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　　America was the best-kept secret in history. Before Columbus the peoples of Europe did not even imagine that this continent was here. Their maps and globes of the earth showed only Europe, Asia, and Africa and left no room for another continent. The greatest surprise was that there really was an America. Columbus himself believed that he had reached the shores of Asia. It was another Italian, Anlerigo Vespucci, who suggested that this was a whole new world. And mapmakers wrote the word America on their maps in honor of him. But at first America seemed only an unlucky obstacle between Europe and the riches of India and China. America was discovered by accident.

　　And what a surprise it was! 〔　　　　　　　ア　　　　　　　〕
Was it really possible that there was an “extra” continent? The Romans had sailed thousands of miles, even to India. The Spanish and Portuguese explored all the way to Iceland and down and around Africa. How could so much of the earth have been kept a secret? If there could be continents that the peoples of Europe never even imagined, how much more might there be in the world that they had not imagined? It was just a few years before the Puritans landed in New England that Shakespeare warned, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio*, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The American surprise promised a world of endless surprises.

　　〔　　　　　　　　イ　　　　　　　〕 European sailors were afraid to sail straight westward into this vast unknown. That way to Asia seemed too many miles. For you had to be able to go there and back. (1) Finally the bold and enterprising sailor Columbus was willing to take his chance and persuaded a doubting crew to go alone. He knew the winds and the current from sailing far north and south along Europe’s Atlantic coast. And he knew how to bring his ships back.

　　At first only a vast ocean could have kept America from the greedy adventuring peoples of Europe. And later only the ocean could have carried so many so far seeking homes. They could hardly have come in such large numbers over three thousand miles by land. 〔　　　　　　　ウ　　　　　　〕There were few highways but any highway robbers who hid behind high rocks and around bends in the road, ready to relieve passengers of their baggage or even of their lives. Unless you walked, you needed teams of horses, which tired, got stuck in the mud, and had to be fed and watered along the way.

　　But the ocean was convenient and pleasant and usually friendly. Though, of course, the sea was sometimes rough, still often enough it was calm. If you knew the winds and the currents, had a compass, and could follow the stars at night, you would make your way faster and safer than on land. 〔　　　　　　　エ　　　　　　　　〕But the winds never had to be fed, and they worked around the clock. On the sea, robbers found no place to hide, and pirates* themselves had to take great risks in the wide ocean. The ocean was lucky in still other ways, for it made people travel in large groups. 〔　　　　　　　　オ　　　　　　　　〕 Only a large vessel could survive the stormy seas and carry provisions for the seven weeks’ passage. In the Mayflower you were traveling with a hundred other passengers, besides captain and crew. You could walk about the deck, dance and sing and play games on the way. (2)You sailed in a little traveling town. You heard *sermons, made laws, and exchanged stories as you went.

　　You did not have to trust to innkeepers on the way. The ship carried food and water and could even bring along treasured pieces of furniture, musical instruments, and favorite books. Cows on board, when they were not seasick, could provide fresh milk. By the time (A)( 1 ) ( 2 ) ( 3 ) ( 4 ) ( 5 ) ( 6 ) ( 7 ) ( 8 ) ( 9 ) who were troublemakers and who were leaders. Then when you first stepped on the unmapped coast, you were already surrounded by friends, prepared to work together building houses and churches and schools, hunting turkey, deer, and wild pigeons, and facing the perils of unfriendly residents. The ship landed in a ready-made* community.

　　As the colonists settled on the Atlantic coast the did not have to wait for roads to be built to receive passengers and produce from the world or to send out their produce in exchange. Safe harbors―Boston, New York, Savannah―opened on ready-made highways to the whole world. The spacious holds of ships that brought settlers could send out furs and corn and rice and tobacco. An elegant London-made coach could be delivered directly to George Washington’s dock at Mount Vernon on the Potomac River.

【２】次の文を読んで、設問のA～Eに答えなさい。

　　“I’ve been a chronic worrier all my life. I’d sit there at my desk worrying about a problem in my business and then I’d begin to worry about going bankrupt. That would lead to worrying about how I was going to support myself, about ( a ) I would do in my old age. It would just spiral up.”

　　In his mid-80s, wealthy, chairman of a national insurance company, this man would seem to be someone who had nothing to worry about. Yet worry he did, until recently. “If I didn’t have business problems, I’d find something else to worry about,” he says. “I guess I was spending half my day worrying, and half the night too. I was losing so much sleep that I was tired all the time and my productivity was falling off.”

　　Everybody worries, but a handful of social scientists who came to focus on this topic while studying *insomnia are now saying that ( 1 )( 2 )( 3 )( 4 )( 5 )( 6 )( 7 )( 8 )( 9 ). More than that, they are telling us that we can learn to worry less.

　　These researchers have found that worriers like the insurance executive experience (A)the phenomenon of the “racing mind”. “The flow of worrisome thoughts is relentless and seems unstoppable,” says Thomas Borkovec, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University and one of the pioneers in worry research. Typically, a person might begin by worrying whether his car needs new brakes. Next he sees the brakes failing and the car knocking down a child. This leads to a vision of himself in court, in financial ruin, with his family on welfare.

