＿＿stratocumulus?” The answer Pretor-Pinney supplies is, “It is pleasing for whatever reason you find it to be.”
The book became a bestseller.
Jon Mooallem. The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort Of) Rattled the Scientific Community
. 2016.
(A) 下線部( A )に関して、“all the jokes”の例であることがわかるように、その内容を日本語で説明せよ。
(B) 下線部( B )の内容を本文に即して日本語で説明せよ。
(C) 下に与えられた語を正しい順番に並べ替え、下線部( C )を埋めるのに最も適切な表現を完成させよ。
about is it layer of pleasing so that's this what
(D) 以下の問いに解答し,その答えとなる記号をマークシートにマークせよ。
(Dーア) 空所 (27) ~ (32) には単語が一つずつ入る。それぞれに文脈上最も適切な語を次のうちから一つずつ選び、マークシートの (27) ~ (32) にその記号を マークせよ。ただし,同じ記号を複数回用いてはならない。
a) admiring
b) disturbing
c) exhausting
d) hating
e) hiding
f) ignoring
g) inventing
h) missing
i) paying
j) recovering
(D－イ) 空所(イ)に入れるのに最も適切な単語を次のうちから一つ選び,マークシートの (33) にその記号をマークせよ。
a) cloudy
b) expensive
c) lazy
d) pointless
e) serious
(D－ウ) 本文の内容と合致しないものはどれか。一つ選び, マークシートの (34)
にその記号をマークせよ。
a) It was not until he went to Rome that Pretor-Pinney found clouds attractive.
b) Pretor-Pinney learned a lot about clouds after he came back to London, which helped him write The Cloudspotter's Guide.
c) Pretor-Pinney's Cloud Appreciation Society drew people's attention quickly.
d) Pretor-Pinney's talk about clouds at a small literary festival turned out to be exceptionally successful.
e) Pretor-Pinney was busy both when co-editor of The Idler and when founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society.
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