例文（かなり長い）

いろいろとご意見を頂いてますが、まず私の実力紹介を兼ねて希望図書の英文をあげておきたいと思います。意見についての考えは後日書きます。
まず、最新の私のTOEICの結果が来ました。705点で、リーディングは385点です。大差でリーディングが高いという結果です。その前は２年近く前になり、受験参考書で再学習して１年弱です。

では、TIMEの単文から。
It was just a few months after then A.N.C. leader Chief Albert Luthuli was awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize that Mandela urged the party leadership to take up arms.
これは理解できます。速度もそれほど落とさなくてもわかります。
次はまったくだめ。解説で理解できますが、無手勝流とはいきません。これはTIME独特の文体によるもので、わかりにくくやめてほしいなと思ってしまいます。
Even so, De Klerk speaks wistfully about “grand apartheid” as a system that might have worked in South Africa had all the nation’s diverse ethnic and tribal groups accepted geographic separation voluntarily.

次にまとまった文例をあげます。
TIMEのESSAYより、What Oscar Wilde Knew About Japanの最終パラグラフを。こういう感じの文章が非常に多かったです。文化的背景を必要とする場合も少なくはないですが、それがなくても難しいときは難しいです。
Perhaps the best illustration of this can be found in the best-selling novel about six days in the life of an English butler, The Remains of the Day. The book reads almost like a handbook of traditional Japanese values: a samurai-like loyalty to a master, a quiet and impenitent nationalism, a sense that self is best realized through self-surrender. Many of the scenes--- in which the butler speaks to his father in the third person, talks of “military-style pep talks” to his staff and resolves to practice “bantering”---might almost be translated from the Japanese. Yet here are all these values, in the midst of an instantly recognizable England, in 1956! The book’s author, Kazuo Ishiguro, who moved to England from Nagasaki at the age of five, grew up simultaneously as a Japanese and a English schoolboy, and so can see that the two are scarcely different. “I think there are a lot of things about the Japanese way of communicating that I don’t know about,” he says, “simply because I don’t know my way around the code. But the actual Japanese method, the actual approach, I think I’m quite at home with---because I’ve been brought up in middle-class England.” Japan, as Wilde might have said, is only as alien as ourselves.

The Economistから昨年のロンドン連続テロ事件のリーダー記事、London Under Attackより冒頭部分。これでこの雑誌では中級くらいと思います。残念ながらこのレベルになると厳しくなります。
Once it had happened, it produced an awful feeing of inevitability. The series of terrorist attacks on London’s Underground and bus system at the end of the morning rush hour on July 7th were presumably timed to coincide with the opening meeting of the G8 rich-country summit in Gleneagles in Scotland. The fact that less than a day earlier London had been filled with jubilation at having won the race to host the 2012 Olympic games may have given the perpetrators an extra dose of satisfaction. We shall never know, but nor, actually, should we care. Such a pointless display of brutality should instead bring forth two thoughts. One is that the surprise should be that this has not occurred sooner. The other is that such attacks should not, and will not, make any difference to the way Londoners live and work.
As soon as the atrocities of New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania took place on September 11th 2001, London was assumed to be at risk of attack. That was so both because of its status as an international financial centre, an epitome of the West and its capitalist ways, and because Britain has long been a close ally of the United States, enemy number one for al-Qaeda and its terrorists associates.

冥王星が惑星から降格したのを受けてInfinite in All DirectionのEngineer’s Dream内の１パラグラフから。この部分はこの本の中では一番易しい部類で、私は理解できます。他の部分は著者の思いもよらないアイデアの観測機械（宇宙蝶）の話があったり、レーガンのスターウォーズ計画の検討など、概念性や哲学性の強いものになっています。海王星についてはどうだったかは知りません。なお、Freeman Dysonはノーベル賞級の物理学者として有名です。ノーベル賞が３人までのため、朝永の受賞のとき彼は外されました。
The JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) engineers managed to perform another new trick at Uranus which they had not done at Jupiter and Saturn. After passing by Uranus, the spacecraft went behind the planet as seen from the Earth. It was behind Uranus for eighty-three minutes before it reappeared on the other side. During the whole of this hour-long eclipse, the Voyager high-gain antenna was kept accurately pointed at the edge of Uranus, so that the transmitted signal might be refracted around Uranus within the Uranus atmosphere and from there continue on its way to Earth. The signal coming from Voyager to Earth, after creeping around the planet through the Uranus atmosphere, was detected from beginning to end of the eclipse. As a result, we now have precise knowledge of the structure of the Uranus atmosphere down to a pressure of three Earth atmospheres. This at a distance of 2 billion miles with a spacecraft which was launched nine years ago. All of us who were there in the room at JPL were deeply impressed. That was an engineer’s dream which came true. We agreed to meet again at JPL on August 25, 1989, for the encounter with Neptune.