【大問２Ａ 内容理解】
Read the following three passages and mark the most appropriate choice (a - d) for each item (１５~２４) on the separate answer sheet.
(A) Take a pen. A pen is a pen whatever the situation, wherever it is. The defining characteristics of a pen do not change whether it is in your pocket, in your hand, or on the table. Determining why a pen produces ink is easy; there is a stable cause and a stable effect, regardless of context.
Now take a person. People have defining characteristics — their personalities. However, while these personalities are relatively stable they do change depending on the situation. You will act differently when you're with your friends compared to when you're in a job interview. To understand and predict people we cannot ignore the situation, we need to know about the core personality characteristics and situational characteristics, and the interaction between them both. Taking account of situations makes the process of attributing cause to effect in social situations much more difficult, and this is what attribution theory is all about. It is how we decide whether a person's behaviour can be attributed to an internal, core personality or dispositional characteristic ("he's looking over here because he likes me!") or a situational characteristic ("oh, he's looking over here because his friend is behind me”).
Richard J. Crisp. Essential Social Psychology.
１５. What does the author say about human personality?
(a) Defining personality characteristics are highly changeable and very inconsistent.
(b) Even though our personalities vary in certain situations, parts of them are quite constant.
(c) Personality characteristics are the most reliable indicators of behaviour, whatever the situation.
(d) The relationship between personality and behaviour can be easily understood in the same way we know how a pen writes.
１６. Which of the following best summarises the author's point of view?
(a) Human behaviour is a product of both internal and external factors.
(b) In social situations, internal personality characteristics make people interact as they do.
(c) People's actions and thoughts are always determined by situational characteristics.
(d) Thought and behaviour are completely random and unpredictable.
【大問２Ｂ 内容理解】
(B) A fascination with Asia first captured the imaginations of many in Europe and America in the eighteenth century, as silks, lacquers, and ceramics were brought back from China, first to the Netherlands and Portugal. In １７８４, the first ship to sail from New York to
Canton began nearly a century of China trade for the seaports of the mid-Atlantic and New England states. The opening of Japan by Matthew C. Perry in １８５４ heightened the thirst for knowledge about that secluded society. International expositions in major cities — London, Paris, Vienna, Philadelphia, Chicago — included exhibitions of wares from China and Japan.
The Great Exposition in London in １８６２ included an exhibition of Japanese books and prints. The Paris Exposition Universelle in １８６７ brought to the West one hundred Japanese wood block prints; in １８７３ Japan sent a more elaborate exhibition to Vienna. The Centennial Exposition of １８７６ in Philadelphia included a Japanese dwelling of two stories, as well as one of the first Japanese gardens in the United States. In the Exposition Universelle of １８８９ in Paris, the simplicity of a Japanese tea room contrasted with that masterpiece of engineering, the Eiffel Tower. In Chicago in １８９３, the World's Columbian Exposition included a replica of the eleventh-century Phoenix Hall of the Byodoin Temple in Uji, on an island with a Japanese garden, parts of which remain today. Several Japanese structures from the １９０４ St. Louis World's Fair were saved and installed in Philadelphia and in Monticello, New York.
Peter Johnson. A Passion for Asia.
１７. Which of the following is true, according to the passage?
(a) Fascination for China decreased as the interest in Japan increased.
(b) Interest in Japan heightened in the West despite Japan's efforts to keep their culture secluded.
(c) There was more interest in Japanese culture in the United States than in Europe.
(d) Western countries were fascinated by Japanese printed works as well as architecture.
１８. At the Paris Exposition Universelle of １８８９, the Japanese tea room was
(a) admired as much as the elaborate wood-block prints, but less so than the Eiffel Tower.
(b) considered too simple compared to the Eiffel Tower.
(c) incompatible with the achievement of the Eiffel Tower.
(d) seen as a counterpoint to the Eiffel Tower.
１９. What is the main idea of the text?
(a) Europeans and Americans studied Chinese and Japanese art and culture, but they did not understand them.
(b) From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, America and Europe saw a great expansion of interest in East Asian art and culture.
(c) The big cities in the U.S.A. and Europe began to adopt Chinese and Japanese architecture in the nineteenth century.
(d) Traders from Portugal, the Netherlands, and the U.S.A. searched for Chinese and Japanese antiquities they could sell to museums.
