要約問題/1989年

次の英文を７０～９０字の日本語に要約せよ。ただし、句読点も字数に数える。

　Some years ago, on a journey to America, I passed the time by asking my fellow passengers to answer some rather strange questions. The first was: 'Which seems to you the larger, an elephant or a second?' After explaining that I meant a second of time and not a second elephant, I then tried to find out what sort of length of time people would consider equal to the size of an elephant.
　One man was a physicist. He insisted that the second must be equal to the distance travelled by light during that interval of time --- which is much larger than an elephant, of course. But most other people voted for the elephant, though there were wide differences in the selection of a time suitable to compare with it.
　Why would most people feel sure that an elephant is larger than a second? Presumably because we think of an elephant as larger than most animals we know, and seconds are smaller than most of the time intervals with which we are concerned. What we are really saying is that an elephant is large for an animal and a second is small as time goes. So we instinctively compare unlike objects by relating them to the average size of their kin.