It's essential to measure the ingredients for this dish precisely in order to make it delicious.

preciously 正確に

The president said that going ahead with this project could end up undermining the company's credibility.

社長が言及したのは、この企画を進めると会社の信用に傷が付く可能性があるということだった

undermine someone's credibilityで「…〈人〉の信用を傷つける；…〈人〉の信ぴょう性を危うくする」の意味を表します。この表現を成立させるundermineが正答です。接頭辞under-には「下の；劣っている」という意味があります。undergoは「経験する；変化などをくぐりぬける」、underlieは「根底にある」、undertakeは「…を請け負う；…を保障する」の意味です。

Published: 12:01 am Sunday, June 22, 2014

Like other automakers, Harima is being battered by the plunge in global auto demand after the financial crisis ------- the world in 2008.

amid 真っ最中で

ascend 上昇する

battered　被害をこうむる、殴られる

plunge 思い切ってする、堕落する　 take the plunge 思い切ってする

Astronomer 天文学者

abundant　十分な　豊富な

uninhabitable　住めない

The problems of squaring a pan-European agenda with the national interests of 25 separate countries _____ the process of integration a slow, complex and at times divisive one.

squaring 対決

integration 統合

divisive　不和を生じさせる

commemorate 記念する

Apple Computer has unveiled its new desktop computer design, _____ all disk drives and processors into a flat display less than two inches thick

unveil　公開する

integrate　統合する

After a muscle fiber has worked intensely for a while, it begins to lose potassium, and that dampens the fiber's ability to contract

muscle fiber 筋肉繊維

intensely　強烈に

potassium　カリウム

dampen　湿らせる　damp　湿気のある

Long hours and unsociable shifts _____ take their toll on health, relationships and family life.

unsociable 非社交的

toll １、損害　２、通行料金

International trade in the world's 20-odd varieties of sturgeon _____ by the United Nations since 1998, after a drastic rise in poaching.

sturgeon　チョウザメ

poaching　２０余り

poaching 密漁

regulated　取り締まる

swelling　膨張

contraception　避妊

Greece's achievement in the 2004 Olympics raise anew the question of whether Athens should be the permanent home of the Games.

anew 新たに　改めて

Japan's latitudinal spread, ranging from subtropical in the south to sub-arctic in the north, makes that a wide diversity of flora and fauna.

latitudinal　緯度の

flora and fauna.　動植物

Parents　are poor observers of their child's behavior so deviant behavior reaches unmanageable proportions

deviant 逸脱した　異常性格者

proportion　割合

The 2000 Census showed that married couples made up half of the 2 million households in the state, and 46 percent of those couples had children under roof.

made up 作り上げられた、でっちあげた

Census　人口調査

By far the most noticeable blemishes on the surface of the Sun _____ sunspots

noticeable　目立つ

blemish　欠点

Across the country, recreational and commercial fishers have been pointing fingers for decades over which group is responsible for _____ stocks of sports fish.

recreational 休養の

dwindling　徐々に小さくなること、少なくなること

For decades the food industry has been known serving up sugary or fat-laden products, promoted with ceaseless advertising.

Sugary 砂糖でできた

fat-laden　product 太る食べ物

ceaseless 　絶え間ない

The hospital is now discounting 10 standard operations and _____ , ranging from having a baby and treating a cataract to undergoing a heart bypass.

procedures　

undergoing 経験する

cataract 白内障　大雨、

Charlene: Er, is it the number of births in a population, measured per thousand people per year?

Professor: Oh, er no, that’s what we call the birth rate. The number of children born in a year, per thousand people. No, the fertility rate is the average number of children born per woman in her lifetime, that is, if she lives beyond her child-bearing years. Now, do you think the British fertility level is higher or lower than it was ... say twenty years ago?

Charlene: I think it’s lower, because these days women are far more focused on their careers than they used to be.

Professor: Well, that point is certainly true, but actually, fertility levels in Britain are relatively high at the moment. In 2008, it was 1.96; that means that on average, each woman gives birth to 1.96 children, and in 2009 it was only slightly lower, at 1.94. The last time fertility rates were this high was back in 1973. In the UK currently, the highest rate of fertility is in Northern Ireland, where the rate is 2.04, and the lowest is in Scotland, where the rate is just 1.77.

Charlene: I don’t understand. How come fertility rate is going up? Women are just as career-driven these days as they were thirty years ago.

