技量と無能.

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

   In her study of the Antwerp print trade, Marisol Greve dismisses the       explanation that engravers abandoned copper for etching simply because etching was faster. The claim is tidy enough to fit in a caption, and it collapses the moment one reads the workshop inventories: several shops kept both techniques running for thirty years, and the slower one paid better. What looks like a shortcut in the historical record, Greve argues, is usually a shortcut in the historian.

   AdeftBefficaciousCfacileDfelicitous

2. 02

   When the 1957 fisheries talks nearly broke apart, the mediator Hélène Vasseur had no training in maritime law, no prepared text, and — as the Norwegian delegate later put it — no technique anyone in the room could have named. What held the session together was her       management of a room whose alliances shifted by the hour: she offered a concession she had not been authorized to make, absorbed the criticism it earned her, and kept every delegation at the table. Nothing about the performance was tidy, and the treaty it produced was later called clumsy — but there was a treaty.

   AadeptBadroitCdeftDimpeccable

3. 03

   Measured against the work of mature composers, the three fugues Mira Aldana wrote at eleven are not especially skilled: the voice-leading is often awkward and the endings break off rather than close. Nor were they written to suit any occasion — there was no commission, no recital, no examination, only a wet August in her uncle's house. Their interest is entirely a matter of calendar. They are       rather than accomplished, remarkable for arriving a decade earlier than such music has any business arriving.

   AadeptBfelicitousCimpeccableDprecocious

4. 04

   Twenty-two years at the Bergen observatory had made Ingrid Solheim indispensable to its accounts and invisible to its science. So when the incoming director asked her in 1968 to calibrate the spectrograph, she declined: no one had ever trained her on the instrument, and she had long since stopped wanting to learn. She sent him to the ledgers instead, where she was by common agreement a       — three neighboring institutes had copied her system outright, and two had sent their own bookkeepers to Bergen simply to watch her post a month's entries.

   AneophyteBnoviceCprowessDvirtuoso

Skill & Incompetence — 15語15 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 9語 ／ わるい意味 2語 ／ 中立 4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。

9 positive, 2 negative, 4 neutral. Strength is ranked within this theme only — the numbers are not comparable across themes.