社学の以下の英文は大学受験生にとっては難しい部類に入ると思います。英語を「訳して」勉強してきた人には特にむずかしいのではないでしょうか。英語のまま読み砕いて、設問に進めば、不明だった点も合点がいく、という問題。
MARK TWAIN regarded trial by jury as “the most ingenious and infallible agency for defeating justice that human wisdom could contrive”. He would presumably approve of what is happening in Russia and Britain. At the end of 2008, Russia abolished jury trials for terrorism and treason. Britain, the supposed mother of trial by jury, is seeking to scrap them for serious fraud and to ban juries from some inquests. Yet China, South Korea and Japan are moving in the opposite direction, introducing or extending trial by jury in a bid to increase the impartiality and independence of their legal systems. Perhaps what a British law lord, the late Lord Devlin, called “the lamp that shows that freedom lives” burns brighter in Asia these days.
たとえば、下線部について、n a bid to (do)を知っている受験生は少ないと思います。しかし、英文の流れが分かれば、この設問の正解、c. in an attempt toが選べるでしょう。
さて、この英文の冒頭で引用されているMark Twainの文章は、以下で読むことができます。これを読むと、'the supposed mother of trial by jury'についても、「なるほど」ということになります。
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Roughing_It/Chapter_XLVIIIThe men who murdered Virginia's original twenty-six cemetery-occupants were never punished. Why? Because Alfred the Great, when he invented trial by jury and knew that he had admirably framed it to secure justice in his age of the world, was not aware that in the nineteenth century the condition of things would be so entirely changed that unless he rose from the grave and altered the jury plan to meet the emergency, it would prove the most ingenious and infallible agency for defeating justice that human wisdom could contrive.（このサイトは音声付です。この章だけでも音声を利用して繰り返し勉強するとよいと思います。）
なお、このEconomistの記事の題名、副題は、The jury is out：European countries are restricting jury trials; Asian ones expanding themです。「要約」として読めるでしょう。http://www.economist.com/node/13109647
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