영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

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 striking proportion of individual investors believe their own stock-picking ability to be above average, a statistical ①impossibility given that only half of any population can genuinely outperform the rest, yet a pattern that persists with remarkable consistency across surveys. This tendency, known as overconfidence bias, leads investors to trade more ②frequently than a more cautious assessment of their own skill would justify. Extensive research comparing the trading records of numerous individual accounts has ③demonstrated that investors who trade most frequently tend to earn substantially ④higher returns than those who trade rarely, largely because transaction costs accumulate and because frequent trading often reflects overconfident reactions to short-term noise rather than genuine insight. Overconfidence also manifests in the tendency to underestimate the range of possible outcomes, causing investors to concentrate their holdings in a small number of assets they feel certain about rather than diversifying across a broader portfolio. Paradoxically, then, the very confidence that motivates investors to act decisively often ⑤undermines the outcomes they are trying to achieve.

Classical economic theory assumes that consumers evaluate every price change in the same rational way, weighing marginal benefit against marginal cost regardless of the absolute numbers involved. Behavioral economists, however, have discovered a striking exception: the moment a price drops to exactly zero, people's judgment shifts in a way that ordinary discounting cannot explain. In a well-known laboratory experiment, participants chose between two chocolates, one of higher quality priced at a small fee and one of lower quality offered for free. When both prices were merely reduced by the same amount, most participants still preferred the higher-quality option. Yet once the cheaper chocolate's price was lowered to zero, the majority abruptly switched their preference, even though the price gap between the two options had not actually changed. Researchers explain this reversal by noting that _______________.

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 happens to be presented first, however arbitrary that number may be. A shopper who first sees a jacket listed at $300 before it is marked down to $150 will likely judge the discounted price as an excellent bargain. Such evidence indicates that rational deliberation alone cannot fully explain how value is perceived, since the ___________ ultimately shapes what buyers are willing to pay.

Labeling theory approaches deviance not as a fixed property of certain acts, but as a social process created when powerful groups attach a negative label to a person's behavior. (A) Once labeled, an individual may find legitimate opportunities closing off, pushing them toward the very community of offenders that the label predicted they would join. (B) According to this view, nearly everyone breaks minor rules at some point, yet only some individuals are singled out and formally branded as delinquents or criminals. (C) This process, sometimes called secondary deviance, illustrates how social reaction can produce the outcome it claims merely to describe.

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. (A) 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. Until such external correction becomes standard practice, ambitious deadlines will likely continue to be broken with remarkable consistency. (B) 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. (C) 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. 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.

Facial recognition software has moved rapidly from airport security lines into shopping malls, schools, and even private apartment buildings. (A) Independent studies, however, have repeatedly found that many commercial systems perform less accurately on women and people with darker skin tones. (B) Proponents note that the technology can unlock doors, catch shoplifters, and speed up identity checks far faster than any human guard could manage. (C) Several cities have already reported cases in which an innocent person was detained based on a flawed match.

When people look back on a multi-day journey, they rarely 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 disproportionate weight in this process: the single moment when emotion reached its highest intensity, and whatever happened right before the experience concluded. (A) Even though both hikers faced comparable hardship overall, the second is far more 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, but is shaped disproportionately by whichever moments felt most intense and by however the experience happened to end. (B) The first finishes with a grueling, 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. (C) Consider two hikers who complete an identical five-day trek.

Before a large-scale construction project such as a highway or dam receives government approval, planners in many countries are required to conduct an environmental impact assessment, a formal process designed to predict and evaluate the ecological consequences of a proposed development. (A) For instance, a proposed highway that would bisect a forest might be evaluated for its potential to fragment habitats, disrupting migration routes on which certain species depend. If the assessment identifies unacceptable risks, planners may be required to redesign the project or adopt mitigation measures such as wildlife corridors. (B) Critics contend, however, that assessments are sometimes treated as a bureaucratic formality rather than a genuine constraint, since developers who commission the studies retain strong influence over how the findings are interpreted. (C) This process begins with a baseline survey, in which specialists document existing conditions, including wildlife, water quality, and air composition, so that future changes can be measured against a reference point. Analysts then model how the project might alter these conditions, drawing on data from comparable developments.

Metacognition, broadly defined as the capacity to monitor and evaluate one's own cognitive processes, is often treated as a reliable guide to what we actually know, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the correspondence between subjective confidence and objective accuracy is far weaker than intuition would suggest. (A) This gap between perceived and actual mastery, sometimes labeled the illusion of knowing, has practical consequences for education, since students who trust their inflated self-assessments are less likely to seek out the more effortful, retrieval-based strategies that would otherwise consolidate their learning. (B) Because rereading familiar material tends to feel effortless, learners frequently mistake that ease of processing for durable comprehension, a misattribution that can lead them to abandon further study prematurely. (C) Individuals routinely overestimate how thoroughly they have understood a passage of text immediately after reading it, a phenomenon partly attributable to the fluency with which the material was processed rather than to any genuine grasp of its underlying structure.