영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a now-famous thought experiment not to describe an actual laboratory procedure, but ①to expose an absurdity hidden within a leading interpretation of quantum mechanics. Imagine a cat sealed inside a closed box together with a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and a vial of poison gas ②rigged to break open the instant the atom decays. Because the atom's decay is governed by genuine quantum randomness, standard quantum theory describes the atom, before anyone looks, ③as existing in a superposition of having decayed and not having decayed at the same time. If the theory is applied consistently to the entire box, the cat itself would have to ④be considered simultaneously alive and dead until an observer opens the lid and looks inside. Schrödinger intended this image to sound obviously ridiculous, using the cat's absurd fate to question whether the act of observation truly determines physical reality, or whether the mathematics is simply being pushed further than it ⑤ever meaning to go.

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. 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. Owners consistently demand more money to give something up than buyers are willing to offer for that very same item, _______________. 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.

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. Some policymakers initially treated internet access as a convenience, comparable to cable television, rather than as infrastructure essential to modern life. That assumption is increasingly being reconsidered, particularly as _______________. Closing this divide will require more than simply distributing devices.

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.

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 sociologist Émile Durkheim studied suicide rates across different societies, he noticed something puzzling: rates rose not only during economic depression but also during sudden prosperity. He concluded that both crises share a common feature, the collapse of shared norms that once told individuals what to expect and how to behave. Decades later, Robert Merton extended the concept to explain deviance within stable societies, proposing that anomie also arises when a culture insists that everyone pursue identical goals, such as wealth, while denying many people the legitimate means to achieve them. Faced with this gap between aspiration and opportunity, _______________. Anomie theory therefore suggests that crime is less a product of individual failure than of structural imbalance within society itself.

Loss aversion does not only influence individual financial choices; it also shapes how information is presented and interpreted in everyday transactions, a phenomenon that marketers and policymakers have learned to exploit deliberately. (A) For example, a retailer who frames a price reduction as "avoid losing a $10 discount by ordering today" typically generates a stronger customer response than one who simply advertises "get a $10 discount," even though both messages describe an identical saving. (B) In other words, the manner in which a choice is presented can activate the same psychological aversion to loss that governs decisions about resources already possessed, meaning that framing itself carries real economic weight. (C) This effect is not confined to retail settings, however; negotiators, too, often treat concessions as losses rather than as steps toward mutual gain, which makes compromise feel more costly than it objectively is.

The anchoring effect is not limited to shopping decisions; it also plays a subtle but powerful role in legal and financial judgments. (A) Similarly, jurors who are told that a plaintiff is seeking an unusually large sum in damages tend to award higher compensation than jurors who hear no specific figure at all, even when the evidence presented is identical. (B) This pattern suggests that anchors can distort judgments requiring careful, case-by-case reasoning, not merely quick, intuitive estimates of price. (C) For instance, experienced judges asked to set a sentence after being exposed to an arbitrary number, such as one generated by rolling dice, have been shown in experimental settings to hand down harsher sentences when the number was high.

Social proof does not operate uniformly; its influence intensifies under specific conditions. (A) It grows especially powerful, for instance, when the situation is ambiguous and individuals lack a clear, independent basis for judging the correct course of action. (B) Conversely, when a task offers unambiguous, verifiable evidence, individuals rely far less on the behavior of others, since they can evaluate the situation directly for themselves. (C) This contrast implies that social proof functions primarily as a substitute for missing information, stepping in precisely where individual certainty runs out.

Psychologists studying human judgment often describe the mind as operating through two distinct systems rather than a single unified process. (A) This efficiency comes at a cost, however, because System 1's shortcuts can produce systematic errors that an overburdened System 2 rarely catches. (B) Most daily decisions are therefore handled almost entirely by System 1, which allows people to function efficiently without exhausting their limited mental resources. (C) System 1 works quickly and automatically, generating impressions without any noticeable effort, while System 2 is slow and deliberate, engaged only when a problem requires careful reasoning.