영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

A growing number of people are practicing what is now called digital detox, the deliberate decision ①to stop using smartphones for a set period. Rather than checking notifications every few minutes, participants unplug for a weekend, a week, or sometimes even longer. Numerous studies suggest that this temporary withdrawal ②produce real benefits for both the mind and the body. First, attention spans ③fragmented by constant notifications gradually recover, allowing people to concentrate on single tasks for longer stretches. Second, avoiding screens before bedtime improves sleep quality, since blue light ④emitted by devices is known to disrupt natural sleep cycles. Third, people freed from their phones often rediscover the pleasure of face-to-face conversations ⑤that had been replaced by texting.

Minji spent nearly every evening ①watched Jimin, an online creator who streamed cooking videos and chatted casually with her viewers. Over several months, Minji began to feel as though she truly knew Jimin, ②laughing at her jokes and worrying whenever she mentioned having a difficult week. Whenever Jimin responded to a comment, even a simple one, Minji felt a small thrill of connection, as if they ③were becoming closer friends. One day, Minji excitedly waited outside a fan event, ④hoping that Jimin would recognize her from the countless messages she had sent. However, Jimin greeted her the same way she greeted every other stranger in line, ⑤without any hint of personal recognition.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed a concept now known as Dunbar's number, suggesting that human beings can only ①abandon about one hundred fifty stable social relationships at any given time. This limit, he argued, comes from the size of the human brain, which ②restricts how many meaningful connections a person can cognitively manage. In contrast, many social media users today have hundreds or even thousands of online friends and followers, a number far ③exceeding what Dunbar's research predicts. However, having numerous digital contacts does not necessarily mean that all of these relationships are ④close or emotionally supportive. Most users, when asked, admit that they interact regularly with only a small fraction of their total followers, while the rest remain largely ⑤unnoticed.

Only a decade ago, translation apps produced sentences so ①awkward that users often laughed at the results rather than trusting them. Today, many of these apps rely on neural networks that analyze entire sentences at once, capturing context instead of translating word by word. This shift has made everyday tasks such as reading a foreign menu or chatting with an overseas friend remarkably ②chaotic. Frequent travelers now point their phone cameras at street signs and receive an ③instant translation overlaid on the screen. Even so, the technology still struggles with humor, sarcasm, and cultural nuance, areas where a single wrong word can ④completely change the intended meaning. For this reason, professional translators argue that these apps are best treated as a helpful ⑤starting point rather than a final, polished result.

Psychologists have long studied a mechanism called the variable reward schedule, in which rewards arrive ①predictably rather than after every single action. Slot machines famously exploit this principle, and social media notifications operate on strikingly similar logic. When someone posts a photo, they cannot predict exactly when likes will appear, nor how many they will eventually receive. This uncertainty triggers a small burst of dopamine each time the phone is checked, regardless of whether the result is ②disappointing or thrilling. Consequently, users often refresh their feeds ③compulsively, hoping the next check will finally bring a satisfying reward. What makes this troubling is that technology companies ④deliberately designed notification systems using insights borrowed from gambling research, rather than stumbling upon them by accident. Such practices raise serious ethical questions about ⑤manipulating users' brains for profit.

Internet activist Eli Pariser introduced the term filter bubble to describe a phenomenon created by online algorithms. Social media platforms and search engines ①constantly track which links users click and how long they linger on certain posts. Based on this data, algorithms ②predict what each individual is most likely to enjoy and quietly prioritize similar content in future results. As a result, two people who type the same search query can receive strikingly different results, each tailored to personal history. This automatic filtering happens ③silently, without users ever deciding to limit what they see. Consequently, many people gradually ④gain access to viewpoints that challenge their existing beliefs, even though they never intended to avoid them. Pariser warned that this invisible curation could weaken democratic debate by narrowing public discussion. Therefore, some experts argue that platforms should reveal how content is filtered, letting users ⑤knowingly escape their own bubbles.

Social media algorithms are designed to keep users engaged by showing them content they are likely to enjoy. (A) As a result, users are gradually exposed to a narrower and narrower range of perspectives over time. (B) This pattern, known as an echo chamber, can eventually lead to greater political polarization within a society. (C) To achieve this goal, the algorithms recommend posts and articles similar to what a user has already liked or shared.

After a strenuous workout, muscle fibers experience thousands of microscopic tears, and the body immediately begins a repair process that depends heavily on amino acids, the building blocks that protein supplies. (A) Waiting too long to eat, however, can slow this recovery, since a muscle's sensitivity to amino acids gradually declines once that window closes. (B) Even so, eating an enormous quantity of protein in a single sitting will not speed things up any further, because the body can only use a limited amount at once, burning or storing the rest. (C) This is precisely why sports scientists recommend consuming protein within a couple of hours after a workout, while the muscle is still especially receptive to it.

When the body fights off an infection, the immune system relies heavily on adequate sleep to function effectively. (A) Rather than being a passive state in which the body simply rests, sleep functions as an active period during which the immune system repairs itself and prepares for future threats, which is why doctors often recommend extra sleep when someone is fighting an illness. (B) Chronic sleep deprivation also appears to promote low-grade inflammation throughout the body, a state that has been linked to a higher risk of heart disease and other chronic conditions. (C) During deep sleep, the body produces and releases cytokines, proteins that help regulate immune responses, and people who consistently sleep fewer than six hours a night show measurably weaker antibody responses after vaccination.

The technology listens to audio, breaks it into individual sounds, and matches those sounds against a massive library of words and phrases to predict what was actually said. Turning on automatic captions used to mean settling for garbled text full of obvious errors, but recent speech-recognition models have made same-language captions accurate enough that many viewers now leave them on by default, even when watching content in their native language. ( ① ) For viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, this improvement has quietly transformed everyday access to video content that once required a human transcriber and a considerable amount of time to caption properly. ( ② ) The system still stumbles over overlapping speakers, strong accents, and specialized vocabulary such as medical or technical terms. ( ③ ) It occasionally produces captions that are unintentionally funny. ( ④ ) Even with these flaws, most users agree that imperfect captions are far more useful than no captions at all. ( ⑤ )