영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Picture a woman who ①receive a plain ceramic mug as a free gift at a conference and, later that afternoon, refuses to sell it for anything less than triple its price in the gift shop downstairs. Before she ②owned the mug, she would never have paid extra for it; once it became hers, however, its value in her mind rose sharply, simply because she now possessed it. Researchers have repeatedly observed this pattern across many everyday objects, from coffee mugs and concert tickets to office chairs and old furniture ③inherited from relatives. Owners consistently demand more money ④to 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 collapse, since each side quietly ⑤attaches a different value to what it currently holds.

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.

A hamburger patty need not come from a slaughtered animal at all if a small sample of muscle cells can be ①discouraged to multiply inside a steel tank. Cultured meat begins with a biopsy of animal muscle tissue, from which scientists isolate cells capable of dividing repeatedly, then feed those cells a nutrient broth that supplies the sugars, proteins, and minerals an animal's bloodstream would ②normally provide. Inside a bioreactor, the cells multiply across scaffolding designed to encourage them to align into fibers, ③gradually thickening into something that begins to resemble muscle tissue rather than a shapeless clump of cells. Supporters argue that because the process never requires raising and slaughtering a whole animal, it could shrink the land, water, and greenhouse gas emissions ④associated with conventional meat production. Skeptics counter that producing the specialized broth at a large enough scale remains prohibitively ⑤expensive, meaning cultured meat is unlikely to compete with conventional meat in price until the technology matures considerably further.

Facing a shortage of caregivers and a rapidly aging population, several countries have begun deploying robots designed to remind elderly residents to take medication, monitor for falls, and even offer simple conversation throughout the day. Early trials show that many residents report ①reduced loneliness, particularly when a robot's presence allows an overworked human staff member to spend a few extra minutes with each patient rather than rushing between rooms. Critics, however, worry that this framing quietly ②shifts the goal of care: instead of asking how technology can support human connection, institutions may come to treat a robot's companionship as an ③unacceptable substitute for it. Advocates for the elderly argue that robots should be evaluated strictly as tools that free up human time for human contact, ④never as a lower-cost replacement for the contact itself, since human presence remains ⑤irreplaceable.

Social media platforms rarely show users a neutral stream of information. Instead, recommendation algorithms are ①optimized to maximize engagement, and content that provokes strong emotion, particularly outrage, tends to hold attention longer than balanced reporting ever could. Over time, users exposed to a steady diet of emotionally charged content may come to believe that extreme opinions are far more ②common than they actually are, simply because those opinions dominate their feed. Researchers describe this as a ③distorted mirror: the platform reflects not society as it truly is, but a version shaped by whatever keeps people scrolling. Some platforms have experimented with reducing the visibility of outrage-driven content, only to see user engagement ④drop, which reveals an uncomfortable truth about the underlying business model. This ⑤confirms that emotionally extreme content plays little role in keeping the platform profitable.

A small bakery once sold a basic loaf for three dollars and a premium loaf for six dollars, and most customers simply bought the cheaper one. The owner then introduced a third option: a slightly larger premium loaf priced at seven dollars, one that was clearly inferior to the six-dollar loaf in terms of value for money. Almost nobody chose the new seven-dollar loaf, yet sales of the six-dollar loaf rose sharply, because _______________. This pattern demonstrates that people rarely judge options in isolation; instead, they evaluate choices relative to whatever alternatives happen to be nearby.

Consider a student who genuinely intends to study for tomorrow's exam yet, when the evening actually arrives, chooses to watch another episode of a favorite show instead, promising herself she will surely study harder next week. This pattern, in which the pull of an immediate pleasure overwhelms the value of a distant benefit, appears again and again across ordinary life, from postponed exercise to delayed savings. People do not necessarily fail to understand that the future reward matters more; rather, _______________. Behavioral economists note that this preference weakens considerably once both options are pushed into the future, which is why planning a diet starting next month feels effortless compared with skipping dessert tonight.

When people are asked to judge how risky or beneficial a particular technology is, they rarely conduct anything resembling a careful cost-benefit analysis. Instead, they consult a quick emotional impression, an instinctive sense of whether the technology feels good or feels bad, and let that impression guide their entire judgment. This mental shortcut, known as the affect heuristic, produces a curious pattern that traditional risk theory struggles to explain: _______________. For example, when researchers presented a fictional industrial chemical alongside a brief description emphasizing its convenience, participants rated it not only as more useful but also, illogically, as less dangerous.

Blockchain technology was originally promoted as a way to remove the need for trusted middlemen. In theory, this design distributes power away from any single institution and toward the network as a whole. In practice, however, _______________, controlling enough computing power or currency to influence outcomes that were supposed to be decided collectively. Whether decentralization can survive this concentration of power remains one of the technology's most unresolved questions.

주어진 문장: Such consistency across repeated trials suggests that the pattern is a genuine feature of human cognition, not random noise. In a classic experiment inspired by Keynes's beauty contest analogy, participants choose a number between zero and one hundred, and the winner is whoever selects the number closest to two-thirds of the average of all guesses submitted. ( ① ) A perfectly rational player, assuming every other participant reasons with unlimited depth, would conclude the equilibrium number is zero, since reasoning about others' reasoning collapses the average toward that single point. ( ② ) In practice, however, actual guesses rarely converge on zero; most participants stop reasoning after a round or two of imagining what others might guess, producing average guesses that cluster between twenty and thirty-five. ( ③ ) This gap between theoretical equilibrium and observed behavior reveals that human reasoning is bounded, capable of anticipating a few steps ahead but rarely capable of iterating the process indefinitely. ( ④ ) Economists use this game as a diagnostic tool, since the number a person submits reveals how many levels of strategic thinking that person is willing to perform. ( ⑤ ) This is a measure that idealized rational agents could never provide.