영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Modern consumer culture often assumes that expanding the range of available options ①will automatically makes people freer and happier, yet a growing body of research suggests the opposite may sometimes be true. When individuals select from an enormous set of alternatives, satisfaction with the final choice frequently declines rather than rises, even when the chosen item ②is objectively excellent. This decline stems not from the difficulty of deciding but from what happens afterward, once a decision ③has already been made. Having considered so many possibilities, a person naturally imagines the specific advantages that a different, unchosen option ④might have offered, and this imagined comparison quietly erodes contentment with what was actually selected. The paradox, therefore, is that abundance can free people from external constraint while simultaneously ⑤trapping them in a private cycle of comparison and regret.

As private companies develop the technology to mine asteroids for rare metals and water, a legal question once confined to science fiction has suddenly ①become urgent: who, if anyone, owns the resources of outer space? Existing international treaties state that no nation may claim sovereignty over celestial bodies, but they say remarkably little about ②whether a private company may extract and sell what it finds there. Some governments have already passed domestic laws ③granting their own companies rights to material mined in space, a move that other nations view as a unilateral attempt to settle a question that should ④decide collectively. Supporters of space mining argue that new resources could ease shortages on Earth and fund further exploration, while critics warn that treating space as an open frontier for extraction risks ⑤repeating the same environmental and political mistakes that colonization caused on Earth.

Picture a woman who receives a plain ceramic mug as a free gift at a conference and, later that afternoon, ①refuses to sell it for anything less than triple its price in the gift shop downstairs. Before she owned the mug, she would never have paid extra for it; once it became hers, however, its value in her mind ②declined sharply, simply because she now possessed it. Researchers have ③repeatedly observed this pattern across many everyday objects, from coffee mugs and concert tickets to office chairs and old furniture inherited from relatives. Owners ④consistently demand more money to give something up than buyers are willing to offer for that very same item, revealing a curious asymmetry rooted purely in possession itself. Some economists argue that this effect explains why negotiations over inherited property so often ⑤collapse, since each side quietly attaches a different value to what it currently holds.

A few years ago, spotting a manipulated video required a trained eye and ①specialized software. Today, freely available applications allow almost anyone to swap a face or fabricate a voice ②convincingly enough to fool casual viewers within minutes. This shift has quietly ③reinforced one of the oldest assumptions in human communication: that seeing and hearing something is a reasonably reliable way to confirm it happened. Journalists now face the burden of verifying footage that once would have been accepted as ④self-evident proof. Perhaps more troubling than any single fake video is the broader effect on public trust, in which genuine footage can be ⑤dismissed as fabricated simply because deepfakes exist.

In the late nineteenth century, the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus undertook a rigorous investigation of forgetting by serving as his own experimental subject. He memorized thousands of meaningless three-letter syllables so that prior knowledge could not skew his results. After learning each list to perfection, he tested his retention at intervals ranging from twenty minutes to a month later. He recorded how many repetitions were required to relearn the material each time. The resulting curve revealed a consistent pattern: _______________. Roughly half of the acquired information vanished within the first hour alone. Yet whatever survived that initial plunge tended to persist for much longer periods. Ebbinghaus further found that distributing study sessions across several days produced better retention than cramming the same repetition into one sitting. This finding, now central to modern learning theory, implies that revisiting material shortly before it would otherwise be forgotten interrupts the decline of the forgetting curve.

Conventional economic wisdom holds that more options are always preferable to fewer. Empirical research on consumer behavior, however, complicates this assumption considerably. When shoppers are presented with an extensive array of choices, they frequently experience heightened anxiety about making the wrong selection and, paradoxically, become less likely to make any purchase or decision at all. Businesses that recognize this dynamic have begun deliberately curating smaller, carefully selected assortments, betting that ___________ can sometimes generate more sales and greater customer satisfaction than abundance.

Facial recognition software has moved rapidly into shopping malls, schools, and apartment buildings. Proponents note that it can unlock doors and speed up identity checks far faster than any human guard. Independent studies, however, have repeatedly found that many commercial systems perform less accurately on women and people with darker skin tones, which means that _______________. Several cities have already reported cases in which an innocent person was detained based on a flawed match.

The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively simple question. If every plank of a wooden ship is replaced one by one over many years, is the vessel that eventually results still the same ship it once was? Most people's first instinct is to answer yes, since each individual replacement seems too small to erase the ship's identity. The puzzle grows far sharper, however, once a second twist is introduced. Suppose a careful collector gathered every discarded plank and reassembled them into a second vessel, built exactly as the original once stood. Two ships would then exist side by side, each with an equal claim to being the genuine one, and no obvious way to decide between them. Philosophers return to this old story again and again, not because they care about timber, but because it forces us to ask whether identity depends on continuous material, continuous form, or _______________.

Long before cognitive scientists possessed the tools to observe the brain directly, Donald Broadbent proposed an influential model suggesting that the human capacity to process incoming sensory information is constrained by a structural bottleneck through which only a single stream of input can pass at any given instant. (A) This basic bottleneck principle continues to inform contemporary explanations of why multitasking so reliably degrades performance on demanding tasks. (B) According to this filter theory, multiple channels of stimulation, such as competing voices in a crowded room, are initially registered at a shallow, physical level, but only one channel is selected for further, meaning-based analysis while the rest are blocked from advancing beyond that early filter. (C) Although later researchers challenged the rigidity of this early selection mechanism, pointing to instances in which unattended information, such as one's own name, nevertheless breaks through and captures awareness, the core insight that attention imposes a genuine processing limit rather than a mere matter of willpower has remained remarkably durable.

주어진 문장: Yet not everyone finds this reassurance convincing. Few ideas in policy debate provoke as much philosophical unease as the notion that a government might deliberately steer citizens toward better choices while leaving every option technically available. ( ① ) Defenders insist that freedom is preserved as long as no option is banned and no penalty is attached, arguing that a citizen who is merely steered, rather than coerced, remains free to choose otherwise. ( ② ) Critics counter that this defense rests on an impoverished notion of liberty, one that ignores how engineered defaults and calculated framing can shape decisions just as powerfully as an outright prohibition would. ( ③ ) If a policy is designed because officials expect it to bypass conscious deliberation, these critics ask, can the resulting choice still be called autonomous, even though no law was broken? ( ④ ) The dispute ultimately turns on what freedom actually requires: the mere absence of coercion, or a decision-making process that remains transparent and undistorted. ( ⑤ ) Until this question is settled, every new intervention promising to help citizens choose better will continue to invite suspicion of quiet manipulation.