영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Desalination, the process of removing dissolved salts from seawater to produce fresh water, has increasingly been adopted by coastal regions facing chronic water ①scarcity. Most modern facilities rely on reverse osmosis, a technique in which seawater is forced through membranes whose microscopic pores block salt while letting water molecules pass. Because this method ②consumes far less energy than the thermal distillation once dominant in the industry, it has become the preferred choice for large-scale plants. Nevertheless, desalination remains an inherently costly and environmentally burdensome solution, a fact often overlooked amid enthusiasm for ending water shortages. For instance, the process generates a ③concentrated byproduct called brine, which, when discharged without adequate dilution, can raise local salinity to levels that harm marine life. Pumping seawater through membranes at high pressure also demands substantial electricity, so plants powered by fossil fuels can ④alleviate the emissions that intensify drought. Therefore, engineers increasingly argue that desalination should be treated not as a stand-alone remedy but as one component of a ⑤broader conservation strategy.

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

Labeling theory approaches deviance not as a ①fixed property of certain acts, but as a social process created when powerful groups attach a negative label to a person's behavior. According to this view, nearly everyone breaks minor rules at some point, yet only some individuals are ②singled out, caught, and formally branded as delinquents, criminals, or troublemakers. Sociologist Howard Becker argued that this label often becomes what he called a master status, a single identity that ③overshadows every other trait a person has. Once labeled, an individual may find legitimate opportunities ④expanding, pushing them toward the very community of offenders that the label predicted they would join. This process, sometimes called secondary deviance, illustrates how social reaction can produce the outcome it claims merely to describe, a pattern critics see as deeply ⑤troubling.

The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively simple question. If every plank of a wooden ship is replaced one by one over many years, is the vessel that eventually results still the same ship it once was? Most people's first instinct is to answer yes, since each individual replacement seems too small to erase the ship's identity. The puzzle grows far sharper, however, once a second twist is introduced. Suppose a careful collector gathered every discarded plank and reassembled them into a second vessel, built exactly as the original once stood. Two ships would then exist side by side, each with an equal claim to being the genuine one, and no obvious way to decide between them. Philosophers return to this old story again and again, not because they care about timber, but because it forces us to ask whether identity depends on continuous material, continuous form, or _______________.

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. 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. 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. 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 say that one of them is the real continuation of the person who entered the machine. This malfunction reveals that _______________.

Suppose a mysterious being with a near-perfect track record of predicting human choices presents a player with two boxes. 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. 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. The player may choose to take only Box B, or to take both boxes, and the prediction has already been made and cannot change. 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 at this point. 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. _______________.

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. (C) 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. (A) Because each generation absorbs its foundational assumptions during adolescence and early adulthood, later generations raised amid different circumstances often develop noticeably different values, even within the same family. (B) Mannheim cautioned against viewing either generation as simply right or wrong, insisting instead that each generation's worldview reflects a coherent response to the particular historical conditions it encountered.

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. (B) This detachment, while sometimes criticized as cold or impersonal, also grants urban residents a distinctive freedom, since so few people know or judge them personally. (A) To cope with this constant sensory overload, Simmel proposed, city dwellers develop what he called a blasé attitude, treating most encounters with calculated detachment rather than genuine engagement. (C) Simmel therefore viewed anonymity as a double-edged feature of modern life, one that isolates individuals from deep communal bonds while liberating them from constant surveillance.

Two drivers, equally distracted by their phones, run a red light in exactly the same careless manner. (A) Although both drivers behaved identically and made exactly the same reckless choice, society judges them very differently: one faces criminal charges and lifelong guilt, while the other receives, at most, a minor traffic ticket. (B) Philosophers call this troubling asymmetry moral luck, since factors entirely outside a person's control end up determining how severely we judge their moral character. (C) By pure chance, a child happens to be crossing the street in front of one driver but not the other, and the first driver kills the child while the second drives through safely.

Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. (C) 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. (A) Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, which merely provide a benchmark for self-assessment. (B) This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are measured.