영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Political philosophers have long ①debated how much authority, if any, a government may legitimately claim over free individuals. Robert Nozick imagined a hypothetical starting point in which people live without any state at all, each relying on private arrangements to protect their own person and property. He argued that a minimal state, limited strictly to enforcing contracts and protecting citizens from violence, theft, and fraud, could arise gradually through a series of voluntary exchanges, with everyone's rights ②repeatedly being violated along the way. Critics on one side, the anarchists, insist that even this minimal government inevitably ③violates the rights of those who never consented to join it, since a truly voluntary arrangement would allow individuals to ④opt out entirely. Critics on the other side argue that a state limited to bare protection cannot address deeper inequalities that arise naturally in any free market. Nozick's thought experiment therefore sits at the center of an ⑤unresolved argument about where legitimate political authority actually begins.

Policymakers seeking to improve public welfare without restricting individual freedom have increasingly embraced an approach known as nudging, which alters the environment in which choices are made rather than ①mandating particular outcomes. A nudge preserves every option that was previously available; it simply arranges those options so that the choice deemed most beneficial becomes easier or more ②visible than the alternatives. Advocates argue that such interventions respect autonomy precisely because no option is ③removed and no penalty is imposed for choosing differently. Critics, however, contend that even subtle architectural choices exploit predictable cognitive shortcuts, raising questions about whether influencing behavior through psychological means is meaningfully different from more ④coercive forms of persuasion. Despite this ongoing debate, governments across many countries have adopted nudge-based programs, reporting outcomes that are frequently ⑤ineffective compared with those achieved through traditional regulation or public information campaigns alone.

When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh not only the expected outcome of each option but also how ①pleasant it would feel to 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 ②dominant factor shaping the final decision. Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than selling it, not because they expect the price to recover, but because selling would force them to confront the possibility of having made a clear mistake. Researchers have found that people feel ③sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing, which helps explain why so many individuals default to inaction whenever a decision feels ④uncertain. Ironically, this strategy of avoiding regret can itself produce outcomes that are later regretted even more ⑤deeply than the ones it was originally designed to prevent.

Conventional economic wisdom holds that more options are always preferable to fewer. Empirical research on consumer behavior, however, complicates this assumption considerably. When shoppers are presented with an extensive array of choices, they frequently experience heightened anxiety about making the wrong selection and, paradoxically, become less likely to make any purchase or decision at all. Businesses that recognize this dynamic have begun deliberately curating smaller, carefully selected assortments, betting that ___________ can sometimes generate more sales and greater customer satisfaction than abundance.

People often recognize, in calm reflection, that their future selves will be tempted to abandon a goal they currently value. Rather than relying solely on willpower at the critical moment, they may choose to _______________, a strategy known as precommitment. By making certain choices costly, inconvenient, or impossible to reverse, individuals can protect a long-term goal from a short-term impulse that has not yet arisen. Similarly, someone determined to finish a project might publicly announce a deadline, transforming private intentions into a commitment that carries social consequences if broken. What unites these examples is a simple insight: because future desires cannot always be trusted, the wisest moment to act may be now.

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? (A) 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. (B) 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. (C) Labor, it seems, functions as a kind of psychological investment: once effort has been poured into a task, individuals become reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly wasted. 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.

주어진 문장: This asymmetry alone can be enough to prevent an otherwise reasonable deal from ever being reached. Picture a woman who receives a plain ceramic mug as a free gift at a conference and, later that afternoon, refuses to sell it for anything less than triple its price in the gift shop downstairs. ( ① ) Before she owned the mug, she would never have paid extra for it; once it became hers, however, its value in her mind rose sharply, simply because she now possessed it. ( ② ) Researchers have repeatedly observed this pattern across many everyday objects, from coffee mugs and concert tickets to office chairs and old furniture inherited from relatives. ( ③ ) Owners consistently demand more money to give something up than buyers are willing to offer for that very same item, revealing a curious asymmetry rooted purely in possession itself. ( ④ ) Some economists argue that this effect explains why negotiations over inherited property so often collapse, since each side quietly attaches a different value to what it currently holds. ( ⑤ ) Understanding this bias, therefore, helps explain why simply owning something, even briefly, can distort how fairly people judge its true worth.

주어진 문장: This apparent immunity to forgetting seemed to set flashbulb memories apart from every other category of recollection. When people recall precisely where they were and what they were doing at the moment they learned of some momentous public event, the resulting memory often feels extraordinarily vivid, as though it had been etched into the mind with photographic precision; researchers have termed such recollections flashbulb memories. ( ① ) Proponents of this concept once argued that the emotional intensity and surprise accompanying such events trigger a distinct neural mechanism that preserves details with unusual fidelity, effectively exempting them from the gradual decay that afflicts ordinary memories. ( ② ) Subsequent longitudinal studies, however, have complicated this picture considerably: when researchers compared accounts gathered within days of an event to accounts gathered years later, they discovered that details had frequently been altered, omitted, or even fabricated, ( ③ ) even though the individuals reporting them expressed unwavering confidence in their accuracy. ( ④ ) This persistent mismatch between subjective certainty and objective consistency implies that flashbulb memories, far from being flawless recordings, are reconstructed narratives shaped by rehearsal, media exposure, and the passage of time. ( ⑤ )

주어진 문장: The same reflexive shift can occur when a smoke alarm suddenly interrupts a deep conversation, even though no one had been monitoring it consciously. Imagine standing at a crowded party where dozens of conversations blend into a wall of noise, yet you effortlessly track the words of the friend beside you. ( ① ) Curiously, if someone across the room utters your name, your attention snaps toward that voice almost instantly. ( ② ) This happens even though you had not consciously been listening to that conversation at all. This phenomenon, known as the cocktail party effect, reveals that selective attention does not simply block out every unattended sound. ( ③ ) Early theorists such as Donald Broadbent proposed that unattended information is filtered out entirely before reaching awareness. Yet the fact that a person's own name can break through this filter contradicts such a rigid model. ( ④ ) Anne Treisman later refined this account, suggesting that unattended channels are merely attenuated rather than eliminated altogether. Especially meaningful stimuli, including one's own name, can still surpass the threshold of conscious recognition. ( ⑤ ) This refinement suggests that attention operates less like a gate and more like a dimmer switch, adjusting the salience of competing streams of information.