영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

문제 1

Consider a village green shared freely by every herder in the community, where each individual may graze as many animals as they wish without ①paying any fee. From the perspective of any single herder, adding one more animal to the shared pasture ②brings a clear personal benefit, since the extra income belongs entirely to that herder alone. The cost of the additional grazing, however, is spread thinly across every herder who uses the green, so no single individual ③bears more than a tiny fraction of the damage. Because this calculation favors adding more animals for every rational herder, the shared pasture is gradually overgrazed until it can no longer ④support any animals at all, harming the very community whose rational members caused the collapse. Philosophers use this scenario to illustrate a troubling gap between what benefits an individual in the short term and what preserves a shared resource in the long term, a gap that voluntary self-restraint alone rarely ⑤closing.

문제 2

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. (B) 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 while denying many people the legitimate means to achieve them. (A) He concluded that both crises share a common feature, the collapse of shared norms, a state Durkheim called anomie, arguing that rapid social change can strip away the moral guidelines that regulate human desire. (C) Faced with this gap between aspiration and opportunity, some individuals conform, but others turn to innovation, ritual, retreat, or rebellion.

문제 3

A single fertilized egg eventually gives rise to every cell type in the human body, from neurons to bone, a feat that has fascinated biologists for more than a century. (A) Because harvesting these cells traditionally required destroying a human embryo, the research provoked ethical objections fierce enough to slow funding and legislation in several countries for years. (B) A breakthrough arrived when scientists discovered that ordinary adult skin cells could be reprogrammed into a state resembling embryonic versatility without ever touching an embryo, opening a path for stem cell research that far more scientists and funding agencies are now willing to support. (C) Embryonic stem cells retain much of that original versatility, capable in principle of developing into almost any tissue, which is why researchers have long viewed them as a promising raw material for repairing damaged organs.

문제 4

The ecological footprint, a widely cited measure of how much biologically productive land and water a population requires to sustain its consumption, has become one of the most familiar tools for communicating humanity's environmental impact. By converting diverse activities, from driving to eating meat, into a single unit of land area, the measure allows policymakers to grasp whether a lifestyle exceeds what the planet can regenerate. (A) Because the footprint aggregates dissimilar impacts, such as carbon emissions and water scarcity, into one composite figure, it can obscure important differences among problems that require distinct policy responses. A region might reduce its footprint by lowering carbon emissions while simultaneously depleting a local aquifer, yet the aggregate number could still appear to improve, concealing damage that demands urgent attention. (B) This simplicity, however, is also the source of its most persistent criticism. (C) Furthermore, the method assumes that all bio-productive land is roughly interchangeable, treating a hectare of forest as equivalent to a hectare of farmland, even though the two provide markedly different ecological functions.

문제 5

Biodegradable plastics have been promoted as a promising solution to plastic waste, since they are designed to decompose into natural substances rather than persist for centuries. (A) For example, a bag labeled biodegradable may take years, not the weeks advertised, to break down in a landfill or ocean, where temperature and microbial activity remain low. In addition, when mixed with conventional plastics in recycling streams, they can contaminate the process, weakening the quality of materials produced afterward. (B) Some engineers therefore compare biodegradable plastics to a bridge that leads nowhere unless paired with infrastructure that completes the journey. Ultimately, realizing their genuine potential requires not only technological refinement but also facilities capable of providing the precise conditions decomposition demands. (C) Manufacturers derive these materials from renewable resources such as corn starch, blending them with additives that accelerate microbial breakdown once discarded. However, their environmental benefits are often exaggerated, largely because decomposition depends on specific conditions rarely found outside industrial composting facilities.

문제 6

Philosopher Robert Nozick devised a thought experiment to test a simple hedonist assumption: that pleasure and the avoidance of pain are all that ultimately matter to human beings. (A) If the hedonist assumption were correct, then everyone should rush to connect themselves permanently to such a machine, since it could deliver a lifetime of perfectly satisfying experiences. (B) Yet when people actually consider the offer, most hesitate and many refuse outright, a reluctance Nozick took as evidence that human beings care about more than the quality of their internal sensations. (C) He asked readers to imagine a machine capable of producing any experience they desired, from writing a great novel to falling in love, all indistinguishable from reality once they were plugged in.

문제 7

Imagine a teleportation device that scans every atom in your body, transmits that information to a distant station, and reconstructs an exact physical duplicate there, while destroying the original body in the process. (A) Philosophers, however, are troubled by a version of the same device that malfunctions: instead of destroying the original, it leaves the original body intact while still creating a perfect duplicate elsewhere. (B) Now two people exist, each with identical memories and an equally strong claim to being the original traveler, and there is no principled way to decide which one is the real continuation of the person who entered the machine. (C) From the traveler's point of view, stepping into the machine and stepping out on the other side would feel utterly seamless, complete with continuous memories and a sense of having simply walked through a door.

문제 8

Ordinary evidence cannot help here, since any proof gathered through the senses would itself be generated by the same simulation being tested. Suppose a mad scientist removed a living brain from its body, placed it in a vat of nutrient fluid, and connected its neurons to a supercomputer capable of generating perfectly realistic sensations. ( ① ) The brain would experience a full and convincing world, complete with a sky, a body, and other people, without ever suspecting that none of it existed outside the simulation. ( ② ) This scenario, unsettling as it sounds, raises a genuinely difficult question for anyone confident in their own perception: how could a person ever prove that they are not that very brain right now? ( ③ ) Some philosophers conclude that absolute certainty about the external world is simply unattainable. ( ④ ) Others argue, however, that the mere possibility of deception, however vivid, is not sufficient reason to abandon our everyday trust in what we perceive. ( ⑤ ) Ordinary caution, after all, can never fully settle which side is correct.

문제 9

The player may choose to take only Box B, or to take both boxes, and the prediction has already been made and cannot change at this point. Suppose a mysterious being with a near-perfect track record of predicting human choices presents a player with two boxes. ( ① ) Box A always contains a visible thousand dollars, while Box B contains either a million dollars or nothing at all, depending on a prediction the being made before the game even began. ( ② ) If the being predicted the player would take only Box B, it placed a million dollars inside; if it predicted the player would take both boxes, it left Box B empty. ( ③ ) One line of reasoning says taking both boxes is strictly better, since whatever is already inside the boxes cannot be altered by the player's choice. ( ④ ) A second line of reasoning says taking only Box B is better, since the being's near-perfect accuracy means that choosing both boxes almost guarantees an empty Box B. ( ⑤ ) This apparent conflict between two seemingly sound arguments has made the puzzle a lasting challenge for decision theory.

문제 10

The secret lies not in the cotton plant itself but in a borrowed piece of bacterial DNA. A cotton plant that manufactures its own insecticide sounds like science fiction, yet it has been growing in fields around the world for decades. ( ① ) Scientists achieved this by isolating a gene from a soil bacterium that produces a protein toxic to specific insect pests but harmless to humans. ( ② ) That gene is then inserted into the plant's own genome so that every cell manufactures the protective protein. ( ③ ) Other genetically modified crops carry a gene that allows them to survive direct exposure to a particular herbicide, letting farmers spray a field to kill weeds without harming the crop growing among them. ( ④ ) Supporters point to yield increases and reduced pesticide spraying documented across millions of hectares, while critics worry about weeds and insects evolving resistance to these built-in defenses over time, much as bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics. ( ⑤ ) Regulatory agencies in most countries now require extensive testing before a genetically modified crop reaches the market, evaluating everything from its nutritional content to its potential effects on nearby ecosystems.