大学入学の本科コース編入前クラスのようなものを学んでいたが、それも今週終わった。日本の大学には無いシステムであるので説明が難しいが、とにかく基本の英語のクラスや代数学、ライティングクラスの全てが終了したわけだ、これで自分の好きな大学へ編入もできる。もちろんスタンフォード・ケンブリッジなどはまた話が変わる。私は続けてこの大学の本科でまだいろいろと学ぶだろう。今の私の生き甲斐は仕事と勉強ともいえるが、これも脳腫瘍のリハビリともいえるだろうか、とにかく多くの感情や思い出を記憶する能力を失った。
さて、今回の最後のクラスで出された問題をここへコピーして、一体アメリカの田舎の小さな大学でどのようなものを学ぶかを残しておきたい。

以下の文を読み、相当する答えを選ぶような類のものだ。
興味があれば答えていただきたい。

タイトル　On a Hill Far Away 　著者　Annie Dillard

In Virginia, late one January afternoon while I had a leg of lamb in the oven, I took a short walk. The idea was to exercise my limbs and rest my mind, but these things rarely work out as I plan. It was sunset by the time I crossed Tinker Creek by hopping from stone to stone and inching up a fallen tree trunk to the bank. On the far side of the creek I followed a barbed-wire fence through steers’ pasture and up to a high grassy hill. I’d never been there before. From the hill the distant creek looked still and loaded with sky. On the hilltop, just across the barbed-wire fence, were three outbuildings: a fenced horse barn, around which a dun mare and a new foal were nervously clattering; a cyclone-fenced dog pen with a barking shepherd and a barking bird dog; and a frame toolshed under whose weedy eaves a little boy was pretending to write with a stone. The little boy didn’t see me. He looked to be about eight, thin, wearing a brown corduroy jacket with darker brown pile on the collar and a matching beaked corduroy cap with big earflaps. He alternated between pretending to write big letters on the toolshed wall and fooling with the dogs from outside their pen. The dogs were going crazy at their fence because of me, and I wondered why the boy didn’t turn around; he must be too little to know much about dogs. When he did see me, by accident, his eyebrows shot up. I smiled and hollered and he came over to the barbed wire. We watched the horses. “How old’s the foal?” I asked him. The golden foal looked like a test model in a patent office–jerky, its eyes not set quite right, a marvel. It ran to keep from falling. ”That one is just one. You’d have to say he was one. . . .” Boy, I thought. I sure don’t know anything about horses. “…he was just born six days ago.” The foal wanted to approach. Every time it looked at us, the mare ran interference and edged the foal away.
The boy and I talked over the barbed wire. The dogs’ names were Barney and Duke. “Luke?” I said. The boy was shocked. “Duke,” he said. He was formal and articulate; he spoke in whole sentences, choosing his words. “I haven’t yet settled on a name for the foal, although Father says he is mine.” When he spoke this way, he gazed up at me through meeting eyebrows. His dark lips made a projecting circle. He looked like a nineteenth-century cartoon of an Earnest Child. This kid is a fraud, I thought. Who calls his father “Father”? But at other times his face would loosen; I could see then that the accustomed gesture of his lips resembled that of a person trying not to cry. Or he would smile, or look away shyly, like now: “Actually, I’ve been considering the name Marky Sparky.” “Marky Sparky,” I repeated, with as much warmth as I could muster. The sun was down. What was I doing chatting with a little kid? Wasn’t there something I should be reading? Then he paused. He looked miserably at his shoetops, and I looked at his brown corduroy cap. Suddenly the cap lifted, and the little face said in a rush, “Do you know the Lord as your personal savior?” “Not only that,” I said, “I know your mother.” It all came together. She had asked me the same question. Until then I had not connected this land, these horses, and this little boy with the woman in the big house at the top of the hill, the house I’d approached from the other direction, to ask permission to walk the land. That was about a year ago. There had been a very long drive-way from the highway on the other side of the hill. The driveway made a circle in front of the house, and in the circle stood an eight-foot aluminum cross with a sign underneath it reading CHRIST THE LORD IS OUR SALVATION. Spotlights in the circle’s honeysuckle were trained up at the cross and the sign. I rang the bell. The woman was very nervous. She was dark, pretty, hard, with the same trembling lashes as the boy. She wore a black dress and one brush roller in the front of her hair. She did not ask me in.
My explanation of myself confused her, but she gave permission. Yes, I could walk their property. (She did not add, as others have, “But I don’t want no kids in here roughhousing.”) She did not let me go; she was worried about something else. She worked her hands. I waited on the other side of the screen door until she came out with it: “Do you know the Lord as your personal savior?” My heart went out to her. No wonder she had been so nervous. She must have to ask this of everyone, absolutely everyone, she meets. That is Christian witness. It makes sense, given its premises. I wanted to make her as happy as possible, reward her courage, and run. She was stunned that I knew the Lord, and clearly uncertain whether we were referring to the same third party. But she had done her bit, bumped over the hump, and now she could relax. She told me about her church, her face brightening. She was part of the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s congregation. He is the powerful evangelist in Lynchburg, Virginia, who has recently taken to politics. She drove, I inferred, 12.0 miles round trip to go to church. While I waited behind the screen door she fetched pamphlets, each a different color. I thanked her kindly; I read them later. The one on the Holy Spirit I thought was good. So this was her son. She had done a good job. He was a nice little kid. He was glad now his required speech was over; he was glad that I was talking easily, telling about meeting his mother. That I had met her seemed to authenticate me to him and dissolve some wariness. The wind that follows sunset was blowing from the western ridge, across our hill and down. There had been ice in the creek. The boy moved closer to the barbed-wire fence; he jammed his fists in his pockets. Whenever I smiled or laughed he looked at me disbelieving, and lifted his eyes from beneath his cap’s bill again and again to my face. He never played at the creek, he said. Because he might be down there, and Father might come home not knowing he was there, and let all the horses out, and the horses would trample him. I had noticed that he quailed whenever the mare in her pen jerked his way. Also there were snakes down there–water moccasins, he said. He seemed tired, old even, weary with longings, solemn. Caution passes for wisdom around here, and this kid knew all the pitfalls. In fact, there are no water moccasins this far north, except out on the coast, but there are some copperheads; I let it go. ”They won’t hurt you,” I said. “I play at the creek,” I said. “Lots.” How old are you? Eight? Nine? How could you not play at the creek? Or: Why am I trying to force this child to play at the creek? What do I do there alone that he’d want to do? What do I do there at all? The distant creek looked like ice from the hill, lightless and unmoving. The bare branches of sycamores on its banks met soundlessly. When was spring coming? The sky was purpling. Why would anyone in his right mind play at the creek? “You’re cold,” I said to the boy. His lips were blue. He tried to keep his corduroy sh
oulders against his bare neck. He pretended not to hear. “I have to go,” I said. “Do you know how to catch a fish when you haven’t got a rod, or a line, or a hook?” He was smiling, warming up for a little dialect, being a kid in a book. He must read a lot. “First, you get you a stick. . . .” He explained what sort of stick. “Then you pull you a thread of honeysuckle. . . and if you need you a hook . . .” We talked about fishing. “I’ve got a roast in the oven,” I said. “I’ve got to go.” He had to go too; Father would be home, and the boy had to set the table for dinner. His mother was fasting. I said so long, so long, and turned. He called, “One more thing!” I looked back; he hesitated a second and began loudly, “Did you ever step on a big old snake?” All right, then. I thanked God for the sisters and friends I had had when I was little; I have not been lonely yet, but it could come at any time. I pulled my jacket collar up as high as I could. He described stepping on the snake; he rolled his eyes and tried to stir me. “I felt it just . . . move under my foot. It was so . . .slimy. . . .” I bided my time. His teeth were chattering. “We were walking through the field beneath the cemetery. I called, ‘Wait, Father, wait!’ I couldn’t lift my foot.” I wondered what they let him read; he spoke in prose, like le bourgeois gentilhomme. “Gee,” I kept saying, “you must have been scared.” ”Well, I was about knee-deep in honeysuckle.” Oh! That was different. Probably he really had stepped on a snake. I would have been plenty scared myself, knee-deep in honeysuckle, but there was no way now to respond to his story all over again, identically but sincerely. Still, it was time to go. It was dark. The mare had nosed her golden foal into the barn. The creek below held a frail color still, the memory of a light that hadn’t yet been snuffed. We parted sadly, over the barbed-wire fence. The boy lowered his enormous, lighted eyes, lifted his shoulders, and went into a classic trudge. He had tried again to keep me there. But I simply had to go. It was dark, it was cold, and I had a roast in the oven, lamb, and I don’t like it too well done.

