英語検定ライティング準１級（第74回）

タイトル「全ての英単語は複数の意味を持つのか？」

Yes, this suggestion is acceptable.
One reason makes the opinion supportable.

英文を読んでいると、訳し方が分からない単語と出会うことが頻繁にある。また作文をする時に使ってはいけないであろう単語しか思い浮かばないことも多々ある。
There are not a few opportunities for us to encounter an English word whose meaning we don’t know when we read a passage written in English.
Only a word we shouldn’t use hits on me when we are engaged in composing sentences in English frequently.

単語には複数の意味があるからだ。大学受験の問題を見るといわゆる多義語を知っているのかどうかを問う問題もある。選択肢の中にあればそれが正解であることが多い。
Such an accident would happen because an English word has several meanings called “polysemous word.”
We often come across a question which asks us whether we know the existence of an English word with several meanings when we work on the entrance exams.
This question is a quiz with multiple four choices, and one of them is a word with several meanings, after all, such a word is absolutely acceptable as an answer.

初めてそれを痛感したのは、予備校の英語の授業に参加した１回目の出来事だった。名詞「matter」は知っていた。しかし動詞「matter」は知らなかったからである。
1982 was the first time when such a word brought home to an examinee like me ignorance of “polysemous word.”
In those days, a noun “matter” was familiar to me, but a verb “matter” was unknown to me, the former of which means “problem” and the latter means “be important.”
This fact struck me due to the following incident.

後者を知らない受験生には授業を受ける資格はないとまで言った講師は、今の時代には生き残れないだろう。しかしその当時は危機感を与えるのも仕事だったのだ。
An English teacher in front of us argued that an examinee ignorant of two meanings of “matter” cannot be entitled with the right to take an entrance exam, which could have deprived him of the current job as an educator in the modern age, but his utterance was extremely successful because it imposed the examinees present on desperate motivations.
Only now his task seems like something brainwashing.

多義語を知らないと意味が取れない英文がある。副詞「well」と名詞「well」を混同したら大変なことになる。日常会話では「lost job」ではなくて「be fired」が使われる。
There are not a few English sentences we cannot figure out when we have no knowledge about a word with several meanings.
We never fail to be confused when we cannot distinguish an adverb “well” and a noun “well,” the former of which means “successfully,” but the latter means “the place where we can get water,” because these two meanings are obviously different.
Another example is that a phrase “be fired” is used in our daily conversation instead of a phrase “lost a job.”

受験英語では100くらい知っておけば大丈夫と言われている。細かいことではあるが、頻出度は高いので、緻密な暗記をすることをお勧めしたい。
The number of words with several meanings we should lean is said to be less than one hundred, which might be enough when we want to understand the passages given to a senior student of the high school.
These words are so frequently seen in the entrance exams that an examinee should learn them by heart carefully, which is recommendable from me.

This reason makes the question titled above favorable.