영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly ①built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? This puzzle, which researchers ②named after a furniture retailer famous for selling items that require home assembly, challenges the standard economic assumption that value is determined solely by an object's inherent qualities. In a series of experiments, participants who ③assembled a plain storage box were willing to pay nearly as much for their own imperfect creation as they were for a professionally built version, despite being fully aware of its flaws. Labor, it seems, functions as a kind of psychological investment: once effort has been ④pour into a task, individuals become reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly ⑤wasted.

Individuals confronted with a set of options frequently default to whichever alternative requires no active decision at all. Decision-makers often treat the current arrangement as a reasonable ①baseline simply because it already exists, even when switching would plainly serve their interests better. When employees must actively opt into a retirement savings plan, participation rates remain stubbornly ②low; yet when the same plan is presented as automatic unless an employee opts out, participation rises ③dramatically, despite the fact that the underlying financial terms are identical in both cases. Two forces appear to drive this asymmetry: first, the cognitive effort required to evaluate alternatives and initiate change, and second, an aversion to the potential regret that might follow an active decision that turns out poorly. Because inaction carries no such vivid regret, the status quo comes to feel ④riskier than it objectively is, illustrating how mere inertia can ⑤masquerade as a deliberate preference.

Cognitive psychologists distinguish between two modes by which the mind handles information, a distinction that helps explain why experienced drivers can hold conversations while navigating familiar roads without conscious effort. Automatic processing occurs ①slowly, requires minimal attention, and typically operates outside conscious awareness, allowing multiple automatic tasks to proceed without interfering with one another. Controlled processing, by contrast, unfolds more slowly, demands ②deliberate attention, and can generally handle only one demanding task at a time, since it draws upon a limited pool of cognitive resources that becomes rapidly depleted under competing demands. Skills that once required intense concentration, such as reading or typing, gradually become automatic through ③extensive practice, freeing attentional resources for other purposes. This shift explains why novice drivers find it difficult to talk while merging onto a highway, whereas seasoned drivers manage the same maneuver with ④comparative ease. However, automaticity carries hidden costs, since automatized responses can be triggered ⑤inappropriately by habitual cues even when circumstances have changed, occasionally producing errors that controlled deliberation would have prevented.

For much of the twentieth century, memory researchers assumed that once a memory had been consolidated—transformed from a fragile, short-term trace into a stable, long-term representation—it remained essentially fixed, immune to further modification unless the underlying neural circuitry was physically damaged. This assumption, however, was overturned by a body of research demonstrating that _______________, rendering it temporarily susceptible to alteration before it is, in a sense, filed away again. During this narrow window, which typically lasts only a few hours, the memory can be strengthened, weakened, or even subtly distorted by new information encountered in the interim, after which it must undergo a second round of stabilization, a process now widely referred to as reconsolidation. Consequently, what we experience as a stable recollection may actually be a continuously revised construction, reshaped every time it is summoned into conscious awareness and returned to storage.

Eyewitness testimony has long carried weight in courtrooms, yet decades of research reveal that memories of witnessed events are more malleable than most people assume. (A) When individuals who observe an event are later exposed to misleading information about what they saw, whether through a leading question or a conversation with another witness, their recollections frequently incorporate details that never occurred, a phenomenon known as the misinformation effect. (B) Crucially, these distorted memories often feel genuine to the person experiencing them, since the original memory trace becomes blended with the newly introduced information rather than existing as a separate, contradictory record. Such findings have prompted legal systems to adopt cautious interviewing protocols designed to minimize suggestive questioning during investigations. (C) In one classic paradigm, participants who watched a video of a traffic accident and were then asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed into each other reported higher speed estimates and were more likely to falsely recall broken glass than participants asked the identical question using the milder verb hit.

Not every default setting, however, produces beneficial outcomes for the people subject to it. (A) A default that automatically enrolls customers in a costly subscription renewal, for example, can generate continued revenue for a company precisely because inertia discourages customers from canceling, even when they would prefer to stop paying. (B) This example illustrates that the power of defaults is ethically neutral in itself, capable of serving either the interests of the individual or the interests of whoever designs the choice environment. (C) Regulators in several jurisdictions have responded by requiring companies to make cancellation just as simple as enrollment, reducing the asymmetry that defaults can otherwise exploit.

The discovery of CRISPR gene-editing technology gave scientists a tool precise enough to correct a single mistaken letter in the human genome, raising hope for curing inherited diseases. (A) Scientific organizations around the world have therefore drawn a careful line, permitting gene editing to treat disease in existing patients while banning any edit that would be inherited by their descendants. (B) Yet editing a gene in a sperm, egg, or early embryo does not simply change one patient; it alters the genetic code passed down to every future generation. (C) Critics worry, however, that as the technology becomes cheaper and more widely available, this line will become harder to enforce than it is to draw.

This malfunction, harmless as it sounds, reveals something troubling: memory and psychological continuity alone cannot fully settle what personal identity actually requires. Imagine a teleportation device that scans every atom in your body, transmits that information to a distant station, and reconstructs an exact physical duplicate there, while destroying the original body in the process. ( ① ) From the traveler's point of view, stepping into the machine and stepping out on the other side would feel utterly seamless, complete with continuous memories and a sense of having simply walked through a door. ( ② ) Philosophers, however, are troubled by a version of the same device that malfunctions. ( ③ ) Instead of destroying the original, it leaves the original body intact while still creating a perfect duplicate elsewhere. ( ④ ) Now two people exist, each with identical memories and an equally strong claim to being the original traveler, and there is no principled way to say which one is the real continuation of the person who entered the machine. ( ⑤ )

주어진 문장: The comparison, notably, is not with reality but with an imagined alternative that may never have been as good as it seems in retrospect. Modern consumer culture often assumes that expanding the range of available options will automatically make people freer and happier, yet a growing body of research suggests the opposite may sometimes be true. ( ① ) When individuals select from an enormous set of alternatives, satisfaction with the final choice frequently declines rather than rises, even when the chosen item is objectively excellent. ( ② ) This decline stems not from the difficulty of deciding but from what happens afterward, once a decision has already been made. ( ③ ) Having considered so many possibilities, a person naturally imagines the specific advantages that a different, unchosen option might have offered, and this imagined comparison quietly erodes contentment with what was actually selected. ( ④ ) By contrast, someone who chose from only two or three alternatives rarely constructs such an elaborate fantasy of missed advantages. ( ⑤ ) The paradox, therefore, is that abundance can free people from external constraint while simultaneously trapping them in a private cycle of comparison and regret.

No further reminders, willpower, or repeated decisions are required once the initial commitment has been made. The design of behavioral savings programs deliberately minimizes the number of decisions a participant must make over time. ( ① ) At the moment of hiring, an employee is asked only once whether to commit future salary increases to retirement savings. ( ② ) If the employee agrees, that single decision governs all future contribution increases automatically. ( ③ ) This stands in sharp contrast to conventional savings advice, which typically asks individuals to make a fresh decision to save more each time their income changes. ( ④ ) Because each additional decision creates another opportunity for procrastination or reconsideration, minimizing the number of required decisions substantially increases the likelihood that saving actually occurs. ( ⑤ ) The program's success, in this sense, stems less from persuading people to value saving more than from reducing the number of moments at which they could choose not to.