would, couldは仮定法？
先日、mightの用法について、以下の質問をさせていただいたものです。
http://okwave.jp/qa/q8405435.html
ご回答者の方には、大変お世話になりました。mightは、仮定法過去であるかと思っていたのですが、この本文では、仮定法ではなく、推量の意味をもつのだと理解できました。
先日の質問の本文も含めて、その先の本文も載せます。高校教科書ポールスターIIからです。
Several years ago, interviewing candidates for a job, I grew tired of asking, “What experience do you have?” So I decided on a one-question quiz to find out how clever the candidate might be. Here it is:
You are on a yacht over the deepest point in the sea, the Mariana Trench, where you drop an iron ball over the side. How long will it take for the iron ball to reach the bottom of the ocean?
Before reading on, please try to solve this yourself ― paying special attention to how you might solve it.
Did you make a completely wild guess because “there wasn’t enough information”? Did you get lost in the details while trying to come up with “exactly the right answer”? Or did you focus on the two most important problems ― how deep the Mariana Trench is and how fast an iron ball might fall through the water ― then make a guess?
What does this have to do with business or creativity? A great deal. In the real world, we often have to make decisions without having all the information we need.
Suppose, for example, you have been asked to make a marketing plan for a new kind of telephone. You would like to know the number of phone stores in the U.S. Unfortunately, you do not have this figure. What do you do?
One solution [*1would] be to turn to the Yellow Pages of a large city. You [*2could] find the number of stores per 100,000 people in that city, and you could then guess how many stores there were in the whole country.
The question about phone stores is called a Fermi problem, named after Enrico Fermi, who was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Fermi used problems such as this to teach his students how to think for themselves. A Fermi problem does not contain all the information you need to solve it completely.
ここで、[*1would]と、[*2could]について質問があります。
私は、*1wouldも、*2couldも、仮定法過去の用法だと思うのですが、いかがでしょうか。
つまり、*1wouldについては、
(If you were give this question,) one solution would be to turn to the Yellow Pages of a large city.
というふうに、かっこのif節が省略されていると考えることができると思うのです。
もちろん、本文には、かっこの内容は書かれていません。
次に*2couldについては、同じく
(If you turned to the Yellow Pages of a large city, ) you could find the number of stores per 100, 000 people in that city, ～
というふうに、かっこのif節が省略されていると考えることができると思います。
本文には、かっこの内容は書かれていません。
would, couldについて、このような解釈でよいでしょうか。ご意見をいただければ幸いです。
よろしくお願いします。
お礼
回答ありがとうございます。 実際にどんなことが問われるか 書いてくださり よく理解することができました。