IELTSリーディング 解き方のコツ

• 本文を先に読む
• タイトル、サブタイトルは必ず読む
• 時間配分のコツを知る
• 本文を読む際のコツを知る
• 問題文をしっかりと把握する
• 素早く本文に戻る
• 設問別の解き方を身につける

• スコア6.0：23問
• スコア6.5以上：27問以上

• 空欄の穴埋め問題
• 図表の穴埋め問題
• 四択問題
• タイトルマッチング問題

• 前後の文章を手掛かりにして内容を補う
• キーワードになる単語が書いてある場所をすぐに見つける
• 書き換えられている表現に気づく

1) From our earliest origins, man has been making use of glass. Historians have discovered that a type of natural glass – (1)obsidian – formed in places such as the mouth of a volcano as a result of the intense heat of an eruption melting sand – was first used as tips for (2)spears. Archaeologists have even found evidence of man-made glass which dates back to 4000 BC; this took the form of glazes used for coating stone (3) beads. It was not until 1500 BC, however, that the first hollow glass container was made by covering a sand core with a layer of molten glass.   

2) Glass blowing became the most common way to make glass containers from the first century BC. The glass made during this time was highly coloured due to the(4) impurities of the raw material. In the first century AD, methods of creating colourless glass were developed, which was then tinted by the addition of colouring materials. The secret of glass making was taken across Europe by the (5)Romans during this century. However, they guarded the skills and technology required to make glass very closely, and it was not until their empire collapsed in 476 AD that glass-making knowledge became widespread throughout Europe and the Middle East. From the 10th century onwards, the Venetians gained a reputation for technical skill and artistic ability in the making of glass bottles, and many of the city’s craftsmen left Italy to set up glassworks throughout Europe. 

• 第1段落：古代に見つけられたグラスのようなものや、人間が作ったと思われるグラスについて
• 第2段落：ガラス製造がヨーロッパ全体に普及するようになった経緯

• 仕組み、やり方などが書かれている場所を本文から探す
• 関連する箇所を精読する
• 書き換え表現に気づく

Raising the hull of the Mary Rose: Stages one and two
※no more than two words

An important factor in trying to salvage the Mary Rose was that the remaining hull was an open shell. This led to an important decision being taken: namely to carry out the lifting operation in three very distinct stages. The hull was attached to a (9)lifting frame via a network of bolts and lifting wires. The problem of the hull being sucked back downwards into the mud was overcome by using 12 (10)hydraulic jacks. These raised it a few centimetres over a period of several days, as the lifting frame rose slowly up its four legs. It was only when the hull was hanging freely from the lifting frame, clear of the seabed and the suction effect of the surrounding mud, that the salvage operation progressed to the second stage. In this stage, the lifting frame was fixed to a hook attached to a crane, and the hull was lifted completely clear of the seabed and transferred underwater into the lifting cradle. This required precise positioning to locate the legs into the (11)stabbing guides’ of the lifting cradle. (12)The lifting cradle was designed to fit the hull using archaeological survey drawings, and was fitted with (13)air bags to provide additional cushioning for the hull’s delicate timber framework. The third and final stage was to lift the entire structure into the air, by which time the hull was also supported from below. Finally, on 11 October 1982, millions of people around the world held their breath as the timber skeleton of the Mary Rose was lifted clear of the water, ready to be returned home to Portsmouth.

• 問題文で聞かれている内容を理解する
• 選択肢の違いをしっかりと把握する
• 関連する箇所がどの段落に書いてあるかを素早く探す
• 消去法を使い、確実に正解であるものを選ぶ。

Could the same approach also shed light on abstract twentieth-century pieces, from Mondrian’s geometrical blocks of colour, to Pollock’s seemingly haphazard arrangements of splashed paint on canvas? Sceptics believe that people claim to like such works simply because they are famous. We certainly do have an inclination to follow the crowd. When asked to make simple perceptual decisions such as matching a shape to its rotated image, for example, people often choose a definitively wrong answer if they see others doing the same. It is easy to imagine that this mentality would have even more impact on a fuzzy concept like art appreciation, where there is no right or wrong answer.

