영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Picture a woman who ①receive 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 ②owned 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. Researchers have repeatedly observed this pattern across many everyday objects, from coffee mugs and concert tickets to office chairs and old furniture ③inherited from relatives. Owners consistently demand more money ④to give something up than buyers are willing to offer for that very same item, revealing a curious asymmetry rooted purely in possession itself. Some economists argue that this effect explains why negotiations over inherited property so often collapse, since each side quietly ⑤attaches a different value to what it currently holds.

Where structural functionalism emphasizes cooperation and stability, conflict theory begins from the premise that society is best understood as an ongoing ①struggle between groups with competing interests over scarce resources such as wealth, power, and prestige. Rooted in the writings of Karl Marx, classical conflict theory focused on the economic struggle between those who own productive resources and those who must sell their labor to survive, arguing that dominant groups shape laws, education, and even widely shared beliefs in ways that quietly ②undermine their own advantage. Later sociologists ③broadened the framework well beyond economic class, applying conflict analysis to struggles organized around race, gender, and other categories of unequal social power. Unlike functionalists, who often interpret existing social arrangements as serving a ④necessary purpose, conflict theorists argue that apparent social order frequently masks underlying tension that dominant groups actively work to ⑤contain.

When sociologist Émile Durkheim studied suicide rates across different societies, he noticed something ①puzzling: rates rose not only during economic depression but also during sudden prosperity. He concluded that both crises share a common feature, the ②collapse of shared norms that once told individuals what to expect and how to behave. Durkheim called this state of normlessness anomie, arguing that rapid social change can ③strengthen the moral guidelines that regulate human desire, leaving individuals disoriented even when material conditions improve. 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 ④identical goals, such as wealth, while denying many people the legitimate means to achieve them. Anomie theory therefore suggests that crime is less a product of individual failure than of ⑤structural imbalance within society itself.

Symbolic interactionism approaches society not as a fixed structure imposed from above but as something continuously constructed through everyday face-to-face interaction, in which individuals interpret and respond to the ①literal meanings that objects, actions, and other people hold for them. Sociologist George Herbert Mead argued that the self itself emerges through this interactive process, as individuals learn to see themselves from the perspective of others, gradually ②internalizing what he called the generalized other, a composite sense of society's expectations. Erving Goffman extended this framework with his dramaturgical approach, comparing social life to a theatrical performance in which individuals ③manage impressions, present different faces in different settings, and carefully control what audiences see backstage versus onstage. Unlike structural theories that emphasize large institutions, symbolic interactionism ④focuses on the small, repeated exchanges through which shared meaning is negotiated, arguing that even stable social structures ultimately depend on countless everyday interactions in which participants continuously ⑤reaffirm the meanings they attach to one another's words and gestures.

When people encounter an individual who appears to memorize enormous quantities of specialized information ①effortlessly, they often assume that person possesses an innate gift. Cognitive psychologists, however, contend that such feats ②rarely stem from raw talent alone. Instead, such feats arise from a learned skill known as chunking, whereby scattered pieces of information are consolidated into larger, meaningful units. A landmark study of chess players demonstrated this principle. When shown a board arranged according to plausible game positions, grandmasters reproduced the layout perfectly. Yet when the same pieces were scattered randomly, their performance ③collapsed to the level of novices. This pattern reveals that expert memory is not larger in raw capacity but is instead organized around patterns accumulated through years of deliberate practice. If chunking, rather than innate aptitude, ④contradicts expert performance, then educators should stop treating talent as fixed and destiny-bound. Curricula ought to be redesigned to cultivate pattern recognition explicitly, since doing so would grant far more students access to expertise once ⑤presumed reserved for the naturally gifted.

When people look back on a multi-day journey, they ①rarely 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 ②disproportionate weight in this process: the single moment when emotion, whether joy or discomfort, reached its highest intensity, and whatever happened right before the experience concluded. Consider two hikers who complete an identical five-day trek. The first finishes with a ③grueling, 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. Even though both hikers faced comparable hardship overall, the second is far ④less 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; rather, it is shaped disproportionately by whichever moments felt most ⑤intense and by however the experience happened to end.

Sociologist Karl Mannheim argued that individuals who come of age during the same historical period tend to share a distinctive outlook shaped by the events, technologies, and crises that defined their formative years, a phenomenon he called a generational unit. Because each generation absorbs its foundational assumptions during adolescence and early adulthood, later generations raised amid different circumstances often develop noticeably different values regarding work, authority, and communication, even within the same family. This divergence produces what is commonly called a generational gap, most visible when older members of a household interpret a younger relative's habits as a rejection of tradition rather than _______________. Mannheim cautioned against viewing either generation as simply right or wrong.

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. Manufacturers derive these materials from renewable resources such as corn starch, blending them with additives that accelerate microbial breakdown once discarded. However, _______________. 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. 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.

Traditional industrial systems have relied on a linear model of production, in which raw materials are extracted, transformed into goods, and eventually discarded as waste. This approach treats natural resources as if unlimited and disposal as if costless. A circular economy proposes an alternative framework in which _______________, thereby reducing the extraction of virgin resources. Central to this model is the notion that waste, rather than being an inevitable byproduct, can be redesigned as a resource for another process, much as fallen leaves nourish the trees that shed them. For example, manufacturers design products so that components can be disassembled and reused in new items once their original function ends. Some companies also lease equipment instead of selling it outright, retaining responsibility for refurbishment. Because such practices lessen dependence on finite raw materials, they reduce the environmental damage caused by mining. Consequently, the circular economy is increasingly regarded as a viable economic strategy that conserves resources for future generations.

Economists traditionally measured a community's wealth in terms of factories, income, or infrastructure, yet sociologists increasingly point to a less visible resource: social capital, the networks of trust and reciprocity that allow people to cooperate for mutual benefit. (C) However, social capital is not uniformly beneficial; tightly bonded networks can also exclude outsiders and reinforce existing inequality. (B) Communities rich in social capital tend to enjoy lower crime and more effective local government, because neighbors who trust one another can coordinate informally. (A) For this reason, researchers increasingly distinguish between bonding capital, which strengthens ties within a single group, and bridging capital, which connects otherwise separate communities.