영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Individuals confronted with a set of options frequently ①default to whichever alternative requires no active decision at all, a tendency scholars term the status quo bias. Rather than weighing the merits of each available choice afresh, decision-makers often treat the current arrangement as a reasonable baseline simply because it already exists, even when ②switching would plainly serve their interests better. This pattern becomes especially apparent in contexts where enrollment in a program ③depend on a default setting. When employees must actively opt into a retirement savings plan, participation rates remain stubbornly low; yet when the same plan is presented as automatic unless an employee opts out, participation rises dramatically, despite the fact that the underlying financial terms ④are identical in both cases. Two forces appear to drive this asymmetry: first, the cognitive effort required to evaluate alternatives, and second, an aversion to the potential regret that ⑤might follow an active decision that turns out poorly.

Two drivers, equally distracted by their phones, ①run a red light in exactly the same careless manner. By pure chance, a child happens to be crossing the street in front of one driver but not the other; the first driver kills the child, while the second driver drives through safely and never even ②noticing the danger. 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. Philosophers call this troubling asymmetry moral luck, since factors entirely outside a person's control end up ③determining how severely we judge their moral character. If moral responsibility is supposed to depend only on what a person chooses and intends, this outcome seems deeply unfair, yet few people are willing ④to excuse the unlucky driver as if nothing worse had happened. Moral luck suggests that our everyday judgments rest on a foundation far ⑤shakier than we usually like to admit.

When an oil tanker ruptures and crude spreads across open water, cleanup crews increasingly reach not only for skimmers and floating booms but also for something far smaller: bacteria that ①eat oil. Certain naturally occurring microbes possess enzymes capable of ②breaking hydrocarbon molecules apart, using the carbon as an energy source and gradually converting a toxic slick into carbon dioxide and harmless byproducts. Bioremediation, as this approach is called, works far more slowly than mechanical cleanup, often ③taking months rather than days, but it can reach contamination trapped in soil or sediment that skimmers and booms can never reach. Scientists have learned to accelerate the process by adding nutrients ④that help native microbial populations multiply faster, or in some cases by introducing engineered strains selected specifically for their appetite for a particular pollutant. Because the method relies on living organisms rather than heavy machinery, it also tends ⑤leave a far gentler footprint on the surrounding ecosystem than excavation or chemical treatment ever could.

Consider a large heap containing ten thousand grains of sand. Nearly everyone agrees that removing a single grain from such a heap leaves another heap behind; surely one grain could never make the difference between a heap and a non-heap. Yet if this principle is applied repeatedly, grain by grain, the heap eventually ②grows to a single lonely grain, or even to no grains at all, and logic alone seems to force us to accept that this final result still counts as a heap. Something has clearly ①gone wrong along the way, since no reasonable person would call one grain of sand a heap, but pinpointing exactly which single removal transformed a heap into a non-heap seems ③impossible. The puzzle exposes a deep discomfort with vague terms like "heap," "tall," or "bald," concepts that seem to admit no sharp ④boundary yet are used confidently in everyday language. Some philosophers conclude that classical logic itself may need to be ⑤revised to accommodate the genuine vagueness built into ordinary human language.

A hamburger patty need not come from a slaughtered animal if a small sample of muscle cells can be persuaded to multiply inside a steel tank. Cultured meat begins with a biopsy of animal muscle tissue, from which scientists isolate cells capable of dividing repeatedly, then feed those cells a nutrient broth that supplies the sugars, proteins, and minerals an animal's bloodstream would normally provide. Inside a bioreactor, the cells multiply across scaffolding designed to encourage them to align into fibers, gradually thickening into something that begins to resemble muscle tissue. Supporters argue that because the process never requires raising and slaughtering a whole animal, _______________. Skeptics counter that producing the specialized broth at a large enough scale remains prohibitively expensive, meaning cultured meat is unlikely to compete with conventional meat in price until the technology matures considerably further.

Medieval philosophers told the story of a hungry donkey placed exactly midway between two identical, equally fragrant piles of hay, with no factor whatsoever tipping the balance toward either option. Because the donkey is assumed to be a perfectly rational creature that always chooses the option supported by the strongest reason, and because neither pile offers any advantage over the other, the donkey supposedly finds itself with no rational basis for choosing one pile rather than the other. Paralyzed by this perfect symmetry, the donkey starves to death precisely because it can find no reason to move in either direction. Critics of the story point out that _______________.

Imagine a brilliant scientist named Mary who has spent her entire life inside a black-and-white room, learning everything physical science could ever teach about color, including the exact wavelengths of light and the precise neural processes triggered when a person sees red. Despite this complete physical knowledge, Mary herself has never actually seen a color; every book, screen, and object in her world has been carefully restricted to shades of gray. Suppose that one day Mary is finally released from the room and shown a ripe red tomato for the first time. Philosopher Frank Jackson argued that Mary would learn something entirely new at that moment, namely what it actually feels like to see red, even though she already possessed every physical fact about color there was to know beforehand. If Mary genuinely gains new knowledge upon leaving the room, then _______________.

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.

Every time an antibiotic kills off a population of bacteria, a handful of cells carrying a random mutation that resists the drug are left behind to multiply without competition. (A) Repeated over decades, across hospitals, farms, and households worldwide, this simple process of natural selection has produced strains of bacteria that survive treatments once considered reliably effective. (B) The pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, has slowed the pace at which new antibiotics reach the market, since a drug meant to be taken for only a week or two rarely earns back the enormous cost of developing it. (C) Researchers are therefore searching in unconventional places, screening soil microbes and even genetic databases for new molecules, and some have also revived an older approach using viruses that infect only bacteria to hunt down resistant strains.

The practical consequence of this precision has been a dramatic acceleration in the pace of genetic research itself. Bacteria have been cutting up invading viral DNA for billions of years, long before any scientist thought to borrow the trick for use in a laboratory. ( ① ) The CRISPR-Cas9 system, as it is now known, relies on a short guide RNA that matches a specific DNA sequence, leading a scissor-like enzyme called Cas9 directly to that exact location in the genome. ( ② ) Once Cas9 arrives at the target site, it slices both strands of the DNA helix, and the cell's own repair machinery rushes in to mend the cut, often introducing a small change in the process. ( ③ ) By supplying the cell with a template during this repair step, scientists can direct that machinery to insert a specific new sequence. ( ④ ) This goes well beyond merely disabling the original gene. ( ⑤ ) What once required years of painstaking work to alter a single gene can now, with a properly designed guide RNA, be accomplished within days.