金沢医科大学
医学部 英語
2026年度 解答・解説

¶1When people [ 1 ] a stomach bug, they often keep their usual [ 2 ] without realizing that they are infectious. A recent survey of residents of the town of Brookfield showed that 52% of the people who fell ill kept [ 3 ] to work or school [ 4 ] the first day of symptoms. This can pass the illness to others very quickly. The germs [ 5 ] easily from hand to hand when people shake hands, share food, or [ 6 ] in crowded rooms. They can also be passed on by touching [ 7 ] such as door handles, tables, or phones, or by eating food prepared by someone who is [ 8 ] with the illness.

¶2The diagram shows how one person with a stomach bug (Index Person) in the town of Brookfield unknowingly started a chain of infections that eventually reached nine other people. On the first Monday of June, a cook went to work while infected and passed the illness to two coworkers. Over the next few days, one of those coworkers went to choir practice and spread the illness to some of the singers. The other coworker attended a birthday party, where more people became ill. The cook later passed the illness to two family members.

¶3The Brookfield Health Office believes that about 60% of new cases that week could be traced to this one cook. This example shows how quickly a stomach bug can spread through everyday contact when people do not stay home in the early stages of their illness.

¶1Imagine you are standing on a train platform in a city you do not know, unable to read the signs. A kind stranger is probably within a few meters of you, yet many of us would rather (a) approach nobody than risk a refusal. Although the colleague who once asked us for directions, the neighbor who borrowed our ladder, and the stranger who needed to use our phone have all faded from memory, we can easily recall the day when we were too shy to ask for something small.

¶2Research across psychology has repeatedly shown that asking for help is good for us. People who ask for advice make better decisions, and those who feel able to rely on others report lower stress. As a result, we might expect people to (1) go out of their way to ask for help whenever they need it. In practice, however, most of us put up with problems for far longer than necessary.

¶3In a recent paper, we examined how often people avoid asking for help and why. In a series of studies involving more than 1,800 participants, we found that people are surprisingly (b) reluctant to ask, although there are ways of managing that feeling. We began by surveying 200 office workers about the previous month. A large majority (84 percent) named a task for which they would have liked help but had not asked anyone. When we asked whether they would ask a colleague now, they were neutral, and they were even less willing to do so in the following week. It is not that people dislike helping others; rather, they are hesitant to [ 1 ] a request in the first place.

¶4To explore this hesitation, we asked the same workers about the [ 2 ] of asking. They had many concerns, but they worried most that a request would be an (2) inconvenience for the colleague, and that they would look less capable as a result. In other words, people seemed to see asking as a burden on the helper. However, this worry is probably unnecessary: when we asked a separate group of 180 people to imagine being asked for help by a friend, most said they would feel glad to help and flattered to be trusted.

¶5To investigate further, we ran two experiments with more than 900 people to see whether we could encourage them to make a real request. This proved surprisingly hard, even though we made it as easy as possible. We recruited only people who had a task they truly wanted help with and who trusted a particular colleague. We gave them their colleague's contact details, and we allowed them a few minutes to write the request. Despite these supportive conditions, fewer than half of the participants sent it. Those who did send it reported feeling better right afterward than those who did not.

¶6We then tried to make the task easier in several other ways. We told some participants not to think too hard and simply to press “send.” We told others that most people enjoy helping, and asked them to imagine how pleased their colleague would feel. We tried to [ 3 ] the fear of looking incapable by suggesting that participants should not expect a perfect answer and should feel proud of having asked at all. Others were encouraged to (3) shrug off a refusal if it came, because it would say little about them.

¶7None of these ideas worked. Nothing we tried raised the number of people who made a request. However, we realized that people might also be misjudging the effort involved for the helper. So we asked 120 people to imagine needing various small favors, such as lending a pen, checking a page of writing, or giving directions, and to guess how much effort a helper would spend on each. We also asked another 120 people who had actually done these favors for others how much effort they had spent. The guesses were about twice as high as the real reports, and the favors seemed far more (4) daunting in the imagination than in practice.

¶8However, here is the good news. One of us had worked on a method known to ease the fear of approaching strangers, and we decided to adapt it to the case of asking for help. We asked some participants to complete a short warm-up in which they made a few small requests, such as asking a classmate what time it was. Others, our control group, simply looked at a map. Afterward, we asked everyone to make a real request to a colleague. About a third of the control group did so, in line with our earlier findings, but nearly half of the warm-up group did. We think that practicing small requests showed people how easy it is to ask and how kindly others respond. Helpers are often more (c) generous than we think. Asking can feel risky, and many of us expect to be judged. [ 4 ], a request often makes the helper feel trusted, and it may be easier to make after some practice.

¶1In 2002, researchers from Dunmore University asked the museum of the village of Tarrow for a small bundle of leaves that had been sitting in a school cupboard since 1872. The leaves had been gathered by Evelyn Crane, a teacher who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, kept some of the most careful records of village life ever made. They did not come from a famous collection. They came from an (a) orchard behind the school, and they turned out to be scientifically valuable.

¶2Crane (1) meticulously recorded the weather, the date of the first frost, the arrival of the swallows, and the weight of each year's apple harvest. She also noticed what others overlooked. In the wet summer of 1871, the leaves of the school orchard grew dark spots, and by autumn many trees had lost their fruit. The villagers blamed an early frost, but Crane's own notes showed that the weather had been mild.

¶3Crane suspected that the (b) disease was caused by something living. The spots first appeared on the lower leaves, then climbed the trunk, tree by tree, along the rows. Frost would have struck all the trees at once. She asked her neighbors about it, but they were (2) baffled by the question, because they saw nothing odd in the pattern. That did not add up.

¶4Crane guessed that a tiny organism was moving from tree to tree, and this idea led her to wonder whether a (c) microscope would reveal it. She sent a bundle of leaves to a professor in the county town, who (3) dismissed her idea after one afternoon of looking. He saw nothing but ordinary leaf cells and wrote that the trouble must be the weather after all.

¶5The professor was wrong, but he could not have known better. The microscopes of his day could not show the tiny threads of a fungus inside a leaf. Today we know that many plant diseases are caused by fungi, which spread by spores, tiny cells carried by wind and water. A spore lands on a leaf and grows into threads that feed on the living tissue. Different fungi leave different marks: rusts produce orange spots, mildews coat leaves with white powder, and scabs cause dark patches. Because each kind of fungus damages a leaf in its own way, the pattern of damage often points to the culprit.

¶6Crane's leaves proved useful because a fungus leaves traces of its DNA on the tissue it attacks. By 2002, a technique for copying DNA known as PCR had advanced so far that even a speck of old leaf could provide enough genetic material to be read. Using it, the Dunmore researchers extracted DNA from the dark spots and found that the damage had indeed been caused by a fungus, the same one that attacks orchards in the region today.

¶7Crane herself had hinted at this finding. While her neighbors saw only frost, she noted that similar spots had appeared the following spring on her brother's trees at a farm twelve miles away, where there had been no frost at all. Fittingly, it is not the professor but Crane whom local farmers remember: they still call the disease “Crane's spot.”