영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

When people estimate the value of an unfamiliar product, they rarely rely on objective calculation alone; instead, they anchor their judgment to whatever numerical reference ①happens to be presented first, however arbitrary that number may be. This phenomenon, ②known as the anchoring effect, exerts a disproportionate influence on price perception precisely because initial figures function as a kind of cognitive gravity that subsequent estimates struggle to escape. A shopper who ③first sees a jacket listed at $300 before it is marked down to $150 will likely judge the discounted price as an excellent bargain. Retailers, well aware of this bias, frequently display an inflated "original price" beside a discounted one, not because the higher figure is meaningful, but because it ④recalibrate customers' expectations. Even professionals are not immune: negotiators who open with an extreme initial offer often secure more favorable final terms than those ⑤who begin with a moderate one.

When people are ①asked to judge how risky or beneficial a particular technology is, they rarely conduct anything ②resembling 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, ③known as the affect heuristic, produces a curious pattern that traditional risk theory struggles to explain: activities people like tend to be judged as both safer and more beneficial, while activities they dislike are judged as both riskier and less beneficial, even when no logical relationship between risk and benefit exists. For example, when researchers ④presented 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. Because emotional impressions form so rapidly and feel so trustworthy, correcting for this heuristic requires deliberate effort; simply presenting more accurate statistics to already anxious or enthusiastic audiences rarely ⑤change their underlying judgment.

Classical economic theory long assumed that decision makers ①gather all relevant information, calculate every possible outcome, and select the single option that maximizes their benefit. Herbert Simon, however, questioned this assumption, ②arguing that human beings operate under real constraints of time, knowledge, and mental capacity that make such exhaustive calculation practically impossible. Instead of searching endlessly for the theoretically perfect choice, people typically stop once they find an option that seems good enough to meet their immediate needs, a strategy Simon ③termed satisficing. A shopper comparing refrigerators, for example, rarely examines every model available; she instead sets a few practical criteria, such as price and size, and selects the first appliance that satisfies them adequately. This approach is not a failure of reasoning but rather a sensible adaptation to a world where information is costly and time is genuinely limited. Consequently, models assuming unlimited rationality often fail to predict actual behavior, while frameworks ④acknowledge these cognitive boundaries offer a far more realistic account of how ordinary decisions are ⑤made.

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.

Imagine watching a fair coin land on heads five times in a row and feeling an increasingly strong intuition that the next flip is somehow due to produce tails. This intuition, though psychologically ①compelling, rests on a basic misunderstanding of probability, since each flip of a fair coin remains entirely ②independent of every flip that came before it. The coin possesses no memory of its previous outcomes, and its probability of landing on tails on the sixth flip stays ③fixed at fifty percent regardless of how many heads preceded it. Casinos have long profited from this misconception, watching gamblers place larger bets after a losing streak simply because they ④mistakenly believe that a win has become statistically overdue. Economists have even documented the same error among trained professionals, including loan officers who grow more likely to approve a risky application simply because they recently rejected several applications ⑤sporadically.

When people look back on a multi-day journey, they ①rarely recall every hour with equal clarity; instead, memory tends to compress the entire experience into just a few representative moments. Psychologists have found that two points carry ②disproportionate weight in this process: the single moment when emotion, whether joy or discomfort, reached its highest intensity, and whatever happened right before the experience concluded. Consider two hikers who complete an identical five-day trek. The first finishes with a ③grueling, rain-soaked final climb, while the second enjoys a calm, scenic descent on the last afternoon despite having endured an equally difficult ascent earlier in the trip. Even though both hikers faced comparable hardship overall, the second is far ④less likely to remember the journey fondly, simply because the trip ended pleasantly. This pattern reveals that overall satisfaction is not calculated as an average of every experienced moment; rather, it is shaped disproportionately by whichever moments felt most ⑤intense and by however the experience happened to end.

Financial markets occasionally experience episodes in which asset prices rise far beyond any level that careful analysis of underlying fundamentals could justify, a phenomenon commonly attributed to herd psychology. During such episodes, individual investors, observing that prices have already risen substantially, often conclude that continuing to buy is ①reasonable simply because so many others are doing the same, rather than because any independent evaluation supports the purchase. This dynamic can become self-perpetuating: rising prices attract new buyers, whose purchases push prices higher still, thereby attracting yet another wave of buyers convinced that the upward trend itself constitutes ②reliable evidence of underlying value. Historical episodes of speculative excess display a strikingly similar pattern, suggesting that the underlying psychological mechanism remains ③variable even as the specific assets involved change considerably across centuries. Eventually, however, some triggering event, however minor, prompts a portion of investors to ④reconsider their assumptions, and the resulting wave of selling can trigger a collapse every bit as rapid and self-reinforcing as the original ⑤ascent.

Psychologists studying human judgment often describe the mind as operating through two distinct systems rather than a single unified process. System 1 works quickly and automatically, generating impressions without any noticeable sense of effort. System 2, by contrast, is slow, deliberate, and demanding, engaged only when a problem requires careful calculation or conscious reasoning. Most daily decisions are handled almost entirely by System 1, which allows people to function efficiently without exhausting their limited mental resources. This efficiency comes at a cost, however, because _______________. As a result, a judgment often feels most confident precisely at the moment when it has skipped the careful scrutiny that could have caught its own mistake.

As private companies develop the technology to mine asteroids for rare metals and water, a legal question has become urgent: who 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 whether a private company may extract and sell what it finds there. Some governments have already passed domestic laws granting their own companies rights to material mined in space, a move that other nations view as _______________.

Blockchain technology was originally promoted as a way to remove the need for trusted middlemen, allowing strangers to exchange value directly through a shared, tamper-resistant ledger. (A) In practice, however, a small number of large players have come to dominate many blockchain networks, controlling enough power to influence outcomes that were supposed to be decided collectively. (B) In theory, this design distributes power away from any single institution and toward the network as a whole. (C) Critics note a further irony: when something goes wrong, there is often no institution left to appeal to, since the system was designed to eliminate central authority.