영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Desalination, the process of ①removing dissolved salts from seawater to produce fresh water, has increasingly been adopted by coastal regions facing chronic water scarcity. Most modern facilities rely on reverse osmosis, a technique in which seawater is ②forced through membranes whose microscopic pores block salt while letting water molecules pass. Because this method consumes 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 concentrated byproduct called brine, which, when discharged without adequate dilution, can raise local salinity to levels that ③harms marine life. Pumping seawater through membranes at high pressure also ④demands substantial electricity, so plants powered by fossil fuels can worsen the emissions that intensify drought. Therefore, engineers increasingly argue that desalination should be ⑤treated not as a stand-alone remedy but as one component of a broader conservation strategy.

Policymakers seeking to improve public welfare without restricting individual freedom have increasingly embraced an approach ①known as nudging, which alters the environment in which choices are made rather than mandating particular outcomes. A nudge preserves every option that ②was previously available; it simply arranges those options so that the choice deemed most beneficial becomes easier or more visible than the alternatives. Placing fruit at eye level in a school cafeteria while keeping dessert accessible but less prominent, for instance, ③do not forbid any student from choosing dessert, yet it measurably shifts consumption patterns toward healthier food. Advocates argue that such interventions ④respect autonomy precisely because no option is removed and no penalty is imposed for choosing differently. Critics, however, contend that even subtle architectural choices exploit predictable cognitive shortcuts, ⑤raising questions about whether influencing behavior through psychological means is meaningfully different from more coercive forms of persuasion.

Two patients diagnosed with the same disease and prescribed the same medication can respond in ①strikingly different ways, one recovering quickly while the other experiences little benefit or even harmful side effects. Precision medicine starts from the observation that this variation often traces back to differences buried in each patient's genome, differences that determine how ②efficiently a body absorbs, breaks down, or responds to a given drug. By sequencing a patient's DNA before treatment begins, doctors can increasingly predict which medication is likely to work best and at what dose, replacing a strategy once described as one-size-fits-all with something closer to a ③tailored fit. This approach has proven especially valuable in cancer treatment, where tumors from two patients with the same diagnosis may carry entirely ④identical genetic mutations that respond to entirely different drugs. Widespread adoption still faces real obstacles, since genetic sequencing remains ⑤expensive in many regions and few doctors have been trained to interpret the flood of genetic data such tests now produce.

A hamburger patty need not come from a slaughtered animal at all if a small sample of muscle cells can be ①discouraged 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 ②normally provide. Inside a bioreactor, the cells multiply across scaffolding designed to encourage them to align into fibers, ③gradually thickening into something that begins to resemble muscle tissue rather than a shapeless clump of cells. Supporters argue that because the process never requires raising and slaughtering a whole animal, it could shrink the land, water, and greenhouse gas emissions ④associated with conventional meat production. Skeptics counter that producing the specialized broth at a large enough scale remains prohibitively ⑤expensive, meaning cultured meat is unlikely to compete with conventional meat in price until the technology matures considerably further.

Millions of people now wear devices that continuously track their heart rate, sleep patterns, and daily activity. Users generally assume this information belongs to them, since it is drawn directly from their own bodies. In practice, however, the terms of service that few people read often grant the manufacturer broad rights to store, analyze, and even sell anonymized versions of that data. Advocates for reform argue that biological data deserves a category of protection stronger than ordinary consumer information, precisely because _______________.

When a resource is shared among many users, none of whom bears the full cost of its depletion, _______________. This dynamic, famously labeled the tragedy of the commons, describes how shared pastures and fisheries can be degraded even when every participant privately understands the danger of overuse. A single herder who adds one more animal to a communal pasture gains the entire benefit of that addition, whereas the resulting damage to the grass is shared among other herders who depend on the land. Because self-interest offers no incentive to restrain consumption unilaterally, the resource tends to be exhausted long before any user intends such an outcome. For decades, economists assumed that only two remedies existed: strict regulation or the conversion of shared resources into private property. Elinor Ostrom challenged this assumption, however, by documenting communities that had sustainably managed fisheries and forests for generations through locally devised rules and mutual monitoring rather than external control.

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 _______________.

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 known as loss aversion. Consider an investor who refuses to sell a declining stock, clinging to the hope that its price will eventually recover, even when all available evidence indicates that selling and reinvesting elsewhere would be more rational. As a result, loss aversion frequently pushes individuals toward ___________ rather than toward the outcome that would maximize their overall welfare.

Because the two sums occupy entirely separate mental categories, the household feels no contradiction in treating them so differently. Consider a household that maintains two separate financial habits that, from a purely economic standpoint, appear difficult to reconcile. ( ① ) On one hand, the household carefully sets aside a fixed percentage of its income each month into a long-term retirement account, resisting any temptation to withdraw from it early. ( ② ) On the other hand, the same household carries a persistent balance on a credit card, paying a substantial interest rate simply for the convenience of short-term borrowing. ( ③ ) A purely rational calculation would suggest withdrawing a small amount from savings to eliminate the higher-interest debt, since the interest earned on savings is far lower than the interest owed on the card. ( ④ ) Yet the household rarely considers this option, since retirement savings are mentally categorized as untouchable while credit card debt is treated as a separate, ongoing obligation. ( ⑤ ) This example illustrates how mental accounting can lead to financial choices that persist despite being demonstrably suboptimal.

This is, in essence, the working premise of an entire field known as synthetic biology, which treats the living cell as programmable hardware. Imagine rewriting a bacterium's code the way a programmer edits a line of software, and much of what synthetic biology promises begins to make sense. ( ① ) Researchers in this field assemble standardized genetic parts into circuits that can be inserted into a cell. ( ② ) Such circuits can instruct a cell to perform a task that no natural organism would carry out, from glowing under stress to detecting a toxin in water. ( ③ ) Because these circuits are built from interchangeable parts rather than designed from scratch each time, a circuit tested in one lab can often be reused, with minor adjustments, in an entirely different application. ( ④ ) Critics note that biological systems rarely behave as predictably as electronic circuits, since a gene inserted into a new cell can interact with existing pathways in unexpected ways, occasionally producing results no engineer intended. ( ⑤ ) Even so, as the catalog of standardized parts keeps expanding, engineers are gaining confidence to design increasingly complex systems, treating the cell as a chassis onto which new functions can be loaded.