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 face a difficult decision, they often weigh not only the expected outcome of each option but also how painful it would feel ①to discover later that a different choice had been better. This anticipation of future regret, rather than the size of the potential loss itself, frequently becomes the dominant factor ②shaping the final decision. Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than ③selling it, not because they expect the price to recover, but because selling would force them to confront the possibility ④of having made a clear mistake. Researchers have found that people feel sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing, which ⑤help explain why so many individuals default to inaction whenever a decision feels uncertain.

Working memory refers to the mental workspace in which information is ①temporarily 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 ②influential that it became widely known as the magic number seven. Subsequent research, however, revealed that Miller's estimate was somewhat ③conservative, since it failed to account for the complexity of the material being remembered. Nelson Cowan later argued that when rehearsal strategies are ④prevented and attention is tightly controlled, genuine capacity hovers closer to four items rather than seven. This discrepancy suggests that what earlier studies had measured was not raw storage capacity itself but a hybrid quantity ⑤inflated 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.

People routinely seek out information that confirms what they already believe while ①overlooking or dismissing evidence that contradicts those beliefs, a pattern known as confirmation bias. This tendency operates not because individuals are deliberately dishonest, but because the mind finds it cognitively less ②taxing to absorb information that fits an existing framework than to reconstruct that framework from scratch. Investors who believe a particular company will succeed, for instance, tend to interpret ambiguous news about that company ③unfavorably, while investors who are skeptical of the same company interpret identical news unfavorably, even though both groups are examining the same underlying facts. Social media platforms can ④intensify this effect by algorithmically presenting users with content similar to what they have previously engaged with. Over time, such selective exposure can harden initial impressions into convictions that feel objectively verified, even though they rest on a systematically ⑤filtered sample of evidence.

Consider a student who ①genuinely 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 ②overwhelms 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, whatever happens right now simply feels disproportionately more urgent and vivid than anything scheduled for later. Behavioral economists note that this preference ③weakens considerably once both options are pushed into the future, which is why planning a diet starting next month feels ④impossible compared with skipping dessert tonight. Such inconsistency helps explain why gym memberships go unused and retirement accounts remain ⑤underfunded, despite people's stated intentions.

A rational approach to decision-making dictates that only future costs and benefits should influence a choice, since resources already spent cannot be ①recovered regardless of what is decided next. In practice, however, people routinely allow such irrecoverable expenditures, known as sunk costs, to shape their subsequent decisions, a pattern referred to as the sunk cost fallacy. A moviegoer who finds a film thoroughly ②disappointing after the first thirty minutes will often remain in the theater until the credits roll, reasoning that leaving early would somehow waste the money already spent on the ticket. Organizations exhibit the same fallacy on a larger scale: a company that has invested heavily in a failing project frequently ③abandons funding it, arguing that stopping the project now would render the prior investment meaningless. Yet continuing to invest in a venture destined to fail merely adds new losses to old ones, ④compounding the very waste the decision-makers hoped to avoid. Economists therefore urge decision-makers to evaluate each choice based solely on its prospective outcomes, treating past expenditures as ⑤irrelevant to the decision at hand.

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 rests on a basic misunderstanding of probability, since each flip of a fair coin remains entirely independent of every flip that came before it. Casinos have long profited from this misconception, watching gamblers place larger bets after a losing streak simply because they mistakenly 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 _______________.

The adoption of behavioral insights into government policy has not proceeded without institutional resistance. (A) Career civil servants accustomed to designing programs around traditional levers, such as financial penalties or public information campaigns, have sometimes questioned whether small changes in wording or presentation could meaningfully influence outcomes that seemed to demand more substantial intervention. (B) Skepticism began to diminish, however, as rigorously controlled trials demonstrated measurable improvements in outcomes ranging from tax compliance to vaccination rates, providing evidence that traditional advocates could not easily dismiss. (C) As a result, many governments now require that new behavioral interventions be tested through randomized trials before wider implementation, a practice that has simultaneously built credibility for the approach and generated a growing body of reliable evidence.

주어진 문장: Such admiration is common, for instance, toward chess grandmasters, medical diagnosticians, or professional musicians who seem to recall vast bodies of specialized knowledge without visible strain. When people encounter an individual who appears to memorize enormous quantities of specialized information effortlessly, they often assume that person possesses an innate gift. ( ① ) Cognitive psychologists, however, contend that such feats rarely stem from raw talent alone. Instead, such feats arise from a learned skill known as chunking, whereby scattered pieces of information are consolidated into larger, meaningful units. ( ② ) A landmark study of chess players demonstrated this principle. When shown a board arranged according to plausible game positions, grandmasters reproduced the layout perfectly. ( ③ ) Yet when the same pieces were scattered randomly, their performance collapsed to the level of novices. This pattern reveals that expert memory is not larger in raw capacity but is instead organized around patterns accumulated through years of deliberate practice. ( ④ ) If chunking, rather than innate aptitude, underlies expert performance, then educators should stop treating talent as fixed and destiny-bound. ( ⑤ ) 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.

Fairness, in other words, is not a feature that can simply be patched in once a problem is discovered. Many large companies now rely on artificial intelligence to screen job applications before a human ever sees them. ( ① ) These systems promise efficiency, scanning thousands of resumes in seconds and ranking candidates according to patterns drawn from previous hiring decisions. ( ② ) However, this reliance on historical data creates a troubling risk. ( ③ ) If a company's past hiring favored a particular group, the algorithm may learn to treat that pattern as a marker of success and quietly reproduce it, even when no one intended discrimination. ( ④ ) Unlike a human interviewer, the system offers no explanation for its choices, which makes the bias difficult to detect until an outside audit reveals it. ( ⑤ ) Some researchers argue that fairness cannot be added afterward; it must be built into the system's design from the very beginning.