東京大学入試問題（2018年2月26日実施）の英語１Bの空所補充問題の解答・解説・和訳・添削です。解答・和訳はオリジナルのものです。また、実際の受験生の３人分の匿名答案の添削も掲載しています。東大志望者の方だけでなく、英文空所補充問題の技術を学びたい受験生も参考にしてください。

問題

１(B) 以下の英文を読み，(ア)，(イ)の問いに答えよ。

　When we think back on emotional events from the past, our memories tend to be distorted by internal influences. One way this can happen is through sharing our memories with others, something that most of us are likely to do after important life events ― whether it’s calling our family to tell them some exciting news, reporting back to our boss about a big problem at work, or even giving a statement to police. In these kinds of situations we are transferring information that was originally received visually (or indeed through other senses) into verbal information. We are turning inputs from our five senses into words. [ (1) ]; every time we take images, sounds, or smells and verbalise them, we potentially alter or lose information. There is a limit to the amount of detail we are able to communicate through language, so we have to cut corners. We simplify. This is a process known as “verbal overshadowing,” a term invented by psychologist Jonathan Schooler.
Schooler, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, published the first set of studies on verbal overshadowing in 1990 with his colleague Tonya Engstler-Schooler. Their main study involved participants watching a video of a bank robbery for 30 seconds. After then doing an unrelated task for 20 minutes, half of the participants spent five minutes writing down a description of the bank robber’s face, while the other half undertook a task naming countries and their capitals. After this, all the participants were presented with a line-up of eight faces that were, as the researchers put it, “verbally similar,” meaning that the faces matched the same kind of description ― such as “blonde hair, green eyes, medium nose, small ears, narrow lips.” This is different from matching photos purely on visual similarity, which may focus on things that are harder to put into words, such as mathematical distances between facial features.
　We would expect that the more often we verbally describe and reinforce the appearance of a face, the better we should retain the image of it in our memory. [ (2) ]. The researchers found that those who wrote down the description of the robber’s face actually performed significantly worse at identifying the correct person out of the line-up than those who did not. In one experiment, for example, of those participants who had written down a description of the criminal, only 27 percent picked the correct person out of the line-up, while 61 percent of those who had not written a description managed to do so. That’s a huge difference. By stating only details that could be readily put into words, the participants had overlooked some of the details of their original visual memory.
　[ (3) ], as indicated by the outcome of possibly the biggest effort ever to reproduce the result of an experiment in psychology. This was a massive project by 33 labs and almost 100 scholars, including Jonathan Schooler and Daniel Simons, published in 2014. All researchers followed the same methods, and they found that even when the experiment was conducted by different researchers, in different countries, and with different participants, the verbal overshadowing effect was constant. Putting pictures into words always makes our memories of those pictures worse.
　Further research by Schooler and others has suggested that this effect may also transfer to other situations and senses. It seems that whenever something is difficult to put into words, verbalisation of it generally diminishes recall. Try to describe a colour, taste, or melody, and you make your memory of it worse. Try describing a map, a decision, or an emotional judgement, and it becomes harder to remember all the details of the original situation. [ (4) ]. If we hear someone else’s description of something we have seen, our memory of it is weakened in that case too. Our friends may be trying to help us when they give their verbal account of something that happened, but they may instead be overshadowing our own original memories.
　According to Schooler, besides losing details, verbalising non-verbal things makes us generate competing memories. We put ourselves into a situation where we have both a memory of the time we described the event and a memory of the time we actually experienced the event. This memory of the verbalisation seems to overwhelm our original memory fragment, and we may subsequently remember the verbalisation as the best account of what happened. When faced with an identification task where we need all the original details back, such as a photo line-up, it then becomes difficult to think past our verbal description. In short, it appears our memories can be negatively affected by our own attempts to improve them.
　[ (5) ]. Schooler’s research also shows that verbalising our memories does not diminish performance ― and may even improve it ― for information that was originally in word form: word lists, spoken statements, or facts, for example.

(ア) 空所(1)～(5)に入れるのに最も適切な文を以下のa)～h)より選び，マークシートの(1)～(5)にその記号をマークせよ。ただし，同じ記号を複数回用いてはならない。
a) All this is not surprising
b) But this process is imperfect
c) This effect is incredibly robust
d) However, it seems that the opposite is true
e) This is without doubt a highly sensitive area
f) This is also true when others verbalise things for us
g) This effect extends to more complex memories as well
h) This does not mean that verbalising is always a bad idea

(イ) Jonathan Schoolerらが発見したと言われていることの内容を，15～20語程度の英語で要約せよ。文章から答えを抜き出すのではなく，できるだけ自分の英語で答えよ。

語彙・語句チェック

distort ~　【動詞】~をゆがめる
internal　【形容詞】内的な
cut corners　【動詞】、近道をする、詳細を省く
colleague　【名詞】同僚
undertake ~　【動詞】~に着手する
reinforce ~　【動詞】~を強化する，補強する
indicate ~　【動詞】~を示唆する
outcome　【名詞】結果
reproduce ~　【動詞】~を再現する
transfer　【動詞】移転/移動する
diminish ~　【動詞】~を減らす，損なう
recall　【名詞】想起
account　【名詞】説明、報告，話
generate ~　【動詞】~を生成する
competing　【形容詞】競合する
overwhelm ~　【動詞】~を圧倒する
fragment　【名詞】かけら
subsequently　【副詞】その後、あとで

(ア)解説

選択肢和訳
a) All this is not surprising「このすべては驚くようなことではない。」
b) But this process is imperfect「しかし，この過程は完全ではない。」
c) This effect is incredibly robust「この効果は驚くほど強力である」
d) However, it seems that the opposite is true「けれども，どうやらその反対が真実であるようである」
e) This is without doubt a highly sensitive area「これは疑いなく，扱いに極めて慎重さを要する領域である。」
f) This is also true when others verbalise things for us「これは，ほかの人が我々に対して物事を言語化する際にも当てはまる」
g) This effect extends to more complex memories as well「この効果は同様に，より複雑な記憶にまで及ぶ。」
h) This does not mean that verbalising is always a bad idea「このことは，言語化が必ずしもよくないものだということを意味しているわけではない」

空所[ 1 ]

正解　b) But this process is imperfect「しかし，この過程は完全ではない」

前後の流れを確認すると、

・we are transferring information that was originally received visually　(or indeed through other senses) into verbal information.「我々は，もともと視覚を通じて（あるいはほかの感覚を通じて）受け取った情報を，言語情報に変換しているのである。」
・We are turning inputs from our five senses into words.「我々は五感を通じて入力された情報を言葉に変えているのである。」

空所[ (1) ]　　　　↑逆接関係↓

　・every time we take images, sounds, or smells and verbalise them, we potentially alter or lose information. 「我々が像や音，においを受容し，それらを言語化するとき，情報を変更したり失ったりする可能性が潜在的にあるのだ。」

となっている。選択肢中で「逆接」を含むのは、b) But this process is imperfect「しかし，この過程は完全ではない」とd) However, it seems that the opposite is true「けれども，どうやらその反対が真実であるようである」であるが、「五感を通じた情報の言語化」と「その欠陥」をつなげるには、b) But this process is imperfect「しかし，この過程は完全ではない」が最適である。