慶應義塾大学 医学部 英語
2026年度 解答・解説

①Cities are built for people, but we are not their only residents. They are also full of small lives that we seldom notice. A, urban pollinators—bees, butterflies and hoverflies*—carry pollen from flower to flower even between the buildings, and without them many city gardens would give no fruit. Appreciating how they survive among the concrete can in turn show us how what we plant for ourselves—whether a park or a window box—can be of vital importance to B.

②(a) dawn on a cool Saturday in Osaka, after a night of rain that left the pavements gleaming*, I was one of about fifteen people who gathered (b) small groups outside a station and climbed the stairs of an old office building. Back (c) the 1970s, its roof had been a place to dump broken air conditioners; now it is covered with flower boxes, herbs and a row of white wooden hives. (あ) Although the garden was first created to make the roof more pleasant for office workers, it is now home to thousands of bees, too.

③Led (d) a beekeeper, we took part in a forty-minute tour about the honeybee. The tour is called “The Dancing Map,” a name that comes from how worker bees seem to dance for fun when they return to the hive, when in fact they are telling their sisters where to find flowers. This tour is the latest (e) a series of events run by the Rooftop Bee Club, a partnership between two local people: a primary-school teacher and a florist.

④“We wanted to change how people feel about insects in the city,” the teacher told me. “We were mainly interested in the small creatures that people tend to be afraid of. (い) We wondered how we could turn this into a bigger conversation and perhaps show the bees’ side of things.” For each tour, the two organisers study the insects closely, learning (f) beekeepers, scientists and the neighbours who live beside the hives.

⑤Although many city people dislike insects, others form friendships with them. One woman who lives beneath the roof has watched the hives from her window almost every day. C, she is so familiar with them that she has names for individual queens, such as “Hanako” for a particularly old one.

⑥“It is easy to see bees as simple honey machines,” said the florist, “but a hive has its own busy society, with jobs and rules of its own that we influence but cannot control.” Indeed, on “The Dancing Map,” she describes the bees as (う) “our small neighbours.”

⑦We had not yet seen a single bee leave the hive as we reached the far corner of the roof, a quiet space behind the water tanks. (え) There the hum of the wings was louder than the traffic, and now and then it was broken by the click of the beekeeper’s tools.

⑧Finally we reached the flower boxes, where the bees gather at the end of a warm morning. One bee was pushing deep into a tiny blossom, but there were no butterflies yet. Then, in the corner of a lavender bush, my camera caught the glint of a transparent wing.

⑨“We don’t take you to a secret place,” the florist said. “All the flowers you see are ones you could pass on any day. (お) Just looking more closely and more slowly can show you something remarkable.”

⑩Throughout the tour, the organisers raise questions about our assumptions about insects and how humans have changed the world around them, whether by planting gardens or by pouring concrete.

⑪The morning ended beside a small rooftop pond, fed by rainwater from the building’s roof, with the glass towers of the business district reflected in its surface. (か) In the countryside, bees would drink at ponds like this; here, human design has created a new place for them to live. The Rooftop Bee Club asks that we notice our part in this shared city, and perhaps (き) think twice about what we plant: it could be another creature’s next meal.

Few things about modern shopping seem more obvious than the idea that more choice is better. Walk into any large supermarket and you will find dozens of kinds of bread and hundreds of kinds of cheese. And (1) it is possible that the most confused shoppers never appear in the statistics at all: according to one small survey, a common reason people give for leaving a shop with nothing is…that they could not decide.

You might assume the explanation is straightforward: we are happier when we can find exactly what we want. ア. A wider range of options often leaves people less satisfied with what they finally choose. Shoppers today spend far longer comparing products than shoppers did a generation ago. (2) “The main finding is that people with more options spend a lot more time deciding and a lot less time enjoying what they chose,” says a consumer researcher at a business school. But “the amount of money they spend is pretty much exactly the same.” (3) さらに、調査は、最も多くの選択肢があると感じている人ほど、結局は最初の選択に戻ることが多いことも示している。

What is going on? Part of the answer is simple arithmetic. As the number of options grows, the number of possible comparisons grows even faster, and so does the chance that we will imagine something better that we could have picked. But it is also a result of how shopping itself has changed. (4) In earlier eras, when shops were small and sold mostly local goods, choosing could certainly be tiring—but it ended when the shelves ended.

But in the age of online shopping, イ. We live in an “endless aisle,” as one retail analyst puts it. There is always another product, another review, another discount, and a few more clicks mean you can easily compare another dozen items at home, on holiday, or on the train. The result, ウ, is feeling stuck: we are each limited human beings, with limited time and attention, trying to judge an unlimited number of options. We feel a social pressure to make “the best choice,” at home and at work, but that is not just really difficult; エ.

(5) With so many alternatives pulling at us, it is hardly surprising that we keep one eye on the choices we did not make. But psychological research suggests that this kind of regret actually lowers satisfaction (not to mention making us slower). So (6) the ironic result of having more choice is that we enjoy what we pick less than if we had been offered fewer options. Psychologists describe this as a problem of “mental load”: worry and doubt (a) on the mind, thereby (b) judgment. When you are overwhelmed, you are more likely to choose badly—agreeing to things you do not want, or (c) hours to trivial details instead of what matters. A vicious circle (d) in: your worry about choosing leaves you even more overwhelmed than before.

Arguably worst of all, this mindset (e) into our free time—so that even a quiet evening can (f) into hours of comparing reviews and ranking things, as if leisure itself should be “efficient.” “The most harmful thing is this habit of applying ratings to parts of life that should, by their nature, be free of them,” argues a food writer who runs a popular cooking blog. She watched it happen to her own hobby. “I used to cook for friends just for fun,” she says. “But now the posting and rating has become its own オ.”

If there is a solution to the problem of too much choice, other than a limit on how many products a shop may sell, it may lie in (g) in mind just how little the “perfect” choice matters. Historically, the clearest sign of wealth was having plenty to choose from: (7) a table with many dishes, a wardrobe with many coats, was proof that a household could afford to be picky. Now, the sheer number of options is available to nearly everyone, and its value has fallen.

To see how odd it is to value sheer variety, consider a story about a baker. Early in her career, the baker “was not very good at it: the loaves were often too dark, and she was slow.” Still, customers were happy to pay and to leave a small tip. As she got better and faster, though, they complained about the price and stopped tipping. You would think they would value fresh bread on the table sooner. But what they really wanted was カ—even if it meant a longer wait. (8) 私たちは、商品だけでなく、自分の人生までも、選択肢の数で評価してしまいがちだ: we measure the worth of a life not by what we choose but by how many doors we keep open. We live restless lives, at least in part, because keeping every option open makes us feel safe. To put it mildly, this makes no sense. Perhaps we would stop long enough to see (9) that—if we were not so afraid of missing out.