金沢医科大学
医学部 英語
2025年度 解答・解説

¶1[ 1 ] That is nearly as much waste as the region's entire building industry produces, but it does not have to be this way. With support, neighbors can mend what they own and develop a habit of repair. Our new study explores how people in the region of Eastmere take part in community repair.

¶2[ 2 ] We then asked visitors to keep diaries of every item they brought in over six weeks. Their stories ranged from toasters and bicycles to wedding dresses and radios. The results show that visitors were keen to fix things, but that repair is not always easy.

¶3[ 3 ] When those firms closed in 2019, local councils had to act quickly to pay for new workshops. In a truly circular economy, nothing is wasted. Goods are valued and kept in use as (1) they pass from owner to owner. In the current phase, however, the focus has been on collecting old products and recycling their materials rather than on fixing them.

¶4Big shops have not helped. In March 2022, the council's repair voucher program was suspended after it received far more claims than it could pay for. That followed the closure of the main parts supplier, Norwick Parts, in 2020. Boxes of unsorted parts filled its warehouses, while other stock was sent straight to the landfill.

¶5Several towns have adopted a “right to repair” rule, most recently Eastmere itself, but success will depend on making repair cheap and easy. Households produced most of the region's broken electrical goods (61%) and discarded clothing (54%) last year. Improving these figures requires changes in social habits as well as changes in the way shops and makers work, supported by regulation and new standards. Earlier research has shown that households sit between the level of individuals and the level of whole communities. However, little attention has been paid to the part households can play in making repair normal.

¶6Moving to a repair habit asks people to change how they use, buy and keep things. The long winter lockdowns gave many people both the time and a reason to learn new skills. As life returns to normal, however, many have found it hard to keep going.

¶7With help from the (2) volunteers at three cafés, we recruited 24 participants from the town of Lowmarsh and its villages. A father of two wanted to mend every broken item in his house for six weeks, while a retired teacher concentrated on bicycles. A woman who lives alone decided to learn how to sew, and a student set out to fix her own laptop. Another resident wanted to open a “tool library” for his neighbors, and a part-time nurse created a three-week repair challenge for her friends.

¶8Participants told us that repair was harder than they had expected. It took extra time, money and patience. They also needed more information and support to start, and then to keep going. For some, the effort became a reason to try something new, such as carrying a broken kettle across town to the café [ 5 ] throwing it away. But the new habits did not always last, because some repairs needed rare parts and were hard to finish.

¶9Spare parts were a major source of frustration: “You can never find the part you need. It's ridiculous. Half the time the part doesn't even have a name on it.” Family and friends mattered too. One man said his family told him they would not support any more repairs after the oven project, while another had a wife and children cheering him on. The shortage of spare parts for older models [ 6 ] again and again in the interviews. Online groups were a useful resource, with one visitor [ 7 ], “Because it makes you realize that other people are trying to rescue every broken thing from the bin.”

¶10Participants named many changes that would make repair easier, including introducing [ 8 ] that requires makers to publish repair manuals, banning glued-in (3) batteries, improving the supply of spare parts, creating markets for second-hand goods, encouraging design for repair, and providing clearer labels. “We need the government and the makers to change the way things are built,” one participant said.

¶11In short, our research shows that large changes are needed to make repair easy. We found that trying repair at home can help in designing and testing new policies. It can connect policymakers to real people and to the things that matter to them, such as raising children, friendships, shared meals, tight budgets and caring for others. If the shift to a circular economy is to succeed, it needs to be planned from the point of view of everyday life inside households.

¶1When schools closed during the long storms of last winter, many countries had to move quickly towards digital learning—online lessons, video calls with teachers, and tablet apps that track a pupil's progress. Many of these tools were already under development, but the crisis made schools start using them faster. For wealthy countries, such tools offer a clear (1) opportunity to reduce the rising cost of education. For poorer countries that are still building their school systems, they could be life-changing.

¶2Many poorer countries will never be able to reach every child in the usual way, with enough classrooms and enough trained teachers in every village. Digital tools open up the possibility of completely new models of teaching, such as pupils having access to the best lessons in the country, working through exercises at their own pace, and receiving help from *1tutoring programs that correct mistakes at once.

¶3It is now possible to deliver lessons at very low cost to a village with no school at all, (2) bridging the gap between the city and the countryside. This matters most for pupils who live far from a teacher. Increasingly, lessons that are now given in classrooms will be taught remotely, using tablets and phones, and pupils will be able to (3) take advantage of the same courses as children in the capital.

¶4Programs that adjust the difficulty of each task [ 18 ] the pupil's progress will make learning more personal. Records kept on digital platforms will show teachers exactly where each child is stuck. Imagine a classroom in which every teacher has a screen that shows how each pupil is doing, that suggests the next exercise, and that can immediately order the books needed for the next topic. On some remote islands, boats are already being used to carry solar-powered tablets to pupils.