【大問２Ｃ 内容理解】
(C) “They are called typhoons," Joseph Conrad's Captain MacWhirr explains in a letter to his wife, to which she stifles a yawn, uninterested in all these ship affairs." A principal character in Conrad's novella Typhoon, MacWhirr is honoring the mariner's practice of referring to hurricanes in regional vernacular. His letter arrives from the China Sea in the northwestern Pacific. If he had been writing from the South Pacific or the Indian Ocean he would have bored his wife with that region's nomenclature, "cyclone." A hurricane is a "hurricane” only in the eastern Pacific and the Atlantic — and, too, the Gulf of Mexico.
It is so, in part, because of the Yucatán Maya. They paid tribute to a no-nonsense, one-legged god named Huracan, the divine source of wind and storms and, appropriately, birth and destruction. Their neighbors to the east and southeast, Taino and Carib, each had a deity of similar name and disposition. From them the Spanish got a word, huracán, for those incomprehensible tempests they discovered in the New World — acts of God, as they saw them, that wrecked their ships and settlements.
Scientists have scoured maritime records, lighthouse logs, diaries, and newspapers to assemble a century and a half of global hurricane geography. On historical storm maps, they draw color-coded tracking lines - purple for the most intense storms and light blue for the seemingly whimsical lines that a child with crayons might draw, though they are precise and ever serious. The colors congeal in seven areas near, but not on, the equator. These are hurricane hot spots, or basins, as scientists call them: three around the Indian Ocean, two in the North Pacific, and one each for the southwestern Pacific and northern Atlantic — the last of which causes not the least damage to the area including the Gulf of Mexico.
After Hurricane Katrina in ２００５, Louisiana climatologists Barry Keim and Robert Muller put together numbers on Gulf storms. They published their findings in a book that is a combination of historical narrative, scientific explanation, and raw data. One of Keim and Muller's most revealing charts gives ６３９ as the number of hurricanes stirring up the Atlantic between １８８６ and ２００５ — slightly more than five on a yearly average. One third of them either tracked into the Gulf or originated there - roughly two a year. Two may not sound like a lot; yet imagine Californians contending every year with the same number of major earthquakes in the span of a few months. Gulf states are struck by hurricanes fifteen percent more often than all other U.S. states combined, and coastal dwellers in the eastern and northern Gulf, from Key West to Galveston, have to batten down their homes and flee danger more often than any other Americans.
Adding to the woes of hurricane season, the Southeast is the rainiest place in the United Sates, and it has ten saturated metropolitan areas. The majority, writes Cynthia Barnett in Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, get "doused by storms brewed in the warm waters of the Gulf." Nearly every place on the Gulf gets fifty to sixty or more inches of rain a year. Storm season alone, says Barnett, dumps more rain than Seattle sees all year. Worries about flooding, destruction, and death run highest from June １ to November ３０, hurricane season. The worst storms have historically occurred in August and September. But sometimes a bad one sneaks up in June.
Jack Davis. The Gulf The Making of an American Sea.
２０. MacWhirr's wife in Joseph Conrad's story is indifferent to the typhoon because
(a) it happens in the China Sea, a faraway place of which she does not know.
(b) it seems to be something different from a hurricane in several ways.
(c) she generally finds no interest in anything about her husband's seafaring profession.
(d) she has no idea at all about the matters her husband mentions in his letter.
２１. A tropical storm appearing near Japan will not be called a "hurricane"
(a) because there is no god who causes wind and storms in the northwestern Pacific.
(b) if you follow the regional custom of what this meteorological phenomenon is called.
(c) though it is more similar to a hurricane than a "cyclone.”
(d) when it does not continue long enough to be so destructive.
２２. Scientists have made maps with colorful lines like a child's drawing
(a) depending on the distances from the equator.
(b) reflecting the actual colors of those natural phenomena.
(c) to differentiate the names those storms should be given.
(d) to locate the stormiest areas on the globe.
２３. Keim and Muller's studies reveal
(a) how people in the West Coast suffered more often from natural disasters than the East.
(b) that storms are more devastating than earthquakes in the United States.
(c) that the Gulf coast dwellers' worries about hurricanes are well-founded.
(d) what will save your life if you dwell in the coastal areas.
２４. This text is best described as an account of
(a) the courses of hurricanes traveling across the sea.
(b) the differences between typhoons, cyclones, and hurricanes.
(c) the frequency of U.S. natural disasters.
(d) the stormy conditions in one part of the Americas.
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