内気と従順.

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

   The geologist Marguerite Vasseur was fearless in the field, scaling cliff faces her colleagues refused, and she lectured to packed halls without a flicker of embarrassment. Her hesitation was of an entirely different kind: certain that her own measurements could not be as sound as those of the senior surveyors, she left eleven years of maps in a drawer. Historians now describe her as       — a scientist who buried, for over a decade, the most precise readings of her generation.

   AbashfulBdemureCdiffidentDtimorous

2. 02

   Correspondence between eighteenth-century painters and their patrons usually keeps to a plain courtesy: a request, a price, a line of thanks. Étienne Mareau's letters to the Duke of Arvenne are another matter. He compares the duke's taste to that of the ancients, devotes a full paragraph to a coat the duke wore in 1764, and only then raises the commission — though on the question of the composition itself he refused every instruction the duke sent him. Editors of the 1871 edition, judging him       rather than merely respectful, cut the openings from every printed letter.

   AdeferentialBdocileCobsequiousDsubmissive

3. 03

   For the last thirty years of his life the composer Aurel Kesler lived in a farmhouse two valleys from the nearest road, returning unopened the invitations of every orchestra that wished to perform his work. The few friends who managed the climb remember the opposite of coldness — long evenings, an affectionate host who talked until dawn, no trace of awkwardness in his manner. Kesler's biographers have therefore had to explain how a man so       could also be so warm.

   AaloofBbashfulCdemureDreclusive

4. 04

   Bronze cools into a shape and keeps it. Wrought iron behaves differently. It is not soft: at a dull orange it still pushes back against the hammer, and a smith who expects it to yield on its own will get nothing from it. Worked by an arm that knows what it wants, though, it will take a curve, hold that curve as it cools, and accept a second one the next morning without cracking. Eighteenth-century gate-makers chose the metal for exactly this reason — no other material in their forges was so       in a trained hand, and none let a two-man workshop attempt the scrollwork that great houses demanded.

   AdeferentialBdocileCsubmissiveDtractable

Shyness, Reserve & Submission — 14語14 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 3語 ／ わるい意味 8語 ／ 中立 3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。

3 positive, 8 negative, 3 neutral. Strength is ranked within this theme only — the numbers are not comparable across themes.