　　(1)Put this way it sounds amusing but to the worrier it is far from funny. ( b ) ever-increasing worries come muscle tension, upset stomach, anxiety and depression, which can eventually lead to more serious health problems. “Worrying is circular,” says Elwood Robinson, a young psychologist who heads the Worry Treatment Program at North Carolina Central University in Durham. “It builds, so you feel worse and worse.”

　　Consider the case of a mother of two adolescent sons. Age 42, she looks 25 and has a relaxed manner―hardly someone who would seem to be a chronic worrier. She began to worry some in college. ( c ) she went on to graduate, get married, then begin teaching and having children, her worries increased. So did her physical symptoms：stomach problems, insomnia. At night she would lie in bed worrying about her children, about the students she was teaching, about ( d ) she was doing good job. (Low self-esteem is characteristic of worriers.) About four years ago she was feeling so much stress that she had to give up her teaching position.

　　Rowland Folensbee, a psychologist who heads a Houston, Texas, worry clinic, says that this pattern is common. “Some people are not worriers at first, but become worriers. They find that their worry *incubates. (B)It is fired off by more and more distant triggers.” Where they might once have worried about paying a bill, they’ll eventually worry about paying for things they haven’t even bought yet. Folensbee has had patients so prone to worry that they decide not to undergo treatment because the prospect “worries” them too much.

　　Worry, ( c ) these researchers define it, is what the mind does while the body is feeling anxious or tense. Says Folensbee, “It’s very difficult to have an empty mind―not to think about anything at all.” Worrying seems to give the tense person “something to do.” According to Borkovec, such a person feels that the worry is “part of me, what I do all the time. (2) Not to be doing that makes me uncomfortable because it’s not myself.”

　　Everybody worries at one time or another, but there are ( a ) Folensbee calls “grades of tendency to worry.” All of the researchers feel that it isn’t so much a question of how much you worry, but ( d ) it is causing problems―costing you sleep, distracting you at work or school, or often making you feel bad.

　　The first task, in reducing worry is to recognize when you are worrying. The second step is to interrupt this worry before it can build. Folensbee asks clients who suddenly realize they’re worrying to focus on an object―something positive―and carefully describe it to themselves. The theory is (ロ)( 1 )( 2 )( 3 )( 4 )( 5 )( 6 )( 7 )( 8 )( 9 )( 10 ) at once“Imaging” can help stop the worry spiral. A person worrying about a plane trip might see himself getting airsick or the plane crashing；instead, he should work up images of a smiling flight attendant and the interesting people he’ll meet―replacing “We’re negative thoughts ( b ) positive ones. “We are trying to get people to think more realistically about the things that worry them,” Robinson says. “We have people who worry endlessly about their schoolwork, but they have always done well. We say to them, ‘Look, have you ever *flunked a course before?’”

【１】次の英文を読んで、設問A～Eに答えよ。

　　Although most of us can occasionally retain visual impressions of things that we have seen, such impressions usually are vague and lacking in detail. Some individual, ( イ ), are able to retain visual images that are almost photographic in clarity. They can glance briefly at a picture and when it is removed still “see” its image located, not in their heads, but somewhere in space before their eyes. (1)They can maintain the image for as long as several minutes, look at it as it remains stationary in space and describe it giving many more details than would be possible from memory alone. Such people are said to have a “photographic memory,” or to use the psychologist’s term “eidetic imagery.”

　Eidetic imagery is relatively ( あ ). Studies with children indicate that only about 5 percent report visual images that last for more than a half-minute and possess sharp detail. The existing evidence suggests that after adolescence the occurrence of eidetic individuals is even less frequent. In a typical procedure for investigating eidetic imagery, the experimenter places a richly detailed picture against an *easel painted gray, gives the child 30 seconds to look at it, removes the picture and then asks the child to describe what he sees on the easel. Most children either report seeing nothing or describe fleeting afterimages of the picture. But some report images that are ( い ) and prolonged. When questioned, they can provide a wealth of detail, ( ロ ) the number of stripes on a cat’s tail or the number of buttons on a jacket. Often the children cannot provide these details without first studying their eidetic image.

　Studies with eidetic children indicate that a viewing time of three to five
seconds is ( う ) to produce an image. The children report that when they do not look at the picture long enough, they do not have an image of parts of it, although they may remember what those parts contain. Exaggerated eye *blinking or looking away from the easel usually makes the image disappear.

　　One theory assumed that (2)eidetic imagery served to improve the transfer of visual stimuli into memory. But evidence suggests that this is not the case. Eidetic children seem to have no ( え ) long-term memories than other children. In fact, if while looking at a picture an eidetic child is asked to name parts of it (or otherwise actively attend to the parts), he is unable to form an image. It appears that eidetic children retain information either in the form of an image or in the form of more typical verbal memory, but they are unable to do both at the same time.

　　Other evidence indicates that eidetic imagery is photographic in nature and not a function of memory. For example, when the eidetic child tries to transfer the image from the easel to another surface, it disappears when it reaches the edge of the easel. At the same time, the eidetic image is not an exact photographic reproduction. (3)The image usually contains additions, omissions and distortions of the stimulus picture in the same way that memories contain distortions of the original event. The aspects of the picture that are of principal interest to the child are the ones that tend to be reproduced in greatest detail in the eidetic image.