영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

A rational approach to decision-making dictates that only future costs and benefits should influence a choice, since resources already spent ①cannot be recovered regardless of what is decided next. In practice, however, people routinely allow such irrecoverable expenditures, known as sunk costs, ②to shape their subsequent decisions, a pattern referred to as the sunk cost fallacy. A moviegoer who finds a film thoroughly disappointing after the first thirty minutes will often remain in the theater until the credits roll, ③reasoning 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 ④have invested heavily in a failing project frequently continues funding it, arguing that abandoning 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, ⑤compounding the very waste the decision-makers hoped to avoid.

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 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 ①had been etched into the mind with photographic precision; researchers have termed such recollections flashbulb memories. Proponents of this concept once ②argued that the emotional intensity and surprise ③accompanying such events ④triggers a distinct neural mechanism that preserves details with unusual fidelity, effectively exempting them from the gradual decay that afflicts ordinary memories. 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, even though the individuals reporting them expressed unwavering confidence in their accuracy. This persistent mismatch between subjective certainty and objective consistency implies that flashbulb memories, far from being flawless recordings, are reconstructed narratives ⑤shaped by rehearsal, media exposure, and the passage of time.

Imagine a man locked inside a room who does not understand a single word of Chinese, yet who possesses a giant rulebook written entirely in English. Slips of paper covered with Chinese characters are passed in through a slot, and by following the rulebook's instructions step by step, he produces replies that appear ①fluent to anyone outside. From the perspective of a native speaker reading the responses, the room seems to understand Chinese ②perfectly. Yet the man inside understands nothing at all; he is merely manipulating shapes according to formal rules, without grasping their ③meaning. This scenario was designed to challenge the assumption that a computer running a sophisticated program truly ④fails to understand language simply because it produces convincing output. Passing every external test of intelligence, the argument suggests, is not the same as possessing genuine understanding, since syntax alone can never generate ⑤semantics.

John Rawls proposed an unusual thought experiment to determine what principles of justice a society ought to adopt. Imagine a group of rational people gathered to design the basic rules of their future society, but placed behind what he called a veil of ignorance, a condition under which ①none of them knows their own race, gender, wealth, talents, or social position in advance. Since no one can predict whether they will be born into privilege or poverty, each person has a strong incentive to choose rules that ②protect the worst-off members of society, rather than rules that merely favor whichever group they happen to belong to. Rawls argued that rational people placed in this position would not gamble on inequality; instead, they would favor arrangements that guarantee basic liberties for everyone and permit unequal outcomes only when those outcomes actually ③benefit the least advantaged. Justice, on this view, is what ④impartial reasoning produces once self-interest is ⑤maximized.

Millions of people now wear devices that continuously track their heart rate, sleep patterns, and daily activity, generating an ①intimate stream of health data that would have been unthinkable to collect just two decades ago. Users generally assume this information belongs to them, since it is drawn directly from their own bodies. In practice, however, the terms of service that few people read often grant the manufacturer ②narrow rights to store, analyze, and even sell anonymized versions of that data to insurers or advertisers. This arrangement becomes especially troubling when health data influences decisions far beyond fitness, such as insurance premiums or employment screening. Advocates for reform argue that biological data deserves a category of protection ③stronger than ordinary consumer information, precisely because it can never truly be ④replaced or reset once it has been ⑤exposed.

Bacteria have been cutting up invading viral DNA for billions of years, long before any scientist thought to borrow the trick for use in a laboratory. The CRISPR-Cas9 system relies on a short guide RNA that matches a specific DNA sequence, _______________. Once Cas9 arrives at the target site, it slices both strands of the DNA helix, and the cell's own repair machinery rushes in to mend the cut, often introducing a small change in the process. By supplying the cell with a template during this repair step, scientists can direct that machinery to insert a specific new sequence rather than merely disabling the original gene. What once required years of painstaking work to alter a single gene can now be accomplished within days.

Imagine two travelers preparing for the same trip: one refuses to fly after watching news coverage of a recent plane crash, while the other books a flight without hesitation. (A) This tendency, in which people estimate how likely an event is based on how easily examples come to mind rather than on actual data, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. (B) Statistically, air travel remains far safer than driving the same distance by car, yet vivid, emotionally charged images tend to dominate human judgment more powerfully than dry statistics ever could. (C) News broadcasts that repeatedly feature rare disasters can leave viewers convinced that such events are common, even though official records clearly show the opposite. Advertisers and politicians alike exploit this pattern, knowing that a single striking anecdote often persuades audiences more effectively than pages of careful statistics ever manage to. Recognizing why memorable examples overshadow objective probability therefore matters, both for making sound personal choices and for noticing when public fear has drifted far from measurable reality.

By the time Achilles reaches the point where the tortoise started, the tortoise has already crawled a little further ahead. Long before calculus existed, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of paradoxes designed to show that motion itself might be logically impossible. ( ① ) In one version, a swift runner named Achilles races a slow-moving tortoise that is given a modest head start, and common sense insists that Achilles will quickly overtake it. ( ② ) This process repeats endlessly, generating an infinite number of smaller and smaller gaps that Achilles must apparently cross one after another. ( ③ ) Zeno concluded that Achilles could never actually catch the tortoise, a conclusion that plainly contradicts everyday experience. ( ④ ) Modern mathematics eventually resolved the paradox by showing that an infinite series of shrinking distances can still sum to a finite total. ( ⑤ ) Motion, as a result, can still be completed in a finite amount of time after all.

Suppose that one day Mary is finally released from the room and shown a ripe red tomato for the first time. Imagine a brilliant scientist named Mary who has spent her entire life inside a black-and-white room, learning everything physical science could ever teach about color, including the exact wavelengths of light and the precise neural processes triggered when a person sees red. ( ① ) Despite this complete physical knowledge, Mary herself has never actually seen a color; every book, screen, and object in her world has been carefully restricted to shades of gray. ( ② ) Philosopher Frank Jackson argued that Mary would learn something entirely new at that moment, namely what it actually feels like to see red. ( ③ ) This is true even though she already possessed every physical fact about color there was to know beforehand. ( ④ ) If Mary genuinely gains new knowledge upon leaving the room, then physical facts alone cannot capture everything there is to know about conscious experience. ( ⑤ ) Something, it seems, was missing from her exhaustive scientific education all along.