영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

When individuals face uncertainty about how to behave, they frequently look to the actions of others for guidance, ①assuming that a behavior adopted by many people is more likely to be correct or appropriate than one adopted by few, a tendency known as social proof. This reliance on collective behavior can be remarkably efficient, since it allows individuals ②to benefit from the accumulated judgment of a crowd without having to gather and evaluate every relevant fact themselves. However, social proof can also lead entire groups astray when the initial signal that ③trigger imitation is itself unreliable or coincidental. A restaurant that happens to attract a long line early in the evening may continue attracting customers throughout the night simply because passersby ④interpret the queue as evidence of superior quality. Financial markets exhibit an analogous pattern: investors who observe others buying a particular asset often join the buying themselves, ⑤reasoning that so many participants cannot all be mistaken.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed the panopticon, a prison structure in which a central watchtower allows a single guard ①observing every cell, while inmates can never determine whether they are actually ②being watched at any given moment. French theorist Michel Foucault later transformed this architectural idea into a broader theory of power, arguing that the mere possibility of being observed is often sufficient ③to produce obedient behavior, since individuals internalize the watcher's gaze and begin to discipline themselves even in the watcher's absence. Foucault extended this logic beyond prisons to schools, hospitals, and workplaces, ④suggesting that modern institutions increasingly rely on continuous, often invisible observation rather than physical force to maintain order. Contemporary scholars have applied Foucault's framework to digital surveillance, arguing that smartphones and workplace monitoring software ⑤recreate panoptic conditions on a vastly larger scale.

The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively simple question. If every plank of a wooden ship ①is replaced one by one over many years, is the vessel that eventually results still the same ship it once was? Most people's first instinct is to answer yes, since each individual replacement seems too small to ②erasing the ship's identity. 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, ③built exactly as the original once stood. Two ships would then exist side by side, each with an equal claim ④to being the genuine one, and no obvious way to decide between them. Philosophers return to this old story again and again, not because they care about timber, but because it forces us to ask whether identity depends on continuous material, continuous form, or some deeper thread that neither one can fully ⑤explain.

Individuals confronted with a set of options frequently default to whichever alternative requires no active decision at all. Decision-makers often treat the current arrangement as a reasonable ①baseline simply because it already exists, even when switching would plainly serve their interests better. When employees must actively opt into a retirement savings plan, participation rates remain stubbornly ②low; yet when the same plan is presented as automatic unless an employee opts out, participation rises ③dramatically, despite the fact that the underlying financial terms are identical in both cases. Two forces appear to drive this asymmetry: first, the cognitive effort required to evaluate alternatives and initiate change, and second, an aversion to the potential regret that might follow an active decision that turns out poorly. Because inaction carries no such vivid regret, the status quo comes to feel ④riskier than it objectively is, illustrating how mere inertia can ⑤masquerade as a deliberate preference.

As solar and wind power expand ①rapidly across national grids, engineers face a challenge that receives far less public attention than the construction of the generating facilities themselves. Unlike conventional power plants, which can adjust their output to match demand at almost any moment, solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity only when sunlight or wind is available, producing supply that fluctuates ②rarely. One proposed solution involves large-scale battery storage systems, which absorb ③surplus electricity generated during periods of high output and release it later when generation declines. Another approach relies on expanding transmission networks across wider regions, so that electricity generated in a sunny area can be redirected to places experiencing a ④shortfall. Without such investment, integrating renewable energy could ⑤paradoxically undermine the very reliability that modern electricity grids are expected to provide.

Conventional economic wisdom holds that more options are always preferable to fewer. Empirical research on consumer behavior, however, complicates this assumption considerably. When shoppers are presented with an extensive array of choices, they frequently experience heightened anxiety about making the wrong selection and, paradoxically, become less likely to make any purchase or decision at all. Businesses that recognize this dynamic have begun deliberately curating smaller, carefully selected assortments, betting that ___________ can sometimes generate more sales and greater customer satisfaction than abundance.

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.

A striking proportion of individual investors believe their own stock-picking ability to be above average, a statistical impossibility given that only half of any population can genuinely outperform the rest. This tendency, known as overconfidence bias, leads investors to trade more frequently than a more cautious assessment of their own skill would justify. Paradoxically, then, the very confidence that motivates investors to act decisively often undermines the outcomes they are trying to achieve, since ___________ frequently produces worse results than a more modest, diversified strategy.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu introduced the concept of habitus to describe the deeply ingrained dispositions, tastes, and ways of perceiving the world that individuals absorb through years of socialization within a particular social class. (B) Bourdieu argued that habitus allows privilege to reproduce itself across generations without any explicit coercion, since children raised in advantaged households absorb the tastes that elite schools implicitly reward. (A) Habitus operates below conscious awareness, so that a person's habitus feels entirely natural even though it was produced by specific social conditions. (C) Because habitus feels like personal identity rather than social conditioning, individuals rarely recognize how thoroughly their preferences have been shaped by class position.

Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. (C) Robert Merton showed that soldiers who compared their promotion chances to peers within their own slow-moving unit often felt more satisfied than soldiers in units with faster promotion rates. (A) Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, which merely provide a benchmark for self-assessment. (B) This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are measured.