Professor: Well, the reason is that during the 1990s women really started to delay having families, and that was the reason for the decrease in birth rate then. Now those women are in their thirties and early forties, and they are starting to have families. So that’s why the birth rate is going up.

Charlene: Oh, I see, so it’s not actually as if people are actively choosing to have more children than they used to.

Professor: Yes, that’s right Charlene. The number of children per family is continuing to fall. Women who are currently in their 70s had an average of 2.4 children. Those in their sixties had 2.2, those in their fifties had 2.0, and the current figure is 1.9. Actually, this figure isn’t due to more families choosing to have only one child, although that certainly is occurring, it’s mainly because of the increasing number of women who have no children at all. This figure was 1 in 10 among the age group who are now 65, but now 1 in 4 women in their mid-40s are childless.

Charlene: I heard that the fertility rate in Europe is, like, really low. 1.3 or something.

Professor: That’s right, Charlene. It is. It’s far below the replacement level. Can you tell me what replacement level means? No? It’s the number of births you need to keep the population constant.

Charlene: Yes, I heard that in France they’re trying to get people to have more children. They even give out gold medals if you have eight!

Professor: That’s right. So, we’ve already mentioned that women are waiting before having children because of their careers. Why else is fertility rate generally decreasing?

Charlene: I think they have fewer children because they’re so expensive. I mean, I heard one report that said it costs £200, 000 a year to raise a child here. But I find that difficult to believe. People’s standard of living is far higher now than it used to be a hundred years ago when families had eight or nine kids.

Professor: That’s very true, but these days people’s expectations tend to be higher. Parents want their children to have the best opportunities in life, so they’re prepared to pay to develop their children’s talents.

Charlene: Yes, I heard that in China, where they’re easing off some of the rules of the one child policy and allowing some couples to have two, many parents are still choosing to have one. They say it’s just too expensive. But, you know, I reckon that, with all this parental micromanagement that’s going on these days, parents only have the time to manage one or two children.

Professor: That’s a good point. So, now I’d like to look at some different organisations, and examine what they believe about the current population issues...

child-bearing 出産

reckon　計算する

parental 親の

micromanagement 細部まで行き届いたマネジメント

Her first novel 'The Bell Jar' had just been published and the publication of her collection of poems 'Ariel' had just been agreed. These poems, which were mostly written during the last year of her life, chronicle the traumatic developments taking place in her personal life and were to make for her a reputation as a first rate poet. But it wasn't until 1982, almost twenty years after her death, that her posthumously published 'Collected poems' won the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

Since this time the fascination and intrigue with her work has continued to grow. Very few modern poets have captured the popular imagination as much as Plath, even to the extent that in 2003 a movie was made about her life and her intense relationship with husband and fellow poet Ted Huges. To understand the continued growth in interest in her work, we have to look at the issues which her life and work address.

As Susan Bassnett writes in her book on women writers. 'Dying as she did in 1963, Sylvia Plath never knew that so soon afterwards the problems of what and how women write was to become such a crucial matter and was to be debated by so many other women' So, Sylvia Plath was a woman writing about women's issues before they were recognised as being of any importance.

Sylvia Plath was born at Robinson memorial Hospital in Boston on 27th October 1932. She was the first born child of Otto and Aurelia Plath, both highly educated academic people. Her father Otto was a professor of biology at Boston University, but her mother had been subjugated into a domestic role as housewife despite her level of education.

Her father was not too pleased with the birth of his daughter and demanded that his wife have a son within the next two years. Amazingly enough his wife obliged by giving birth to a son almost exactly two years later. This domineering father figure became a common theme that recurred throughout Plath's writing. With the birth of her brother, Sylvia had to work much harder to win her father's attention and approval. When in 1936 Plath's father became ill, access to him became even more restricted, and Plath's main means of getting attention from her father was by achieving academic success. This meant that from an early age she began to equate love with success.

In 1940 Plath's father died and this left the family in a very difficult financial situation. They were forced to move away from the seaside home that Plath had enjoyed so much and into a suburb of Boston and her mother had to take a part time job to support the family. In 1950 Plath graduated from Bradford High school and won a scholarship to Smith College. In the same year she published a short story entitled 'And summer will not come again' and a poem called 'Bitter strawberries'. Plath's time at Smith was difficult as she had very high expectations of herself. She wanted to achieve immaculate grades, but she also wanted to be accepted by her peers and an important part of being accepted was being popular and dating lots of boys.

