次の英文を読んで設問に答えなさい。

What would you do to earn money if all you had was five dollars and two hours? This is the task I gave students in one of my classes at Stanford University.^*1 Each of fourteen teams received an envelope with five dollars of investment money and the students were told they could spend as much time as they wanted planning. However, once they opened the envelope, they had only two hours to make as much money as possible. I gave them from Wednesday afternoon until Sunday evening to complete the task. Then, on Sunday evening, each team had to send me a summary of what it had done, and on Monday afternoon each team had three minutes in class to do a presentation about its project. The students were encouraged to be entrepreneurial^*2 by identifying opportunities, challenging assumptions, making the best use of the limited resources they had, and by being creative.

What would you do if you were given this challenge? When I ask this question to most groups, someone usually shouts out, “Go to Las Vegas,”^*3 or “Buy a lottery ticket.”^*4 This makes everyone laugh, but most of my students took seriously the challenge to question traditional assumptions, in order to create as much value as possible.

How did they do this? Here's a clue: the teams that made the most money didn't use the five dollars at all. They realized that focusing on the money would actually limit their possibilities. They understood that five dollars was almost nothing and decided to think about the problem more broadly: What can we do to make money if we start with absolutely nothing?

(1)They improved their observation skills, used their talents, and stimulated their creativity to identify problems around them, such as problems they experienced or noticed others experiencing, or problems they might have seen before but had never thought to solve. These problems annoyed people, but were not major ones. By discovering these problems and then working to solve them, the winning teams earned more than $\$$600, and the average profit from the five-dollar investment was 4,000 percent!

So what did they do? All of the teams were extremely creative. One group identified a problem that is common in a lot of college towns: the long lines at popular restaurants on Saturday night. The team decided to help those people who didn't want to wait in line. The members made pairs and made reservations at several restaurants. As the times for their reservations approached, they sold each reservation for as much as twenty dollars to customers who were happy to avoid a long wait.

During the evening, they made an interesting observation. They realized that the female students were better at selling the reservations than the male students, probably because customers were more comfortable being approached by the young women. (2)They adjusted their plan so that the male students ran around town making reservations at different restaurants while the female students sold those reservations.

This team, and some others, earned a few hundred dollars, and their classmates were impressed. However, (3)the team that made the greatest profit thought about its resources completely differently, and made $650. The students of this team determined that the most valuable asset they had was neither the five dollars nor the two hours. Instead, they realized that their most precious resource was their three-minute presentation time on Monday. They decided to sell it to a company that wanted to recruit the students in the class. The team created a three-minute “commercial” for that company and showed it to the students during the presentation time. This was brilliant. These students recognized that they had a valuable asset, one that others didn't even notice, just waiting to be used.

The overall goal of the exercise described above is to demonstrate that all problems can be thought of as opportunities for creative solutions. There are opportunities all around us. At any place and time you can look around and identify problems that need solutions. Some are common, such as getting a table at a popular restaurant, and many, as we well know, are much larger, relating to major world issues. However, regardless of the size of the problem, there are usually creative ways to solve them by using the resources that are already available to you.

【Adapted from What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World, by Tina Seelig, HarperCollins, New York, 2011, pp. 1-8】

〔注〕
• *1 Stanford University: 米国カリフォルニア州にある私立大学
• *2 entrepreneurial: 企業家(起業家)精神にあふれた
• *3 Las Vegas: 米国ネバダ州の都市; カジノで有名
• *4 lottery ticket: 宝くじ券

〔設問〕

• 1. 下線部(1)を日本語に訳しなさい。
• 2. 下線部(2)について、計画を変更する前に行ったことと、変更した後に行ったことを、本文の内容に沿って日本語で書きなさい。
• 3. 下線部(3)のグループが行ったことを、本文の内容に沿って日本語で書きなさい。
• 4. 本文の内容に関する次の文(1)~(5)を読み、正しいものには○、間違っているものには×を、それぞれ記入しなさい。
  • (1) Each group was allowed to spend as much time as it wanted for making as much money as possible with five dollars.
  • (2) Most students thought seriously of various ways to increase the investment by gambling.
  • (3) The average profit of the teams amounted to approximately $\$$200.
  • (4) The students who earned $\$$650 made use of the high value placed on their university.
  • (5) The author gave the challenge to the students to make them aware of the importance of being creative in solving a problem.