영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Economists have long debated whether prosperity and environmental quality are fundamentally opposed, or whether the relationship between them ①changes shape as an economy matures. The Environmental Kuznets Curve, a hypothesis ②borrowed from earlier theories of income inequality, proposes that pollution initially rises alongside economic growth before eventually declining once a society crosses a certain threshold of wealth. In its early stages, industrializing nations prioritize output over conservation, ③treats clean air and water as expendable costs of development to be addressed later. Beyond a certain point, however, rising incomes generate both the technological capacity and the political will ④to demand stricter regulation, so degradation begins to reverse even as production keeps expanding. Some scholars regard this trajectory as a reassuring paradox, suggesting that the very growth ⑤blamed for ecological harm may eventually finance its own repair. Critics, by contrast, argue that the curve rests on a narrow selection of pollutants that happen to decline with wealth, while ignoring greenhouse gases and resource depletion, which show no comparable tendency to fall.

Long before humans learned to drill for oil, microorganisms had already ①mastered the art of converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into stored chemical energy. Modern biofuel research borrows this ability, cultivating algae or engineered bacteria in large tanks where they can be coaxed into producing oils and sugars that can be ②refined into fuel usable in existing engines. Unlike crops grown for corn-based ethanol, which ③compete directly with food production for arable land, many algae strains can thrive in shallow ponds, wastewater, or even coastal seawater unsuitable for conventional agriculture. Engineers have also learned to tinker with the metabolic pathways of these organisms, boosting oil yield far beyond what any wild strain would naturally produce on its own. Despite this progress, producing biofuel at a cost competitive with fossil fuel remains ④difficult, since harvesting and processing the organisms ⑤conserves a substantial share of the energy the fuel itself will eventually provide.

As cities have expanded across landscapes once covered with ①absorbent soil, impervious surfaces have turned stormwater from a resource that recharges groundwater into a hazard that floods streets and carries pollutants into waterways. Green infrastructure, which mimics the hydrological functions that natural landscapes once performed, offers planners a way to treat the city as a sponge rather than a ②rigid drainage pipe. Rain gardens, shallow depressions planted with deep-rooted vegetation, are designed to capture runoff from rooftops, allowing it to filter ③rapidly through soil before reaching underground aquifers. Permeable pavement, made of porous materials that let water pass directly through, serves a similar purpose along sidewalks, where asphalt would remain ④impenetrable. For example, cities that replaced pavement with permeable alternatives have reported ⑤notable reductions in flooding during storms that once overwhelmed sewers. However, engineers caution that green infrastructure cannot entirely replace conventional pipes in dense cores, where heavy runoff still requires structural reinforcement. Consequently, municipalities now regard green and gray infrastructure as complementary systems, each compensating for the other's limitations.

Blockchain technology was originally promoted as a way to remove the need for trusted middlemen. In theory, this design distributes power away from any single institution and toward the network as a whole. In practice, however, _______________, controlling enough computing power or currency to influence outcomes that were supposed to be decided collectively. Whether decentralization can survive this concentration of power remains one of the technology's most unresolved questions.

Political philosophers have long debated how much authority, if any, a government may legitimately claim over free individuals. Robert Nozick imagined a hypothetical starting point in which people live without any state at all, each relying on private arrangements to protect their own person and property. He argued that a minimal state, limited strictly to enforcing contracts and protecting citizens from violence, theft, and fraud, could arise gradually through a series of voluntary exchanges, without anyone's rights ever being violated along the way. Critics on one side, the anarchists, insist that even this minimal government inevitably violates the rights of those who never consented to join it. Critics on the other side argue that a state limited to bare protection cannot address deeper inequalities that arise naturally in any free market. Nozick's thought experiment therefore _______________.

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.

As more schools shift toward digital textbooks and online assignments, a student without reliable internet access at home faces a disadvantage that has little to do with talent or effort. (A) That assumption is increasingly being reconsidered, particularly as more essential services, from job applications to medical appointments, move online by default. (B) Some policymakers initially treated internet access as a convenience, comparable to cable television, rather than as infrastructure essential to modern life. (C) Closing this divide will require more than simply distributing devices; it will demand sustained investment in the physical networks that carry information into every home.

As private companies develop the technology to mine asteroids for rare metals and water, a legal question once confined to science fiction has suddenly become urgent: who, if anyone, owns the resources of outer space? (A) Some governments have already passed domestic laws granting their own companies rights to material mined in space, a move other nations view as a unilateral attempt to settle a shared question. (B) Existing international treaties state that no nation may claim sovereignty over celestial bodies, but they say remarkably little about whether a private company may extract and sell what it finds there. (C) Supporters of space mining argue that new resources could ease shortages on Earth, while critics warn that treating space as an open frontier for extraction risks repeating past mistakes.

Working memory refers to the mental workspace in which information is temporarily held and manipulated while a person performs a cognitive task. Such tasks include solving an arithmetic problem, following a rapid conversation, or holding a phone number in mind before dialing it. (A) Subsequent research, however, revealed that Miller's estimate was somewhat generous, since it failed to account for the complexity of the material being remembered. Nelson Cowan later argued that when rehearsal strategies are prevented and attention is tightly controlled, genuine capacity hovers closer to four items rather than seven. (B) This discrepancy suggests that what earlier studies had measured was not raw storage capacity itself but a hybrid quantity inflated by clever strategies. Contemporary psychologists therefore distinguish between the fixed limit of working memory and the flexible techniques that allow individuals to transcend that limit. (C) In the mid-twentieth century, the psychologist George Miller proposed that this workspace could accommodate roughly seven discrete items. His claim proved so influential that it became widely known as the magic number seven.

A liver no longer has to sit inside a human body to be studied closely. (A) Unlike flat cultures grown on a plastic dish, which lose many of the cues that guide normal development, organoids let cells interact in three dimensions much as they would inside the body, yielding tissue that behaves in strikingly realistic ways. (B) This fidelity has made organoids invaluable for testing how a drug affects human tissue before any patient is exposed, and some laboratories have even grown organoids from a single patient's own cells, raising the possibility of trialing a treatment on a miniature copy of that patient's organ. (C) By coaxing stem cells to organize themselves within a nutrient-rich gel, scientists can now grow miniature three-dimensional structures called organoids, which reproduce much of the architecture and function of a real organ.