美と装飾.

使ってみる — 4問

おぼえたかどうかではなく、文に合う語を選べるかを試します。 選択肢はすべて、このテーマの語です。意味の遠い語は混ぜていません。 だから「よい意味か、わるい意味か」と「どのくらい強いか」で絞るのが、そのまま解き方になります。

1. 01

   When Harriet Delaine's survey of Andean orchids appeared in 1884, botanists praised its measurements and deplored its sentences. A single observation — that one petal curls inward at dusk — could not reach the reader without three clauses of moonlight and sighing air, and none of that ornament carried any information the specimen had not already supplied. Reviewers objected not that her prose was decorated but that it was      , so heavy with borrowed sweetness that the orchid vanished behind it, and more than one urged Delaine to trust her data.

   AaustereBelaborateCfloridDornate

2. 02

   Household inventories from seventeenth-century Antwerp record an odd asymmetry. Merchant families spent modestly on the back rooms where they actually lived and heavily on the narrow façade facing the street: gilding went on the door frame, which neighbors passed daily, and not on the parlor chairs, which only the family used. Historians now read such spending as       rather than comfortable, since it was aimed at the eyes of the street and paid for nothing the household itself enjoyed.

   AgarishBopulentCostentatiousDresplendent

3. 03

   Critics of the 1820s reserved a separate category for paintings of the high Alps. A canvas of a glacier was not merely beautiful; viewers reported something close to fear alongside their admiration, as if the mountain's indifference to human scale were part of what moved them. Thomas Merrow's Morning Below the Ice-Field was praised as       precisely because it did not inflate its subject: the peak he set above the glacier is, in fact, that large.

   AetherealBgrandioseCopulentDsublime

4. 04

   The Cistercian builders of twelfth-century Burgundy wrote their aesthetic into their rule. Capitals were to be left uncarved, windows unfilled by colored glass, walls washed a single uniform gray; where a Cluniac abbey greeted a visitor with gilded figures, a Cistercian one offered stone and proportion. Historians describe the result as       rather than poor, since the order could easily have afforded ornament and chose to refuse it.

   AaustereBelaborateCornateDvariegated

Beauty, Decoration & Display — 21語21 words

このテーマの全語です。定義を隠して、 よい意味・わるい意味・中立の三つに分けてみるのが、いちばん効く使い方です。 分け間違えた語が、そのまま自分の弱点になります。

Every word in this theme. The best use of it is to cover the meanings and sort the list into positive, negative and neutral. Whichever ones you put in the wrong pile are exactly your weak spots.

内訳：よい意味 8語 ／ わるい意味 5語 ／ 中立 8語。 強さはこのテーマの中での相対です。テーマをまたいで比べる数字ではありません。

8 positive, 5 negative, 8 neutral. Strength is ranked within this theme only — the numbers are not comparable across themes.