영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Smart speakers have quietly become a fixture in many households, ① responding to spoken requests for weather updates, music, or kitchen timers. Behind this simple exchange lies a complex process: the device converts sound waves into text, interprets the meaning using language models, and then generates a spoken reply, all within a second or two. Because these assistants improve by ② learning from millions of interactions, they gradually become better at recognizing regional accents and casual phrasing that once confused them. Still, the technology remains far from perfect. Background noise, overlapping voices, or an unusual sentence structure can cause the assistant ③ misunderstanding a simple request, sometimes with amusing results. Engineers continue to refine these systems, but many admit that truly natural conversation, the kind ④ that flows without repeated commands or awkward pauses, ⑤ remains one of the hardest goals in the entire field of artificial intelligence.

When a customer opens a company's website at midnight with a billing question, an actual employee is unlikely ① to be available, which is exactly the gap that customer service chatbots were built ② to fill. These programs can instantly answer common questions, track packages, and process simple refunds without ③ making anyone wait on hold. Yet the technology has clear boundaries. When a customer's problem is unusual, emotionally charged, or simply does not fit the chatbot's script, the automated replies can feel frustratingly circular, ④ repeating the same suggestion no matter how the question is rephrased. Many companies have responded by designing chatbots to recognize their own limits, automatically ⑤ transfer a frustrated customer to a human agent before the conversation turns into a source of complaint rather than a solution.

A documentary director named Mira first traveled to a remote Arctic glacier to film its towering cliffs of blue ice, which seemed frozen in time. Standing before the ①<u>massive</u> wall, she assumed such an enormous structure could hardly change within a lifetime. Five years later, however, she returned to the very same coordinates, expecting her camera to capture an identical scene. Instead, she discovered that the glacier had ②<u>retreated</u> so dramatically that the ice cliffs, once visible from her original position, had nearly ③<u>disappeared</u>, leaving bare rock and pools of meltwater behind. Comparing the two sets of footage side by side, Mira realized that a transformation she had expected to take centuries was actually happening within a single decade. This encounter convinced her that climate change, which she had previously regarded as a ⑤<u>distant</u> statistic, was in fact a ④<u>trivial</u> process reshaping landscapes before her eyes.

Feed an AI music program a mood, a tempo, and a rough genre, and within seconds it can generate a complete instrumental track, ready to be dropped under a video or used as background music for a small business. The software has studied thousands of existing songs, learning which chord progressions and rhythms tend to sound ① pleasant together, and it ② recombines these patterns into something new rather than copying any single source directly. For independent creators who cannot afford a composer or expensive licensing fees, this has been a genuine ③ breakthrough. Professional musicians, however, remain divided. Some welcome the tool as a quick way to sketch ideas before refining them by hand, while others ④ celebrate that a flood of AI-generated background music could quietly push human composers out of smaller, lower-budget projects. ⑤ the very jobs many musicians once relied on to build a career.

On a summer evening, downtown streets often feel ①noticeably hotter than nearby parks or suburban neighborhoods, even after the sun has set. This phenomenon, known as the urban heat island effect, occurs when cities ②retain more heat than surrounding rural areas because of their dense concentration of asphalt, concrete, and buildings. Unlike soil or vegetation, which absorb and release heat ③instantly, these man-made surfaces absorb sunlight during the day and slowly radiate it back at night, preventing temperatures from cooling. Tall buildings packed closely together also block wind, trapping warm air within narrow streets. In contrast, areas with ④abundant trees and open water naturally stay cooler, since plants release moisture that helps lower surrounding temperatures. To reduce this effect, many cities have begun installing rooftop gardens and ⑤expanding public parks, hoping that additional greenery will absorb less heat than pavement does.

Open a music streaming app on any given morning, and a personalized playlist is usually already waiting, assembled overnight from songs the algorithm predicts will match a listener's current mood. Listeners often praise the feature for introducing them to artists they never would have searched for on their own. Musicians, meanwhile, have mixed feelings about this shift in how audiences discover new music. A song that the algorithm decides not to promote may struggle to reach listeners no matter how well it was written, meaning that _______________.

Elite athletes rarely walk up to a free throw line or a golf ball without first performing a highly specific sequence of movements, a habit sports psychologists call a pre-performance routine. Far from being mere superstition, this consistent sequence serves a genuine cognitive purpose: repeating the same physical and mental steps before every attempt narrows an athlete's focus away from distracting thoughts and toward the specific technical cues needed to execute the skill correctly. Researchers have found that athletes who follow a consistent routine tend to show more stable performance under pressure than those who approach each attempt differently, because _______________. For this reason, coaches now actively teach young athletes to develop and rehearse individualized routines rather than treating them as personal quirks.

To compensate for their carbon emissions, many individuals and companies now purchase carbon offsets, financial credits that fund projects such as planting trees or building renewable energy plants. The idea is appealing: paying for an equivalent amount of carbon to be absorbed elsewhere should cancel out the harm caused by activities like flying. However, critics argue that this system often functions as _______________. For example, a newly planted forest may take decades to absorb the promised carbon, and it could later burn down or be cut, erasing any benefit. Moreover, some offset projects would have happened anyway, meaning the credits fund nothing truly additional. Therefore, relying heavily on offsets allows businesses to maintain harmful practices while appearing responsible. Experts insist that offsetting should complement, not replace, direct reductions in fossil fuel use if the strategy is to remain credible.

Not all environmental changes happen at the same steady pace. (A) A well-known example involves melting Arctic ice, which exposes darker ocean water that absorbs more sunlight and speeds up further melting in a self-reinforcing cycle. (B) Once this kind of threshold is crossed, reversing the damage becomes extremely difficult, which is why scientists consider identifying these points an urgent priority. (C) Some changes accumulate slowly and predictably, while others can suddenly accelerate once a critical threshold, known as a tipping point, is crossed.

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