¶5One of the major costs to education systems comes from the 20 to 30 percent of pupils who fall behind after missing lessons and never catch up. Fixing this could mean better results, fewer repeated years and happier pupils. Technology may be able to help here, too. Text messages and apps can remind pupils to do their homework, read aloud and practice sums. Another promising idea is a smart notebook which records the dates and times when it is opened and reminds pupils to study at the right time.

¶6However, the rules of schooling will need to change if this new world of digital learning is to work. Probably the most important question is who owns and controls pupils' data and how its privacy can be protected. This cannot be avoided, because many of the wider benefits of digital learning—for research and for improving school systems—depend on pooling and sharing data. There have already been cases in which pupils' records were exposed. We need principles that ensure each family has control over its own data while allowing wider benefits to be realized. There is also growing awareness of the importance of tackling bias in the *2algorithms: much of the research behind them has been carried out in a few rich cities, and may not suit pupils from other regions or language groups.

¶7Countries will arrive at different decisions on the balance between individual privacy and the wider good. During the lockdowns, parents in several countries willingly [ 19 ] schools having access to their children's learning records. In others, there was a preference for systems that prevented any central body from holding all the information. In democracies, there is emerging agreement that families should control the data and that their permission should be required for any wider use. However, practice varies widely, and the situation is still changing. It may be necessary to protect some data (such as records of special needs) more strongly than data that clearly serves the public (such as attendance).

¶8Despite the challenges, digital learning offers a real opportunity to deliver better education at lower cost and to [ 20 ] teachers from some of the more routine parts of the job, such as marking tests. This will allow them to focus on the human side of teaching, which does most to keep pupils on track and, in the end, to improve results. This combination of “high tech” and “high touch” may be the way to balance cost and quality in the schools of the future.

¶1Like many other inquiries into the natural world, studies of the climate have modest origins in an 18th-century harbor town, where between 1761 and 1779 a lighthouse keeper named Henrik Valmer noted the temperature every morning, and the harbor office printed his tables in 1780 in its yearly sea almanac. However, Valmer's lighthouse stood on a cold, exposed rock, so his readings said little about the surrounding region, and we did not see systematic large-scale records of temperature until the 1850s, [ 26 ] the national weather offices of Marlow and Orlan began to publish them.

¶2Since then, we have studied every aspect of the climate, from its yearly cycle and its relation to the ocean to its *1regional differences in warming. [ 27 ] we now know, with high accuracy, the expected temperature for each month in each place. If a farmer in the Orlan Basin asks the weather office about next July, he will be told that the month is likely to be warmer than 90 percent of the Julys in his valley's records.

¶3(1) For those interested in long-term measures of change, as well as in revealing regional comparisons, one of the clearest results of modern systematic weather studies remains the well-documented history of rising average temperatures. Although severe winter cold (a month with temperatures far below the normal) is still common in many mountain regions, its frequency has declined—mostly [ 28 ] the steady warming of the oceans—from about 40 percent of winters in the 1890s to about 22 percent in the 1990s, and warming was a global trend of the 20th century.

¶4Warmer seas and a changing atmosphere—above all, greater amounts of carbon dioxide in the air—have driven the shift, and warmer weather is linked with a surprisingly large number of effects. These do not include generally higher rainfall, but there is a lower risk of frost damage to crops, and also a longer growing season, longer tourist seasons and more outdoor work. The link between temperature and crop yields was first documented in 1912 and has since been [ 29 ] repeatedly in regions ranging from the wheat fields of Marlow to the rice terraces of Orlan. Moreover, the latter study showed that farms in warmer valleys were larger and richer!

¶5Long-term, region-wide findings are equally fascinating. Average July temperatures in preindustrial Marlow were between 17 and 18 degrees, and the global average was about 14 degrees. Information from 120 regions shows an average rise over the 20th century of 0.8 degrees for the world as a whole. The Kestrel Islands recorded the century's largest rise (2.1 degrees), and the Orlan Basin topped the inland sequence with 1.6 degrees. Detailed records kept at Marlow since 1900 at 12 stations show how readings respond to changes in the network: between 1900 and 1940 the average July reading rose by 0.02 degrees per year, but the closure of many hill stations during the war removed the coolest sites, and the average appeared to jump by 0.5 degrees. The yearly increase resumed only in 1949, and during the second half of the century it averaged 0.03 degrees. In contrast, measurements for the second half of the century show a minimal rise on the Southern Plateau and none in the deep valleys.

¶6Which region has the hottest summers? Coal use has been a key factor, [ 30 ] it in Marlow or in Orlan. Before the war, the air of Orlan was cleaner than that of Marlow, but after 1950 coal use in Marlow declined while in Orlan it rose until the 1970s—and (2) it continues to be higher than in Marlow. The lesson is obvious: the easiest way to slow local warming is to burn less coal.