英語長文読解テキスト一覧

基本の基本 Part1 友達と山登り        

Last Friday , Emma and his colleague David discussed their plans for the weekend .

Emma wanted to go to the mountains , because she goes climbing every Saturday .

David had never climbed , but he decided to accompany his colleague Emma .

The next morning , Emma and David found each other at the foot of the mountain .

At first , Emma thought that David could not climb easily ,

because he did not look very strong . But after a few minutes ,

he managed to move faster than she did .

Emma and David finally arrived on top of the mountain . That’s where they had lunch .

The next time , they will go to another area and climb a higher mountain .

基本の基本 Part2  スイスのチョコレート

   Yoshiko is a chocolatier in Geneva .  

She has lived in this city for 15 years .

When she was a student at the university , she made her first trip to Geneva .

First , she was interested in the painting ,

but finally ,  it was the Geneva chocolate that she loved the most .  

At that time , she decided to become a chocolatier. 

After finishing her studies in Japan ,

she returned to Geneva to go to the national pastry school .

And then , she worked in a shop as a pastry chef for nine years .

Finally , she  opened her shop in Geneva .

In the early years ,  few people came to buy her chocolates .

But now she  receives two hundred customers a day .

基本の基本 Part3  元気なおばあちゃん

     Ken‘s grandmother is 95 years old .

She is a very active lady who always wants to do new things .

Last year , she started to study Itaian .

Her teacher is the boss of an Italian restaurant .

The Italian language pleases her a lot .

She would like to go to Italy . But Ken’s parents are worried .

They asked Ken if he did not want to go to Italy with her grandmother .

Ken loves his grandmother and he likes to travel .

He is delighted to be able to make this trip .

But he does not speak Italian at all .  

So he will study it tomorrow .

基本の基本 Part4   ノアの図書館

       Since his childhood , Noah went to the city library every Saturday .

In this library , he met young people of his age  and he often made friends .

Last year , there was a fire in the library which was built of wood .

Fortunately , no one died , but the fire destroyed the building .

After this accident , the city decided to build a new library .

Noah and his friends wanted to do something to help .

They asked people to donate books for the library .

Finally, many books were donated to the city that Noah lived in .

Noah is very happy .    The new library will open next year .

 

京都産業大学

   Mauro Morandi has lived alone on Italy’s Budelli Island for 31 years.

In 1989, the engine in his boat died, and he washed up on the coast of Budelli Island,

located between Sardinia and Corsica.   By chance, Morandi learned that the island’s caretaker

was retiring, so he sold his boat and took over the job.  Thirty-one years later, Morandi remains

the sole resident and keeper of the island.  

 In the early 1990s, Budelli Island’s Pink Beach was named a natural treasure

by the Italian government. The beach was closed off to protect its delicate ecosystem,

and only some areas were left accessible to visitors. The island rapidly went

from hosting thousands of people a day to usually hosting just one.   

“I will never leave. I hope to die here and have my ashes scattered in the wind,” says Morandi,

who is now 81. He believes all life eventually returns to the Earth  

that we are all part of the same energy.

This belief is why he stays on the island even without any  pay.   

Despite his dislike of people, Morandi guards Budelli’s environment with passion and educates

summertime visitors about the ecosystem and how to protect it. “I’m not a scientist,” Morandi says.

“Yes, I know the names of plants and animals, but my work is very different from this.

To be able to care for a plant is a technical task  

I try to make people understand why the plant needs to live.”   

Morandi said that teaching people how to see beauty will save the world from being wrongly used.

“I would like people to understand that we must  try not to look at beauty,

but feel beauty with our eyes closed,” he says.    Winters on Budelli are both beautiful and  lonely.

Morandi endures long stretches of time—more than 20 days—without any human  contact.

 He finds comfort in spending this time thinking, and often sits on the beach with nothing

but the sounds of the wind and waves to break the silence. “I’m sort of in prison here,” he says.

“But it’s a prison that I chose for myself.”   Morandi passes the time with creative activities.

He makes pieces of wood into sculptures, finding faces hidden in their unusual shapes.

