理科の実験だけではありません ― experiment

私の勉強不足を露呈するようですが、”experiment＝（理科のクラスでの）実験”という理解しかなかったのですが、”新しいことをやってみる”という、科学・サイエンスにSpecificではない、よりGeneralな意味で用いられる用例もあることを、今日知りました。

もう少し俗っぽく言うと、


手を出す、手を染める


といった意味にも使える表現のように思えます。

昨日のタバコの話題に続いて、10代の若者の喫煙が映画での俳優の喫煙シーンをきっかけにしているという記事です。


Seeing movie characters smoke cigarettes increases the risk that Mexican-American teens will try smoking, according to a new study that calls for movies with smoking scenes to receive an R-rating.

It followed 1,328 Mexican-American adolescents, aged 11 to 13, for four years and noted the types of movies they viewed.

At the start of the study, 10 percent of the adolescents had experimented with smoking, compared with 17 percent by the end of the study. The more smoking scenes they had seen in movies, the more likely they were to experiment with smoking.

"Exposure to movie smoking predicted smoking onset even after controlling for several established risk factors, like exposure to friends who smoke," study author Anna Wilkinson, an assistant professor in the epidemiology department at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, said in an American Association for Cancer Research news release.
(Movies May Tempt Teens to Smoke. US News. December 3, 2009.)