次の英文を読み, 下記の設問に答えなさい。

A critically ill patient lies on a hospital bed, his condition taking a turn for the worse. Suddenly, he feels himself rising up out of his body and floating toward a bright light. But he panics and returns to his body. Later, his doctors ( 1 ) him he was clinically dead for two minutes. What happened to this man? Like millions of other people, he has undergone a near-death experience.

Accounts of this type of incident date back thousands of years, all sharing common traits to link them together. The experience begins with some sort of injury or illness ( 2 ) people to the brink of death, followed by a feeling of great peace and the sensation of rising out of their bodies. They proceed to move through a tunnel toward a bright light, entering into another realm where they encounter an intelligent being who ( 3 ) with them. At this point, they are either commanded to return to their bodies, or they choose to move away from the light, and the experience ends.

Supernatural ( 4 ) of these experiences differ based on prevailing cultural beliefs of life after death. A basic view on the experience might regard the voices in the light ( 5 ) departed loved ones or creatures from another dimension trying to communicate with us.

But from a religious point of view, it would appear that the person's soul had briefly departed their body to journey through the border between a real world and the afterlife, ( 6 ) God, angels or some other form of deity, before returning.

A more scientific explanation centers ( 7 ) the way our brain deals with the information it receives from our senses. When a person is near death, the brain can malfunction and misread the data it receives. A lack of oxygen can be misinterpreted as a floating sensation, while an overload of visual information is seen as a bright, white light. The feeling of calmness has been attributed ( 8 ) an increase in endorphin* levels triggered by the brain during traumatic* events. Later, as patients try to understand what has happened, they filter the ( 9 ) through their belief systems and come up with startlingly similar tales.

There is no way to know for certain whether a near-death experience is really a glimpse into the afterlife or just a trauma-induced hallucination.* But it is possible that this curious ( 10 ) can be helpful for human beings to understand more about the mysteries of death.

• *エンドルフィン
• *心的外傷を引き起こす
• *心的外傷に誘発された幻覚症状

問 空所 ( 1 )~( 10 ) を補うのに最も適したものをそれぞれ選択肢1~4 の中から選びなさい。

• (1)
  • 1.criticize
  • 2.inform
  • 3.warn
  4.observe
• (2)
  • 1.being brought
  • 2.brought
  • 3.to bring
  • 4.bringing
• (3)
  • 1.communicates
  • 2.contacts
  • 3.transmits
  4.serves
• (4)
  • 1.criticisms
  • 2.resolutions
  • 3.interpretations
  • 4.symptoms
• (5)
  • 1.as
  • 2.for
  • 3.with
  • 4.to
• (6)
  • 1.loving
  • 2.having
  • 3.leaving
  • 4.encountering
• (7)
  • 1.to
  • 2.in
  3.on
  • 4.with
• (8)
  • 1.in
  • 2.with
  • 3.to
  • 4.for
• (9)
  • 1.expression
  • 2.experience
  • 3.explanation
  • 4.experiment
• (10)
  • 1.phenomenon
  • 2.thing
  • 3.occasion
  • 4.case