Dillard states that she wanted to “…exercise her limbs…”In this context, limbs mean:

1.abilities　2.muscles　3.body　4.legs

In Dillard’s essay, she mentions seeing a “foal”. A foal isa/an:

1.sicklyanimal　2.younghorse　3.younganimal　4.oldhorse

Dillard describes the foal as “jerky”. In this context, jerkymeans:

1.shaky　2.rude　3.lumpy　4.sleepy

The woman whom Dillard talks to says, “But I don’t want nokids in here roughhousing.” In this context, roughhousing means:

1.littering　2.loitering　3.beingsilly　4.noisyor rowdy playing

Dillard states that the little boy’s teeth were “chattering.”This means:

1.theboy’s teeth were hurting　2.theboy was getting sick　3.theboy was cold　4.theboy was talking too much

注意深くこの言葉がある周りの文章を読めば、言葉自体の意味は分からなくても何を指しているのかが分かる、それが答えである。

人は生まれて、いつの日か死ぬものだ。70年、82年、あるいは24年と生きたなら後は死ぬだけだ。何もしなくても時間さえ過ぎればそうなる。これは寿命というものだろう。
しかし、たとえ人生が短くとも、ひとり一人が自分のテーマを持ちそれを発信し続けることが大切だ。凡人でも、有名であっても、並みの会社員でもプロでも、自身が何かテーマを持ち生きるということは、この人生を味わう上で極めて大切だろう。
あなたのテーマはどうやって無農薬でおいしい果物を作るか、あるいは新世代の新しい乗り物、反人種差別、究極の人間の住まい、熱帯病原菌の予防と根絶、あるいは究極の音楽など、戦争を始める国の指導者の心理の原因を突き止めてそれをどうして無くせるかなど、キリがないが人として知能のある生き物として、自分ならば何ができるか考えて一生それに費やして生きるもの悪くない。給料が、家族が、独身だなどと屁理屈はいい、これから始めるだけだろう。