영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Bacteria have been cutting up invading viral DNA for billions of years, long before any scientist ①thought to borrow the trick for use in a laboratory. The CRISPR-Cas9 system, as it is now known, relies on a short guide RNA that matches a specific DNA sequence, ②lead a scissor-like enzyme called Cas9 directly to that exact location in the genome. Once Cas9 arrives at the target site, it slices both strands of the DNA helix, and the cell's own repair machinery rushes in ③to mend the cut, often introducing a small change in the process. By supplying the cell with a template during this repair step, scientists can direct that machinery ④to insert a specific new sequence rather than merely disabling the original gene. What once required years of painstaking work to alter a single gene can now, with a properly designed guide RNA, ⑤be accomplished within days, a shift in speed that has reshaped nearly every corner of biological research.

Long before humans learned to drill for oil, microorganisms had already mastered the art of ①converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into stored chemical energy. Modern biofuel research borrows this ability, cultivating algae or engineered bacteria in large tanks where they can be ②coaxed into producing oils and sugars that can be refined into fuel usable in existing engines. Unlike crops grown for corn-based ethanol, which compete directly with food production for arable land, many algae strains can ③thrive in shallow ponds, wastewater, or even coastal seawater unsuitable for conventional agriculture. Engineers have also learned to tinker with the metabolic pathways of these organisms, ④boosted oil yield far beyond what any wild strain would naturally produce on its own. Despite this progress, producing biofuel at a cost competitive with fossil fuel remains difficult, since harvesting and processing the organisms consumes a substantial share of the energy the fuel itself will eventually ⑤provide.

For much of its history, economic theory treated emotion as a distortion to be eliminated from otherwise rational calculation, an obstacle standing between decision-makers and their true self-interest. More recent research, however, suggests that emotion functions not merely as noise but as an ①integral component of sound judgment, one that supplies information conventional reasoning alone cannot readily access. Individuals who, due to specific neurological conditions, lose the capacity to experience emotion while retaining otherwise normal cognitive abilities frequently struggle to make even simple decisions, spending ②excessive time weighing options that most people resolve almost instantly through a felt sense of what seems right. This observation suggests that emotional responses often function as rapid heuristics, allowing individuals to ③bypass exhaustive deliberation by relying on accumulated affective associations built from past experience. At the same time, acute emotional states, particularly fear and excitement, can distort judgment in predictable directions: fear tends to make individuals more risk-averse than their circumstances objectively warrant, while excitement can ④inflate optimism about outcomes that remain, in reality, highly uncertain. Financial regulators have begun incorporating this understanding into policy design, recognizing that decisions made under conditions of acute emotional arousal often depart substantially from the measured judgment that individuals would exhibit under ⑤turbulent circumstances.

Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in ①isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. A struggling artist may judge success not against neighbors but against celebrated painters in art history, a comparison that can inspire ambition or, just as easily, ②breed persistent dissatisfaction. Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, which merely provide a ③benchmark for self-assessment. Robert Merton showed that soldiers who compared their promotion chances to peers within their own slow-moving unit often felt more satisfied than soldiers in units with faster promotion rates, because the latter could see colleagues advancing while they themselves ④surpassed them. This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are ⑤measured.

Working memory refers to the mental workspace in which information is temporarily held and manipulated while a person performs a cognitive task. Such tasks include solving an arithmetic problem, following a rapid conversation, or holding a phone number in mind before dialing it. In the mid-twentieth century, the psychologist George Miller proposed that this workspace could accommodate roughly seven discrete items. His claim proved so influential that it became widely known as the magic number seven. Subsequent research, however, revealed that Miller's estimate was somewhat generous, since it failed to account for the complexity of the material being remembered. Nelson Cowan later argued that when rehearsal strategies are prevented and attention is tightly controlled, _______________. This discrepancy suggests that what earlier studies had measured was not raw storage capacity itself but a hybrid quantity inflated by clever strategies. Contemporary psychologists therefore distinguish between the fixed limit of working memory and the flexible techniques that allow individuals to transcend that limit.

A biosensor works by pairing a biological component, such as an enzyme or antibody, with an electronic device that converts a biological reaction into a signal a computer can read. When the target molecule binds to the biological component, it triggers a small measurable change that the device translates into a readable number. This design has already transformed diabetes management, letting patients monitor blood sugar continuously through a small sensor worn under the skin rather than pricking a finger several times a day. Engineers are now racing to extend the same principle to detect subtler targets, from cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream to trace contaminants in drinking water. _______________.

Suppose a mad scientist removed a living brain from its body and placed it in a vat of nutrient fluid, connecting its neurons to a supercomputer capable of generating perfectly realistic sensations. (A) This scenario, unsettling as it sounds, raises a genuinely difficult question for anyone confident in their own perception: how could a person ever prove that they are not that very brain right now? (B) The brain would experience a full and convincing world, complete with a sky, a body, and other people, without ever suspecting that none of it existed outside the simulation. (C) Ordinary evidence cannot help, since any proof gathered through the senses would itself be generated by the same simulation being tested.

Traditional industrial systems have relied on a linear model of production, in which raw materials are extracted, transformed into goods, and eventually discarded as waste. This approach treats natural resources as if unlimited and disposal as if costless. (A) Because such practices lessen dependence on finite raw materials, they reduce the environmental damage caused by mining. Consequently, the circular economy is increasingly regarded as a viable economic strategy that conserves resources for future generations. (B) A circular economy proposes an alternative framework in which materials are kept in continuous use through reuse, repair, and recycling, thereby reducing the extraction of virgin resources. Central to this model is the notion that waste, rather than being an inevitable byproduct, can be redesigned as a resource for another process, much as fallen leaves nourish the trees that shed them. (C) For example, manufacturers design products so that components can be disassembled and reused in new items once their original function ends. Some companies also lease equipment instead of selling it outright, retaining responsibility for refurbishment.

Anyone who has ever promised to finish a project "by Friday," only to still be working on it weeks later, has experienced the planning fallacy firsthand. (A) One proposed remedy, known as reference class forecasting, requires planners to deliberately consult outcomes from comparable past projects rather than relying solely on their own optimistic intuition. Until such external correction becomes standard practice, ambitious deadlines will likely continue to be broken with remarkable consistency. (B) This term describes the persistent tendency of individuals and organizations to underestimate how long a task will take, how much it will cost, and how many complications will inevitably arise. (C) What makes this bias particularly stubborn is that awareness of past failures rarely leads to more accurate predictions; a construction firm that finished its last three projects late will often insist, with genuine confidence, that this next project will be different. Researchers argue that planners focus almost exclusively on the specific steps of the current task while ignoring the broader statistical record of similar projects that came before.

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