【設問】
(A) 次の英文の内容を，80～100字の日本語に要約せよ。句読点も字数に含める。
I live in a nice old apartment building in Edinburgh: several floors of individual flats, all connected by an internal staircase made of sandstone. The building is at least a century old, and nowadays each of those sandstone steps is looking a little worn.
This wear is the result of a century of people walking up and down from their flats. As they have left for and returned from work, as they have gone out to the shops or for dinner, many times a day the feet of the people living here have fallen upon each stair.
As every geologist knows, even a small force, repeated over a large enough stretch of time, can add up to some very large effects indeed. A century of footsteps is quite a lot. If each of thirty-five residents travelled up and down the staircase four times a day on average, then each step has been struck by at least ten million feet since it was laid down.
When I climb this staircase to my flat, I enjoy the daily reminder that humans are a geological force. If ten million people were all sent up this staircase one by one, it would take less than eight months for their feet to wear away a centimeter of sandstone.
And then, consider that ten million people is but a small fraction of the seven billion people currently in the world. If you could somehow use the feet of all of those people at once, then you could grind meters of rock away in a few moments. A few more repetitions and you’d have an impressive hole. Keep going for a few hours, and you could produce a new valley.
This might seem like a rather unrealistic thought experiment, but it does highlight, in a rather literal way, the idea of a carbon footprint, which is a measure of the environmental impact of human actions. When it comes to our carbon footprints, the entire planet is the staircase. Our individual contribution – the energy we consume, the waste we produce – may seem insignificant, hardly something that is going to affect the planet. But when you multiply by seven billion, the small environmental impact of any one person becomes a very weighty footprint indeed. It’s not surprising that Earth is as worn down as my old staircase.
【解答例】
(A) 人の歩行が生む力は非常に小さいが，長い年月をかけて繰り返すと地形を変えるほど大きくなる。同様に，一人ひとりの温室効果ガス排出量は少ないが，地球の全人口を合わせれば環境に対して非常に大きな影響力を持つ。(100字)
(B)
(1) ア
(2) オ
(3) カ
(4) ク
(5) ウ
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