영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Medieval philosophers told the story of a hungry donkey placed exactly midway between two identical, equally fragrant piles of hay, with no factor whatsoever ①tipping the balance toward either option. Because the donkey is assumed to be a perfectly rational creature that always chooses the option ②supported by the strongest reason, and because neither pile offers any advantage over the other, the donkey supposedly finds itself with no rational basis for choosing one pile rather than the other. ③Paralyzed by this perfect symmetry, the donkey starves to death precisely because it can find no reason to move in either direction. Critics of the story point out that real animals, and real humans, rarely face situations of such flawless symmetry, and that even a tiny, arbitrary preference ④is usual enough to break the tie in practice. The paradox nevertheless raises a serious question about whether purely rational deliberation can ever generate action on its own, without some additional nudge that reason alone ⑤cannot supply.

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.

Anyone who has tried to name the ink color of a word like red printed in blue letters knows how surprisingly difficult the task can feel. This everyday struggle, known as the Stroop effect, deserves more attention than casual curiosity grants it, because it reveals something fundamental about how the mind allocates its limited resources. Reading a familiar word is an automatic process practiced so extensively since childhood that it proceeds almost involuntarily ①, whereas naming a color requires deliberate ②, controlled attention. When these two processes point toward conflicting answers, the automatic pathway tends to intrude ③ upon the controlled one, slowing responses and decreasing ④ errors. Educators should not dismiss this delay as a trivial curiosity confined to laboratories, since the same competition between habit and intention underlies far more consequential situations, such as a driver's struggle to resist checking a phone despite knowing the danger. Recognizing how automatic responses can hijack conscious intentions is essential for designing environments, from classrooms to highways, that support rather than undermine ⑤ our efforts at self-control.

Imagine a distant planet identical to Earth in every visible respect, except that the clear liquid its inhabitants call "water" is not H2O but a different compound, XYZ, that happens to look, taste, and behave exactly the same. When an Earthling and a Twin Earthling each say the word "water," they seem to mean the ①same thing, since neither could tell the substances apart without a chemistry lab. Philosopher Hilary Putnam used this scenario to argue that the meaning of a word is not determined solely by what happens inside a speaker's head. Even though the two speakers hold ②opposing thoughts and mental images when they use the word, their statements refer to ③two different substances, because the underlying chemical composition, not personal belief, fixes what a word ultimately picks out. Meaning, Putnam concluded, depends ④partly on the world outside the mind, not merely on the ⑤private mental states of whoever happens to be speaking.

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 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.

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.

Behavioral economists have long observed that people tend to feel the pain of losing something more intensely than the pleasure of gaining an equivalent amount, a tendency known as loss aversion. Consider an investor who refuses to sell a declining stock, clinging to the hope that its price will eventually recover, even when all available evidence indicates that selling and reinvesting elsewhere would be more rational. As a result, loss aversion frequently pushes individuals toward ___________ rather than toward the outcome that would maximize their overall welfare.

Unlike Bentham's single tower, today's surveillance is frequently decentralized and voluntary, which some theorists claim makes it more effective precisely because it no longer feels like surveillance at all. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed the panopticon, a prison structure in which a central watchtower allows a single guard to observe every cell, while inmates can never determine whether they are actually being watched at any given moment. ( ① ) French theorist Michel Foucault later transformed this architectural idea into a broader theory of power, arguing that the mere possibility of being observed is often sufficient to produce obedient behavior. ( ② ) Foucault extended this logic beyond prisons to schools, hospitals, and workplaces, suggesting that modern institutions increasingly rely on continuous, often invisible observation rather than physical force to maintain order. ( ③ ) Contemporary scholars have applied Foucault's framework to digital surveillance, arguing that smartphones and workplace monitoring software recreate panoptic conditions on a vastly larger scale. ( ④ ) These technologies allow observation to occur almost anywhere, at almost any time. ( ⑤ )

During recent years, this gap became impossible to ignore, as families in rural areas or low-income neighborhoods struggled to complete schoolwork that assumed a stable connection and a personal device. As more schools shift toward digital textbooks and online assignments, a student without reliable internet access at home faces a disadvantage that has little to do with talent or effort. ( ① ) Some policymakers initially treated internet access as a convenience, comparable to cable television, rather than as infrastructure essential to modern life. ( ② ) That assumption is increasingly being reconsidered, particularly as more essential services move online by default. ( ③ ) Closing this divide will require more than simply distributing devices. ( ④ ) It will demand sustained investment in the physical networks that carry information into every home, regardless of income or location. ( ⑤ )