He reads eagerly and studies the wisdom of Greek philosophers and literary talents.

He takes pictures of the island, marveling at how it changes from hour to hour, season to season.   

When Wi-Fi inevitably found its way to this nearly empty island,

Morandi adopted  it and began sharing his island paradise with the world through social media.

Embracing this new form of communication is his compromise for a larger purpose-to create

a bond between people and nature by exposing them to its beauty.

Morandi hopes this bond will motivate people to care for the planet wherever they are.   

“Love is an absolute consequence of beauty, and the opposite is also true,”

Morandi says. “When you love a person deeply you see him or her as beautiful,

but not because you see them as physically beautiful-you identify with them,

you become a part of them and they become a part of you. It’s the same thing with nature.”

 

東京大1

 One lesson that life teaches as we grow older is that both our fears and

our hopes are mostly illusions and are not to be taken too seriously.  Time after time

we learn that that which we fear most in life never happens, or never happens exactly as we have dreaded.  

We also learn that if our fears come to pass, the actuality is never quite as bad as the fear we had in the first place. 

 In addition, we have undreamed-of strength to bear the difficulty. 

On the other hand, our specific hopes usually prove to be poor traveling companions too.  

We must be optimistic about life and what the future holds, but so often, even when our specific dreams come true,

we find that we are happy for only a brief period.  We must still live with the same discontents and frustrations we had before. 

Many of our hopes do not center on what will bring us real peace of mind, 

but rather what others tell us will make us rich or beautiful. Conversely, 

we must not take our fears so seriously that they prevent us from taking any risks.   

Just living is a risky business ; and often, by taking well-thought-out risks , 

we run a lesser danger than if we always try to play it safe.

The best path lies in the middle course.  We should have enough concern about the future 

that we prepare for it as best we can. We should have hope and optimism, 

for these attributes are essential to a constructive, happy life with peace of mind ;

 but we must remember that our hopes and fears are often illusions promising to change our way of life 

but leaving us exactly as we were before. 

東京大2    

The notion that every problem can be studied as such with an open

and empty mind, without knowing what has already been learned about it,

must condemn men to a chronic childishness.

For no man, and no generation of men, is capable of inventing

for itself the arts and sciences of a high civilization.

No one, and no one generation, is capable of rediscovering all the truths

men need, of developing sufficient knowledge by applying a mere intelligence,

no matter how acute, to mere observation, no matter how accurate.

The men of any generation, as a French philosopher once put it,

are like dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants.

If we are to “see more things than the ancients and things more distant”

it is “due neither to the sharpness of our sight nor the greatness of our stature”

but “simply because they have lent us their own.”   For individuals do not have

 the time, the opportunity or the energy to make all the experiments

and to discern all the significance that have gone into the making

of the whole heritage of civilization.       In developing knowledge men

must collaborate with their ancestors. Otherwise they must begin,

not where their ancestors arrived but where their ancestors began.

If they exclude the tradition of the past from the curriculums of the schools

they make it necessary for each generation to repeat the errors rather

than to benefit by the successes of preceding generations.


東京大3  

 If history is regarded as just the record of the past,  

it is hard to see any grounds for claiming that it should play any large role

in the curriculum of elementary education.

The past is the past, and the dead may be safely left to bury their dead. 

There are too many urgent demands in the present, too many calls

over the threshold of the future, to permit the child to become deeply absorbed

in what is  forever gone by.  Not so when history is considered

as an account of the forces and forms of social life. 

Social life we have always with us ;

the distinction of past and present is indifferent to it.

Whether it was lived just here or just there is a matter of slight moment. 

It is life for all that ; it shows the motives

which draw men together and push them apart, portrays

what is desirable and what is hurtful. Whatever history may be

for the scientific historian, for the educator it must be an indirect sociology

     a study of society which reveals its process of becoming and its modes

of organization.  Existing society is both too complex and too close

to the child to be studied.  He finds no clues into its labyrinth of detail

and can mount no heights from which to get a perspective of its arrangement. 

 

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