영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Behavioral economists have long observed that people tend to feel the pain of losing something more intensely than the pleasure of gaining an equivalent amount, a tendency ①known as loss aversion. This asymmetry, which ②was first documented through a series of carefully designed experiments, suggests that the psychological weight of a loss can be roughly twice that of a comparable gain. Consider an investor who refuses to sell a declining stock, ③clings to the hope that its price will eventually recover, even when all available evidence indicates that selling and reinvesting elsewhere would be more rational. Such behavior, though it ④appears irrational from a purely economic standpoint, becomes understandable once we recognize that the investor is trying to avoid the sharp discomfort associated with realizing a loss. Similarly, consumers often demand a much higher price to give up an item they already own than they would be ⑤willing to pay to acquire the same item in the first place.

Consider a village green shared freely by every herder in the community, where each individual may graze as many animals as they wish without ①paying any fee. From the perspective of any single herder, adding one more animal to the shared pasture ②brings a clear personal benefit, since the extra income belongs entirely to that herder alone. The cost of the additional grazing, however, is spread thinly across every herder who uses the green, so no single individual ③bears more than a tiny fraction of the damage. Because this calculation favors adding more animals for every rational herder, the shared pasture is gradually overgrazed until it can no longer ④support any animals at all, harming the very community whose rational members caused the collapse. Philosophers use this scenario to illustrate a troubling gap between what benefits an individual in the short term and what preserves a shared resource in the long term, a gap that voluntary self-restraint alone rarely ⑤closing.

Sociologist Karl Mannheim argued that individuals ①who 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, when identity ②are still forming, later generations raised amid different circumstances often ③develop 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 ④interpret a younger relative's habits as a rejection of tradition rather than a rational adaptation to a genuinely different social environment. Mannheim cautioned against viewing either generation as simply right or wrong, insisting instead that each generation's worldview ⑤reflects a coherent response to the particular historical conditions it encountered.

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 ①complete 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 ②new 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 physical facts alone ③cannot capture everything there is to know about conscious experience, ④confirming that something was indeed missing from her exhaustive scientific education all along, a conclusion that some physicalists find entirely ⑤unsurprising.

John Rawls proposed an unusual thought experiment to determine what principles of justice a society ought to adopt. Imagine a group of rational people gathered to design the basic rules of their future society, but placed behind what he called a veil of ignorance, a condition under which ①none of them knows their own race, gender, wealth, talents, or social position in advance. Since no one can predict whether they will be born into privilege or poverty, each person has a strong incentive to choose rules that ②protect the worst-off members of society, rather than rules that merely favor whichever group they happen to belong to. Rawls argued that rational people placed in this position would not gamble on inequality; instead, they would favor arrangements that guarantee basic liberties for everyone and permit unequal outcomes only when those outcomes actually ③benefit the least advantaged. Justice, on this view, is what ④impartial reasoning produces once self-interest is ⑤maximized.

Emissions trading, a market-based mechanism for curbing greenhouse gases, allows governments to set an overall limit on carbon output while letting firms trade permits within that limit. Under this system, known as cap-and-trade, companies that cut emissions more ①cheaply than required can sell surplus allowances to firms facing higher reduction costs. Proponents argue that this flexibility lets society reach a given environmental target at the ②lowest overall cost, since abatement shifts toward whoever can achieve it most economically. Critics, however, contend that trading schemes frequently allocate too many permits, a flaw that has historically ③depressed carbon prices and blunted incentives to invest in cleaner technology. For example, early phases of several regional markets granted allowances so generously that permit prices ④collapsed, leaving polluters with little pressure to change their practices. Consequently, many economists now advocate combining trading with a price floor, a minimum permit price that keeps the market from collapsing during weak demand, thereby ⑤undermining the cost-effectiveness for which trading is valued.

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 eat oil. (A) Scientists have learned to accelerate the process by adding nutrients that help native microbial populations multiply faster, or by introducing engineered strains, and because the method relies on living organisms rather than heavy machinery, it also tends to leave a far gentler footprint on the surrounding ecosystem than excavation or chemical treatment ever could. (B) Certain naturally occurring microbes possess enzymes capable of breaking hydrocarbon molecules apart, using the carbon as an energy source and gradually converting a toxic slick into carbon dioxide and harmless byproducts. (C) Bioremediation, as this approach is called, works far more slowly than mechanical cleanup, often taking months rather than days, but it can reach contamination trapped in soil or sediment that skimmers and booms can never reach.

If such a divide hardens, competitive advantages in school, sports, and the workplace could come to depend less on effort than on access to capital. Beyond restoring lost function, engineers are now exploring implants and prosthetics designed to give healthy people abilities beyond ordinary human limits. ( ① ) Supporters frame this as simply the next step in a long history of human enhancement, no different in principle from eyeglasses or vaccines. ( ② ) Critics counter that earlier enhancements were broadly available to anyone regardless of wealth. ( ③ ) Cutting-edge neural and physical implants, by contrast, are likely to remain expensive for decades, potentially splitting society into those who can afford enhancement and those who cannot. ( ④ ) What began as a medical tool for restoring what was lost, in other words, may end up redefining the baseline of what counts as an ordinary human being. ( ⑤ )

Philosophers return to this old story again and again, not because they care about timber, but because it forces us to ask a far deeper question about identity itself. The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively simple question. ( ① ) 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? ( ② ) Most people's first instinct is to answer yes, since each individual replacement seems too small to erase the ship's identity. ( ③ ) 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. ( ④ ) 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. ( ⑤ ) Whether identity depends on continuous material, continuous form, or some deeper thread, no single answer has ever fully satisfied everyone who has taken up the question.

This malfunction, harmless as it sounds, reveals something troubling: memory and psychological continuity alone cannot fully settle what personal identity actually requires. 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. ( ① ) 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. ( ② ) Philosophers, however, are troubled by a version of the same device that malfunctions. ( ③ ) Instead of destroying the original, it leaves the original body intact while still creating a perfect duplicate elsewhere. ( ④ ) 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 which one is the real continuation of the person who entered the machine. ( ⑤ )