【設問】
(A) 次の英文の内容を，70～80字の日本語に要約せよ。句読点も字数に含める。
We like to think that humans are supremely logical, making decisions on the basis of hard data and not on impulse. But this vision of homo economicus – a person who acts in his or her best interest when given accurate information – has been shaken, especially by discoveries in the emerging field of risk perception. It has been found that humans have great difficulty in accurately gauging risk. We have a system that gives us conflicting advice from two powerful sources – logic and instinct, or the head and the gut.
Our instinctive gut reactions developed in a world full of hungry wild animals and warring tribes, where they served important functions. Letting the amygdala (in the brain’s emotional core) take over at the first sign of danger, milliseconds before the neo-cortex (the thinking part of the brain) was aware that a spear was headed for our chest, was probably a very useful adaptation. Even today those gut responses save us from getting flattened by buses or dropping a brick on our toes. But our amygdala is not suited for a world where risks are measured by clicks on a radiation detector.
A risk-perception apparatus designed for avoiding wild animals makes it unlikely that we will ever run screaming from fatty food. “People are likely to react with little fear to certain types of objectively dangerous risk that evolution has not prepared them for, such as hamburgers, automobiles, and smoking, even when they recognize the threat at a conscious level,” says one researcher. Even Charles Darwin failed to break the amygdala’s iron grip on risk perception. As an experiment, he placed his face up against the rattlesnake cage at the London Zoo and tried to keep himself calm and unmoved when the snake struck the plate glass. He failed.
A whole industry has developed around conquering the fear of flying, but while we pray not to be one of the roughly five hundred annual airline casualties around the world, we give little thought to driving to the grocery store, even though more than one million people die in automobile accidents each year.
[出典：Jason Daley. What You Don’t Know Can Kill You.]
【解答例】
(A) 人間は合理的に行動すると考えられがちだが，リスクに対してはむしろ本能的に反応する。昔は本能を優先した方が生き残れたが，不摂生などの現代のリスクには対応できない。(80字)
(B)
(1) h
(2) c
(3) b
(4) e
(5) g
(ア) eat
0コメント