영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Classical economic theory long assumed that decision makers gather all relevant information, calculate every possible outcome, and select the single option that maximizes their benefit. Herbert Simon, however, questioned this assumption, arguing that human beings operate under real constraints of time, knowledge, and mental capacity that make such ①exhaustive calculation practically impossible. Instead of searching ②endlessly for the theoretically perfect choice, people typically stop once they find an option that seems good enough to meet their immediate needs, a strategy Simon termed satisficing. A shopper comparing refrigerators, for example, rarely examines every model available; she instead sets a few practical criteria, such as price and size, and selects the first appliance that satisfies them ③adequately. This approach is not a failure of reasoning but rather a sensible adaptation to a world where information is ④costly and time is genuinely limited. Consequently, models assuming unlimited rationality often fail to predict actual behavior, while frameworks acknowledging these cognitive boundaries offer a far more ⑤unrealistic account of how ordinary decisions are actually made.

Engineers are now exploring implants and prosthetics designed to give healthy people abilities beyond ordinary human limits. Supporters frame this as simply the next step in a long history of human enhancement, no different in principle from eyeglasses or vaccines. Critics counter that earlier enhancements were broadly available to anyone regardless of wealth, while cutting-edge neural and physical implants are likely to remain expensive for decades, potentially _______________.

Economists traditionally measured a community's wealth in terms of factories, income, or infrastructure, yet sociologists increasingly point to a less visible resource: social capital, the networks of trust and reciprocity that allow people to cooperate for mutual benefit. Robert Putnam popularized the concept by documenting a decline in civic participation, a trend he captured in the phrase bowling alone. Communities rich in social capital tend to enjoy lower crime and more effective local government, because neighbors who know and trust one another can coordinate informally without relying entirely on formal institutions. However, _______________. For this reason, researchers increasingly distinguish between bonding capital, which strengthens ties within a single group, and bridging capital, which connects otherwise separate communities.

When workers receive a five percent raise in a year when prices have climbed five percent as well, their real purchasing power has not changed at all, yet many still report _______________. This tendency to judge economic well-being by nominal figures printed on a paycheck, rather than by what that money can actually purchase, is known among economists as money illusion. Employers exploit this pattern by favoring modest nominal raises over deeper structural adjustments, since a visible increase on a payslip satisfies employees more effectively than an explanation about inflation could.

When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh how painful it would feel to discover later that a different choice had been better. This anticipation of future regret frequently becomes the dominant factor shaping the final decision. Researchers have found that people feel sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing, _______________. Ironically, this strategy of avoiding regret can itself produce outcomes that are later regretted even more deeply than the ones it was originally designed to prevent.

Consider a student who genuinely intends to study for tomorrow's exam yet, when the evening actually arrives, chooses to watch another episode of a favorite show instead, promising herself she will surely study harder next week. This pattern, in which the pull of an immediate pleasure overwhelms the value of a distant benefit, appears again and again across ordinary life, from postponed exercise to delayed savings. People do not necessarily fail to understand that the future reward matters more; rather, _______________. Behavioral economists note that this preference weakens considerably once both options are pushed into the future, which is why planning a diet starting next month feels effortless compared with skipping dessert tonight.

Suppose you meet a quiet, gentle man who speaks softly, tends a small garden, and organizes his bookshelf with meticulous care. (A) This judgment, however, ignores a crucial fact: truck drivers vastly outnumber florists in almost every country, which means that, statistically, he is far more likely to belong to the larger group regardless of how well he fits the flower-shop image. (B) Relying on resemblance to a familiar category rather than on underlying numerical proportions, known among researchers as representativeness, leads people to overlook these base rates almost automatically. Even trained professionals, who should know better, often fall into the same trap when a vivid description feels more convincing than plain statistics. Consequently, teaching people to pause and ask how common something actually is, instead of merely how typical it appears, can meaningfully improve the accuracy of everyday predictions and reduce costly errors in judgment. (C) Asked whether he is more likely a florist or a truck driver, most people instinctively choose florist, since his personality matches the stereotype so neatly.

When people encounter an individual who appears to memorize enormous quantities of specialized information effortlessly, they often assume that person possesses an innate gift. Cognitive psychologists, however, contend that such feats rarely stem from raw talent alone. (A) This pattern reveals that expert memory is not larger in raw capacity but is instead organized around patterns accumulated through years of deliberate practice. If chunking, rather than innate aptitude, underlies expert performance, then educators should stop treating talent as fixed and destiny-bound. Curricula ought to be redesigned to cultivate pattern recognition explicitly, since doing so would grant far more students access to expertise once presumed reserved for the naturally gifted. (B) A landmark study of chess players demonstrated this principle. When shown a board arranged according to plausible game positions, grandmasters reproduced the layout perfectly. Yet when the same pieces were scattered randomly, their performance collapsed to the level of novices. (C) Instead, such feats arise from a learned skill known as chunking, whereby scattered pieces of information are consolidated into larger, meaningful units.

주어진 문장: Traditional economic models, in fact, offer no straightforward account of why unpaid, amateur labor should raise an object's perceived worth in the eyes of its very creator. Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? ( ① ) This puzzle, which researchers named after a furniture retailer famous for selling items that require home assembly, challenges the standard economic assumption that value is determined solely by an object's inherent qualities. ( ② ) In a series of experiments, participants who assembled a plain storage box were willing to pay nearly as much for their own imperfect creation as they were for a professionally built version, despite being fully aware of its flaws. ( ③ ) Labor, it seems, functions as a kind of psychological investment: once effort has been poured into a task, individuals become reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly wasted. ( ④ ) This tendency helps explain why consumers often prefer products that demand some degree of personal assembly, even when a comparable finished item is available at a lower price and requires no time investment whatsoever. ( ⑤ )

주어진 문장: This experiment shows that consumers do not simply weigh money saved against money spent, but react to the very presence or absence of a price tag itself. Classical economic theory assumes that consumers evaluate every price change in the same rational way, weighing marginal benefit against marginal cost regardless of the absolute numbers involved. ( ① ) Behavioral economists, however, have discovered a striking exception: the moment a price drops to exactly zero, people's judgment shifts in a way that ordinary discounting cannot explain. ( ② ) In a well-known laboratory experiment, participants chose between two chocolates, one of higher quality priced at a small fee and one of lower quality offered for free. ( ③ ) When both prices were merely reduced by the same amount, most participants still preferred the higher-quality option. Yet once the cheaper chocolate's price was lowered to zero, the majority abruptly switched their preference, even though the price gap between the two options had not actually changed. ( ④ ) Researchers explain this reversal by noting that a free item carries no perceived risk of loss, which makes it feel disproportionately attractive compared with any option that still requires payment, however small. ( ⑤ )