Business: English Skills
ビジネスチャンスを活かす英語力UPのために
こんにちは、今月B項を担当させていただきます、周です。
もうすぐ夏ですね。今回はアイスクリームを食べるときに起こる頭痛について一緒に勉強しましょう。オンラインの記事を抜粋し、解説を行いたいと思います。
If it hasn’t happened to you, count yourself as lucky. For many people, eating ice cream or drinking an icy drink too fast can produce a really painful headache. It usually hits in the front of the brain, behind the forehead. The technical name for this phenomenon is cold-stimulus headache, but people also refer to it as “ice cream headache” or “brain freeze.” The good news is that brain freeze is easy to prevent – just eat more slowly. The other bit of good news is these headaches don’t last very long – a minute at the outside.
Jorge Serrador studies brain freeze headaches, not just because he wants to make the world a safer place for ice cream eaters, but also for what they can tell him about how and why the headaches occur (1). He’s hoping that will lead to better ways to treat or prevent them. It turns out it’s hard to study headaches, and a brain freeze headache is one of the few types that can be conjured up on demand (2). Serrador says no one really knows yet what causes them. But there are some theories. For example, Serrador has shown that just before the brain freeze hits, there’s an increase in blood flow to the front of the brain.
“That’s increasing the volume and therefore increasing the localized pressure in that area,” he says. The brain may be interpreting that increased pressure as pain.
“Another theory that’s been put out there is that the cold actually stimulates a nerve in the roof of the mouth,” says Serrador. That stimulated nerve in the mouth goes into overdrive. It sends off a barrage of signals to the brain that once again the brain interprets as “ouch.”
Harvard Medical School headache researcher Elizabeth Loder says it’s not all that surprising to think scientists may learn something important from studying ice cream headaches.
“Some of these things that people think of as silly or whimsical, they’re actually really fascinating,” says Loder, who is also president of the American Headache Society.
This article is part of Joe’s Big Idea, an NPR project to explore how innovations come about.
(From NPR SCIENCE, July 3, 2012, When Ice Cream Attacks: The Mystery Of Brain Freeze, http://www.npr.org/2012/07/03/156155297/when-ice-cream-attacks-the-
mystery-of-brain-freeze)
Vocabulary:
Forehead 額(ひたい)、前額部
Stimulus 刺激、激励するもの
Conjure 祈願する、おりいって頼む
Theory 理論、学説、意見
Overdrive 高頻度駆動、過度な活動
Barrage 連続、集中
Whimsical 変な、妙な
Phrases:
Count…as… (…を)(…と)思われる、みなされる
例：This doesn’t count as a strike against you.
これは君に不利な一撃とはみなされない
I count her as one of my best friends.
私は彼女を最高の友の一人として数に入れている
Refer to…as… ～を…と呼ぶ
例：Christians refer to the mother of Jesus as the Virgin Mary.
キリスト教徒はイエスの母を聖母マリアと称する
As he was considered an indirect descendant, he did not refer to
himself as being from ‘the Matsudono family.
傍流とされた理由で、「松殿家」は名乗らなかった
(All explanations and examples are cited from http://ejje.weblio.jp/)
訳文
(1) Jorge Serrador「ブレーン・フリーズ」による頭痛を研究するのは、アイスクリームを食べる人のためだけでなく、頭痛の発生の仕方や理由について説明できるようにするためです。
…for what…: for the reason that
(2) （研究者にとって）頭痛を研究することは難しいが、「ブレーン・フリーズ」による頭痛は、意図的に操作することができる数少ない種類のひとつであることが解りました。
…be conjured up on demand: be triggered/controlled on purpose