Angelina Hawley-Dolan, of Boston College, Massachusetts, responded to this debate by asking volunteers to view pairs of paintings – either the creations of famous abstract artists or the doodles of infants, chimps and elephants. They then had to judge which they preferred. A third of the paintings were given no captions, while many were labelled incorrectly -volunteers might think they were viewing a chimp’s messy brushstrokes when they were actually seeing an acclaimed masterpiece. In each set of trials, volunteers generally preferred the work of renowned artists, even when they believed it was by an animal or a child. It seems that the viewer can sense the artist’s vision in paintings, even if they can’t explain why.

• 第2段落：人が絵画が好きな理由はその絵が有名だからか、特に抽象的な概念においては人は他人の意見に同調しがちである。
• 第3段落：アンジェリーナ・ホーリー・ドランが行った研究でも有名な芸術家の作品が好まれた。そして鑑賞者はその作家が多く描いたものを感じることができるようだ。

【A】Easter Island, or Rapu Nui as it is known locally, is home to several hundred ancient human statues – the moai. After this remote Pacific island was settled by the Polynesians, it remained isolated for centuries. All the energy and resources that went into the moai – some of which are ten metres tall and weigh over 7,000 kilos – came from the island itself. Yet when Dutch explorers landed in 1722, they met a Stone Age culture. The moai were carved with stone tools, then transported for many kilometres, without the use of animals or wheels, to massive stone platforms. The identity of the moai builders was in doubt until well into the twentieth century. Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer, thought the statues had been created by pre-Inca peoples from Peru. Bestselling Swiss author Erich von Daniken believed they were built by stranded extraterrestrials. Modern science – linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence – has definitively proved the moai builders were Polynesians, but not how they moved their creations. Local folklore maintains that the statues walked, while researchers have tended to assume the ancestors dragged the statues somehow, using ropes and logs.

【B】When the Europeans arrived, Rapa Nui was grassland, with only a few scrawny trees. In the 1970s and 1980s, though, researchers found pollen preserved in lake sediments, which proved the island had been covered in lush palm forests for thousands of years. Only after the Polynesians arrived did those forests disappear. US scientist Jared Diamond believes that the Rapanui people – descendants of Polynesian settlers – wrecked their own environment. They had unfortunately settled on an extremely fragile island – dry, cool, and too remote to be properly fertilised by windblown volcanic ash. When the islanders cleared the forests for firewood and farming, the forests didn’t grow back. As trees became scarce and they could no longer construct wooden canoes for fishing, they ate birds. Soil erosion decreased their crop yields. Before Europeans arrived, the Rapanui had descended into civil war and cannibalism, he maintains. The collapse of their isolated civilisation, Diamond writes, is a ’worst-case scenario for what may lie ahead of us in our own future’.

• 段落A：イースター島のモアイ像は、イースター島でポリネシア人によって造られたものと考えられ、引きずって動かしたとされる。
• 段落B：昔の花粉からイースター島は元々、青々とした森があったが、ヨーロッパ人が到来した時には、草で覆われ資源に乏しかった。ポリネシア人が生きるために環境破壊を行ったと言う学者もいる。

IELTSアカデミックモジュールのリーディング試験は、設問数が多いため、先に問題文を読んでも覚えきれず、時間のロスになってしまう可能性があるので、問題文から読み進めていきましょう。
まずは、どの段落にどんな内容が書いているかを把握し、問題に取り組みましょう。段落ごとに内容を忘れないよう、ちょっとしたメモを取ることもおすすめします。

問題文の意味を読み違えてしまうと、せっかく本文が読めていても失点につながってしまいます。設問の意味は、しっかりと理解するように気を付けましょう。設問の意味が理解できたら、その内容の関連する本文の段落に戻り、精読をしましょう。そして、正しい解答を導いていきます。