영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Suppose you meet a quiet, ①gentle man who speaks softly, tends a small garden, and organizes his bookshelf with meticulous care. Asked whether he is more likely a florist or a truck driver, most people ②instinctively choose florist, since his personality matches the stereotype so neatly. This judgment, however, ignores a crucial fact: truck drivers vastly ③trail florists in almost every country, which means that, statistically, he is far more likely to belong to the larger group regardless of how well he fits the flower-shop image. Relying on resemblance to a familiar category rather than on underlying numerical proportions, known among researchers as representativeness, leads people to overlook these base rates almost ④automatically. Even trained professionals, who should know better, often fall into the same trap when a vivid description feels more ⑤convincing than plain statistics.

Marketers have long recognized that perceived scarcity, the sense that a product or opportunity is available only in limited quantity or for a limited time, can dramatically increase its ①desirability, even when the item's intrinsic qualities remain entirely unchanged. This phenomenon, known as the scarcity effect, operates on a simple psychological principle: when something appears ②easy to obtain, people tend to infer that it must be valuable, since truly worthless items rarely generate genuine competition for possession. A retailer who labels a product as "limited edition" or displays a countdown timer beside a discounted offer exploits this inference, prompting customers to make ③hurried purchase decisions they might otherwise postpone or reconsider. Experimental studies confirm that identical products are rated as more desirable and often command ④higher prices when framed as scarce than when the same products are presented as widely and continuously available. Consumers who later reflect calmly on such purchases frequently discover that the item's actual usefulness fell well short of the ⑤urgency they experienced at the moment of decision.

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

Many large companies now rely on artificial intelligence to screen job applications before a human ever sees them. These systems promise efficiency, scanning thousands of resumes in seconds and ranking candidates according to patterns drawn from previous hiring decisions. However, this reliance on historical data creates a troubling risk. If a company's past hiring favored a particular group, the algorithm may learn to treat that pattern as a marker of success and quietly reproduce it, even when no one intended discrimination. Unlike a human interviewer, the system offers no explanation for its choices, which means that _______________. Some researchers argue that fairness cannot be added afterward; it must be built into the system's design from the very beginning.

Imagine watching a fair coin land on heads five times in a row and feeling an increasingly strong intuition that the next flip is somehow due to produce tails. (A) This intuition, though psychologically compelling, rests on a basic misunderstanding of probability, since each flip of a fair coin remains entirely independent of every flip that came before it. (B) The coin possesses no memory of its previous outcomes, and its probability of landing on tails on the sixth flip stays fixed at fifty percent regardless of how many heads preceded it. (C) Casinos have long profited from this misconception, watching gamblers place larger bets after a losing streak simply because they mistakenly believe that a win has become statistically overdue.

Consider a student who genuinely intends to study for tomorrow's exam yet, when the evening actually arrives, chooses to watch another episode of a favorite show instead, promising herself she will surely study harder next week. (A) Behavioral economists note that this preference weakens considerably once both options are pushed into the future, which is why planning a diet starting next month feels effortless compared with skipping dessert tonight. Such inconsistency helps explain why gym memberships go unused and retirement accounts remain underfunded, despite people's stated intentions. Recognizing this pull toward the present, therefore, allows individuals and institutions to design commitments that quietly protect long-term goals from short-term temptation. (B) People do not necessarily fail to understand that the future reward matters more; rather, whatever happens right now simply feels disproportionately more urgent and vivid than anything scheduled for later. (C) This pattern, in which the pull of an immediate pleasure overwhelms the value of a distant benefit, appears again and again across ordinary life, from postponed exercise to delayed savings.

Anyone designing a presentation, a curriculum, or a grocery list should attend to a well-documented pattern in human memory known as the serial position effect. When people are asked to recall items from a list right after studying it, they consistently remember the items presented at the beginning and end far better than those buried in the middle. (A) Communicators who ignore this pattern risk burying their most important point where it will predictably be forgotten. A more effective strategy, therefore, places the crucial message at the beginning or end, precisely where memory proves most reliable. (B) The advantage for early items, called the primacy effect, arises because those items receive more rehearsal and are more likely to be transferred into long-term storage before subsequent items compete for attention. (C) The advantage for final items, known as the recency effect, occurs because those items remain accessible in short-term memory at the moment of recall. Middle items suffer because they must compete for limited rehearsal opportunities while lacking the stability afforded by extended processing.

Confirmation bias becomes particularly consequential in political discourse, where citizens must evaluate competing claims about complex issues. (A) As a result, exposure to more information does not necessarily produce more accurate beliefs; it can instead deepen existing divisions by giving each side additional material that appears to validate its own position. (B) Voters who favor a particular policy tend to seek out news sources and commentators who share that view, while largely avoiding those who might challenge it. (C) This selective consumption means that two people examining ostensibly the same news environment can end up with radically different, mutually reinforcing interpretations of events.

The underlying technique, it turns out, borrows more from a familiar desktop machine than one might expect. A printer that once produced only plastic prototypes can now deposit living cells layer by layer to build a structure that begins to resemble actual tissue. ( ① ) Bioprinting adapts the logic of conventional 3D printing, replacing plastic filament with a specialized ink made of living cells suspended in a gel that supports their survival while the shape sets. ( ② ) Printing a flat patch of skin or a simple blood vessel has already moved from laboratory curiosity to early clinical testing, since these tissues are thin enough for nutrients to reach every cell by diffusion. ( ③ ) Printing a solid organ such as a kidney remains a far greater challenge, because internal cells starve without their own blood supply. ( ④ ) No printer yet exists that can build a network of vessels fast enough to keep them alive. ( ⑤ ) Researchers are therefore focusing on hybrid strategies, printing a rough scaffold and then allowing the tissue to mature and grow its own vasculature over time, rather than attempting to print every vessel directly.

The same mechanism that helps citizens save more for retirement, in other words, can just as easily be turned against their financial interests. Default settings are not inherently virtuous; their ethical value depends entirely on whose interests they serve. ( ① ) A retirement plan that automatically enrolls employees at a reasonable contribution rate generally benefits those employees by overcoming their tendency toward inertia. ( ② ) A subscription service that automatically renews at a higher price unless the customer actively cancels, however, exploits that very same inertia for the company's benefit rather than the customer's. ( ③ ) Both arrangements rely on the identical psychological tendency to accept whatever has been preselected. ( ④ ) Distinguishing between beneficial and exploitative uses of default settings therefore requires examining not the mechanism itself but the intentions and incentives of whoever designed it. ( ⑤ ) Regulators increasingly demand transparency about default settings precisely because the mechanism alone cannot reveal whether it serves the consumer or merely the company offering it.