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.

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.

Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? This puzzle, which researchers named 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 assembled 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 poured into a task, _______________. This tendency helps explain why consumers often prefer products that demand some degree of personal assembly, even when a comparable finished item is available at a lower price and requires no time investment whatsoever.

Imagine two travelers preparing for the same trip: one refuses to fly after watching news coverage of a recent plane crash, while the other books a flight without hesitation. Statistically, air travel remains far safer than driving the same distance by car, yet vivid, emotionally charged images tend to dominate human judgment more powerfully than dry statistics ever could. This tendency, in which people estimate how likely an event is based on _______________, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. News broadcasts that repeatedly feature rare disasters can leave viewers convinced that such events are common, even though official records clearly show the opposite. Advertisers and politicians alike exploit this pattern, knowing that a single striking anecdote often persuades audiences more effectively than pages of careful statistics ever manage to.

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. Defenders insist that freedom is preserved as long as no option is banned and no penalty is attached. Critics counter that this defense rests on an impoverished notion of liberty, one that ignores how _______________. The dispute ultimately turns on what freedom actually requires: the mere absence of coercion, or a decision-making process that remains transparent and undistorted.

Suppose you meet a quiet, gentle man who speaks softly, tends a small garden, and organizes his bookshelf with meticulous care. (A) This judgment, however, ignores a crucial fact: truck drivers vastly outnumber florists in almost every country, which means that, statistically, he is far more likely to belong to the larger group regardless of how well he fits the flower-shop image. (B) Relying on resemblance to a familiar category rather than on underlying numerical proportions, known among researchers as representativeness, leads people to overlook these base rates almost automatically. Even trained professionals, who should know better, often fall into the same trap when a vivid description feels more convincing than plain statistics. Consequently, teaching people to pause and ask how common something actually is, instead of merely how typical it appears, can meaningfully improve the accuracy of everyday predictions and reduce costly errors in judgment. (C) Asked whether he is more likely a florist or a truck driver, most people instinctively choose florist, since his personality matches the stereotype so neatly.

When workers receive a five percent raise in a year when prices have climbed five percent as well, their real purchasing power has not changed at all, yet many still report feeling noticeably better off. (A) Employers exploit this pattern by favoring modest nominal raises over deeper structural adjustments, since a visible increase on a payslip satisfies employees more effectively than an explanation about inflation could. (B) The illusion persists even among people who claim to understand inflation well, which suggests that the bias operates at an intuitive level that formal knowledge does not easily override. (C) This tendency to judge economic well-being by nominal figures printed on a paycheck, rather than by what that money can actually purchase, is known among economists as money illusion.

For decades, memory researchers assumed that repetition alone determined how well information would be retained, an assumption that an influential theory proposed by Craik and Lockhart eventually overturned. (A) Shallow processing, which involves attending merely to superficial features such as the shape of letters or the sound of a word, produces memory traces that fade quickly and remain vulnerable to interference. Elaborative processing, by contrast, requires connecting new information to existing knowledge, generating meaningful associations, and analyzing semantic content, thereby producing traces that are considerably more durable. (B) Consequently, a student who merely repeats a definition aloud without considering its implications is less likely to retain it than one who relates the concept to a personal example. This distinction reshaped educational practice, encouraging teachers to design tasks that demand comprehension rather than mechanical repetition, since durable memory depends on the depth, not the frequency, of cognitive engagement. (C) According to their framework, what matters most is not how many times a person rehearses material but how deeply that material is processed during encoding.

When people encounter an individual who appears to memorize enormous quantities of specialized information effortlessly, they often assume that person possesses an innate gift. Cognitive psychologists, however, contend that such feats rarely stem from raw talent alone. (A) This pattern reveals that expert memory is not larger in raw capacity but is instead organized around patterns accumulated through years of deliberate practice. If chunking, rather than innate aptitude, underlies expert performance, then educators should stop treating talent as fixed and destiny-bound. Curricula ought to be redesigned to cultivate pattern recognition explicitly, since doing so would grant far more students access to expertise once presumed reserved for the naturally gifted. (B) A landmark study of chess players demonstrated this principle. When shown a board arranged according to plausible game positions, grandmasters reproduced the layout perfectly. Yet when the same pieces were scattered randomly, their performance collapsed to the level of novices. (C) Instead, such feats arise from a learned skill known as chunking, whereby scattered pieces of information are consolidated into larger, meaningful units.

주어진 문장: Correcting this bias, therefore, requires more than good intentions or personal willpower. 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. ( ① ) 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. ( ② ) 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. ( ③ ) 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. ( ④ ) 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. ( ⑤ ) Until such external correction becomes standard practice, ambitious deadlines will likely continue to be broken with remarkable consistency.