This was difficult because as a scholarship girl she had only a very small allowance to spend on clothes and going out, and each year's continued scholarship was dependent on the level of her grades. In 1953 Plath won a fiction contest sponsored by Madamouselle magazine and was offered the opportunity to go to New York as a guest editor. She relished this opportunity to spend a month working in a professional publishing environment, but Plath returned from New York feeling exhausted and after hearing news that her application to a creative writing course had been rejected, she fell into what was to become one of many depressions.

finest 最高の

verge 端の

sought 求められている

chronicle 年代史

posthumously 遺作の

fascination 魅了された

fellow ボーイフレンド

afterwards 後に

subjugate 従属している　支配されている

obliged ～せざるをえない

domineer　傲慢な

reccure 繰り返される

immaculate 汚れ一つない

peer 同僚

relish　味わう

At first, it would appear that this question is impossible to answer. To find out how grammar is created, someone needs to be present at the time of a language's creation, documenting its emergence. Many historical linguists are able to trace modern complex languages back to earlier languages, but in order to answer the question of how complex languages are actually formed, the researcher needs to observe how languages are started from scratch. Amazingly, however, this is possible.

Some of the most recent languages evolved due to the Atlantic slave trade. At that time, slaves from a number of different ethnicities were forced to work together under colonizer's rule. Since they had no opportunity to learn each other's languages, they developed a make-shift language called a pidgin.

Pidgins are strings of words copied from the language of the landowner. They have little in the way of grammar, and in many cases it is difficult for a listener to deduce when an event happened, and who did what to whom. [A]
Speakers need to use circumlocution in order to make their meaning understood. [B]
Interestingly, however, all it takes for a pidgin to become a complex language is for a group of children to be exposed to it at the time when they learn their mother tongue. [C]
Slave children did not simply copy the strings of words uttered by their elders, they adapted their words to create a new, expressive language. [D] It included standardised word orders and grammatical markers that existed in neither the pidgin language, nor the language of the colonizers. Complex grammar systems which emerge from pidgins are termed creoles, and they are invented by children.

Further evidence of this can be seen in studying sign languages for the deaf. Sign languages are not simply a series of gestures; they utilise the same grammatical machinery that is found in spoken languages. Moreover, there are many different languages used worldwide. The creation of one such language was documented quite recently in Nicaragua. Previously, all deaf people were isolated from each other, but in 1979 a new government introduced schools for the deaf. Although children were taught speech and lip reading in the classroom, in the playgrounds they began to invent their own sign system, using the gestures that they used at home.

It was basically a pidgin. Each child used the signs differently, and there was no consistent grammar. However, children who joined the school later, when this inventive sign system was already around, developed a quite different sign language. Although it was based on the signs of the older children, the younger children's language was more fluid and compact, and it utilised a large range of grammatical devices to clarify meaning. What is more, all the children used the signs in the same way. A new creole was born.

Some linguists believe that many of the world's most established languages were creoles at first. The English past tense –ed ending may have evolved from the verb 'do'. 'It ended' may once have been 'It end-did'. Therefore it would appear that even the most widespread languages were partly created by children. Children appear to have innate grammatical machinery in their brains, which springs to life when they are first trying to make sense of the world around them. Their minds can serve to create logical, complex structures, even when there is no grammar present for them to copy.

sequences 連続、続発

auxiliary verb 助動詞

subtle　微妙な

inherent　本来の

primitive　原始の、太古の

component　構成

distinguish　区別する

baffle　困惑させる

linguists 語学者

trace　足跡　

string　ひも

deduce 推測する

circumlocution 回りくどい言い方

uttere　全くの

adapted 改造した

deaf　耳の聞こえない

utilise　利用する

isolated 孤立した

innate　生まれつきの

Good afternoon everyone. We have gathered you all here to announce that our company has purchased a manufacturing plant overseas. While we truly wish we could keep all of you on board, it is simply not possible at this time.

①Some of the assembly team will receive notice over the next few weeks that your jobs have been eliminated. Some of those jobs are going to the new plant, and some are just being phased out.

②All of you will receive two months severance pay, which is twice the industry standard. The new plant will require management, so ③some of the floor supervisors will be asked to relocate to train the new staff. Others will be offered early retirement packages. Beyond that, we don't expect to make any other personnel changes.

phased out　業務廃止

Severance pay　離職手当

recolate 転職