영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Émile Durkheim insisted that sociology could become a genuine science only if it ①identified a distinct subject matter that could not be reduced to individual psychology. He termed this subject matter social facts, ②defining as ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that exist outside any single individual yet exert a coercive influence over that individual's behavior. Language, currency, legal codes, and religious ritual all ③qualify as social facts, since a person is born into these systems already fully formed and must conform to them regardless of personal preference. Durkheim insisted that social facts should be studied as things, meaning they must be ④examined empirically through observable patterns such as statistics. His study of suicide rates exemplified this method, showing that rates varied systematically according to variables such as religious affiliation and marital status, patterns that could not ⑤be explained by individual psychology alone.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu introduced the concept of habitus to describe the deeply ingrained dispositions, tastes, and ways of perceiving the world ①that individuals absorb through years of socialization within a particular social class. Habitus operates below conscious awareness, ②shaping everything from posture and accent to preferences in food, art, and leisure, so that a person's habitus feels entirely natural even though it ③was produced by specific social conditions. Bourdieu argued that habitus allows privilege to reproduce itself across generations without any explicit coercion, since children raised in advantaged households absorb the tastes and manners that institutions such as elite schools implicitly ④reward, while children from other backgrounds may find the same institutions subtly unfamiliar. Because habitus feels like personal identity rather than social conditioning, individuals rarely recognize how thoroughly their preferences ⑤having been shaped by class position.

Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in ①isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. A struggling artist may judge success not against neighbors but against celebrated painters in art history, a comparison that can inspire ambition or, just as easily, ②breed persistent dissatisfaction. Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, which merely provide a ③benchmark for self-assessment. Robert Merton showed that soldiers who compared their promotion chances to peers within their own slow-moving unit often felt more satisfied than soldiers in units with faster promotion rates, because the latter could see colleagues advancing while they themselves ④surpassed them. This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are ⑤measured.

Sociologist Mark Granovetter challenged a common assumption when he found that job seekers were more likely to hear about new opportunities from casual acquaintances than from close friends and family. This finding, published as the strength of weak ties, rests on a structural insight: close friends tend to belong to the same tight social circle and therefore already share most of the same information, whereas casual acquaintances typically move in ①different circles and can act as bridges to information a person would otherwise never encounter. Weak ties, precisely because they connect otherwise ②separate networks, transmit novel information more efficiently than the redundant, overlapping ties within a tightly bonded group. Granovetter's insight has since been applied well beyond job searches, informing research on how innovations ③spread, how political movements recruit new members, and how epidemics travel through a population, suggesting that casual relationships may ④quietly determine access to opportunities that shape an entire career, a conclusion most researchers now consider entirely ⑤implausible.

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.

German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies distinguished between two fundamentally different forms of social organization, which he termed Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft, often translated as community, describes relationships bound by close kinship, shared tradition, and face-to-face familiarity, typical of small villages where individuals know one another across an entire lifetime. Gesellschaft, often translated as society, describes relationships organized around impersonal contracts, self-interest, and formal law, typical of large cities where interactions occur between relative strangers who cooperate for specific, limited purposes. Tönnies did not regard one form as simply superior to the other; rather, he saw the shift from Gemeinschaft toward Gesellschaft as a defining feature of modernization, one that _______________.

Structural functionalism approaches society as a complex system of interdependent parts, each contributing to the overall stability and smooth operation of the whole, much as organs contribute to the survival of a biological body. Sociologist Talcott Parsons argued that institutions such as the family, education, religion, and government each perform necessary functions, so that removing or weakening any one institution threatens the equilibrium of the entire system. Robert Merton refined this framework by distinguishing manifest functions, the intended and openly recognized consequences of a social practice, from latent functions, unintended consequences that nonetheless help sustain the system, such as schools serving not only to educate but also to provide childcare that allows parents to work. Critics have long charged that functionalism, by emphasizing stability and equilibrium, struggles to explain social conflict and rapid change, since it tends to _______________.

Social mobility refers to the movement of individuals or families between different positions within a society's system of stratification, whether upward, downward, or sideways. (C) Structural mobility, caused by large-scale economic shifts such as the growth of new industries, must be distinguished from individual mobility, which results from a single person's particular choices. (A) Sociologists distinguish intragenerational mobility, changes within a single person's lifetime, from intergenerational mobility, differences between the social position of parents and their children. (B) Research across many nations has found that education functions as the primary channel of upward mobility, yet access to quality education is itself unevenly distributed.

A cluster of neurons smaller than a pea can now spontaneously organize itself into layered structures that mimic, in miniature, the architecture of a developing human brain. (A) Because organoids lack sensory organs, a body, or any connection to the outside world, most neuroscientists argue that the structures cannot generate anything resembling subjective experience, though some ethicists believe the field would benefit from establishing clear boundaries now, before the science outruns the conversation about what it means. (B) Grown from stem cells coaxed to follow the same developmental cues that guide an embryo, these brain organoids have begun firing electrical signals in patterns that faintly resemble the activity recorded in an infant's brain. (C) For researchers studying disorders such as autism or schizophrenia, this offers something long unavailable: a living model of human brain development that can be observed and manipulated directly, without ever touching an actual patient.

This detachment, while sometimes criticized as cold or impersonal, also grants urban residents a distinctive freedom: because so few people know or judge them personally, city dwellers can experiment with identities and lifestyles that would invite intense scrutiny in a smaller, more tightly knit community. German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that the psychological experience of city life differs fundamentally from life in small towns, primarily because urban residents are bombarded with a much greater volume of stimuli than the human nervous system evolved to process. ( ① ) To cope with this constant sensory overload, Simmel proposed, city dwellers develop what he called a blasé attitude. ( ② ) This is a protective indifference in which individuals mentally blunt their emotional reaction to the surrounding crowd, treating most encounters with calculated detachment rather than genuine engagement. ( ③ ) Simmel therefore viewed anonymity as a double-edged feature of modern life. ( ④ ) It isolates individuals from deep communal bonds while simultaneously liberating them from the constant surveillance of small-town social life. ( ⑤ )