国際医療福祉大学
医学部 英語
2026年度 解答・解説

21 Glasses are so common today that we rarely think about where they came from. ①Long before glasses were invented, readers with poor eyesight used a curved piece of glass, called a reading stone. ②Placed directly on the page, it made the letters appear larger. ③These early tools were mostly used by monks, whom spent many hours copying books by hand. ④Wearable glasses did not appear until the late thirteenth century, in northern Italy.

22 The first glasses looked very different from ours. ①They consisted of two lenses joined by a rivet at the nose, so wearers had to hold them in front of their eyes. ②Because the frames had no arms, people pressed them against their noses or hold them by hand. ③Only scholars and wealthy people could afford such delicate items. ④Even so, the new invention spread quickly across Europe.

23 For about two hundred years, glasses helped only people who were farsighted. ①Lenses for short sight, which curve inward, did not appear until the fifteenth century. ②Their arrival was closely connected to the spread of printing, because more people were reading books at close range. ③Workshops in Venice and Florence soon began producing them in large numbers. ④As a result, the demand of glasses rose sharply, and prices fell.

24 Progress in the design of frames was much slower. ①In the sixteenth century, glassmakers learned to grind lenses more evenly. ②Frames, too, gradually improved, and some were made of leather or thin wood. ③Not until the eighteenth century did spectacles had arms that rested on the ears. ④Before that, many wearers kept their glasses in place with a ribbon tied behind the head.

25 Even so, many people still had to carry two pairs of glasses. ①In the late eighteenth century, the American statesman Benjamin Franklin is often said to have grown tired of switching between a pair for reading and a pair for distance. ②He had the lenses cut in half and putting them into a single frame, with the upper half for distance and the lower half for reading. ③Many people laughed at the idea at first. ④Today, however, such glasses, known as bifocals, are worn by millions.

①Trees keep a diary, though few of us know how to read it. Each year a tree adds a new layer of wood beneath its bark, and when the trunk is cut, that layer shows up as a ring. In a wet year the ring is wide; in a dry year it is narrow. By measuring thousands of rings, researchers can reconstruct the rainfall of centuries that came long before the first weather stations were built.

②A team led by Dr. Mireille Anders of Northvale University recently used this method to settle a question that has divided historians for generations: did a long (1) bring about the fall of the Aldermoor kingdom in the thirteenth century? The written records of the time are of little help. They mention empty granaries in some years and overflowing ones in others, and each chronicler seems to have had a different story to tell.

③So Anders and her colleagues decided to (2) put the old theory to the test with the trees themselves. They gathered samples from 214 oaks, some still growing in the Aldermoor forests and some used centuries ago as beams in village churches. Because the beams overlap in age with the living trees, the team was able to link them together into an (3) unbroken record covering 1,100 years. The living trees were sampled by (4) a thin core from each trunk with a hollow drill, so that no tree was harmed.

④The pattern that emerged was clear. Between 1274 and 1293, the rings were almost always narrow, and the narrowest of them (5) coincided with the years in which the chronicles describe the emptiest granaries. In the worst year, a ring measured only 0.8 millimetres across, while the average width over the whole 1,100 years was 3.2 millimetres. In other words, the ring from the worst year was only (6) the average.

⑤The rings also show what came next. After the dry spell ended, the oak rings grew wide again within a few years, yet the chronicles report that the kingdom's farmland never fully (7) revived. Anders takes this to mean that drought was the beginning of the trouble, not its only cause.

⑥Anders is careful not to claim too much. The rings fit the written story, but they cannot tell us how the kingdom's rulers responded, or whether disease and war made matters worse. Still, her team has shown that the chroniclers were not simply inventing their hunger. The trees remembered what the people had tried to forget.

Fossils are usually thought of as the remains of animals that died, but a few of them also reveal how an animal lived. One such fossil is “Juniper,” a fox that died about 12,000 years ago. Her skeleton was found in a riverbank in northern Valdoria by a team from the Orland Museum of Natural History.

①

Juniper's skeleton was unusual in one respect. The bone of her left foreleg had once been broken badly, yet it had grown back together. “A break like that is usually a death sentence for a wild fox,” said the team's leader, Dr. Haruka Lindqvist. “She cannot hunt, and she cannot escape from enemies. For the bone to heal so well, something must have kept her alive for months.”

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At first, the team found it (1) that a fox could have lived through such an injury alone. To (2) what had happened, they studied thin slices of the healed bone under a microscope and compared them with the bones of modern foxes that wildlife doctors had treated.

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Taken together, these clues pointed to an unexpected helper: people. Beside the skeleton, the team found the remains of a small hearth, a few stone tools, and animal bones that had been cut with those tools. If Juniper had lived near a camp, human beings may well have been the (3) lifeline that kept her alive.

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Not everyone agrees. Some scientists point out that a camp could simply have supplied scraps, which any hurt fox could have eaten without being tamed. Lindqvist accepts this. “We cannot prove that anyone cared for her,” she says. “But the evidence (4) rules out the simple story that a wild animal can never recover from such an injury.”

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Juniper's story shows how much a single fossil can (5) us about the past. Scientists once believed that only the strongest animals (6) the Ice Age, but bones like hers suggest that weak or injured animals sometimes did too. Today, with fires and (7) pollution damaging habitats in the same region, the team hopes the discovery will make people more (8) how fragile wild animals are.

⑥

The microscope work, which took almost a year, revealed two further details. The bone had set in a straight line, which normally requires an animal to rest the limb for weeks, and it showed none of the damage that comes from being broken again and again.

This disagreement is not new. For decades, researchers have argued over whether early humans ever helped injured animals, because the same healed bone can be read in two quite different ways.