영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Imagine a distant planet ①identically to Earth in every visible respect, except that the clear liquid its inhabitants call "water" is not H2O but a different compound, XYZ, that happens ②to look, taste, and behave exactly the same. When an Earthling and a Twin Earthling each say the word "water," they seem to mean the same thing, since neither could tell the substances apart without a chemistry lab. Philosopher Hilary Putnam ③used this scenario to argue that the meaning of a word is not determined solely by what happens inside a speaker's head. Even though the two speakers hold identical thoughts and mental images when they use the word, their statements refer to two different substances, because the underlying chemical composition, not personal belief, ④fixes what a word ultimately picks out. Meaning, Putnam concluded, depends partly on the world outside the mind, not merely on the private mental states of ⑤whoever happens to be speaking.

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

Time travel to the past has long fascinated physicists and philosophers alike, but it also generates a famously troubling ①contradiction. Suppose a traveler journeyed backward in time and, through some combination of accident and intention, prevented their own grandfather from ever meeting their grandmother. If the grandfather never had children, the traveler themselves would never have been born, which means the traveler could never have existed to make the trip in the first place. Yet if the traveler never made the trip, the grandfather would have ②survived to meet the grandmother after all, allowing the traveler to be born and eventually travel back in time. The story therefore ③loops endlessly, undermining itself at every turn rather than settling into any stable outcome. Some physicists resolve the paradox by arguing that any consistent timeline must ④permit such self-defeating actions to succeed freely, while others propose that a traveler who alters the past simply branches off into a separate, parallel timeline instead, an idea many find ⑤appealing precisely because it avoids the contradiction altogether.

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt devised a scenario to challenge a long-held ①assumption about moral responsibility: that a person can be blamed for an action only if they could genuinely have done otherwise. Imagine a man named Black who secretly implants a device in another man's brain, ready to force a particular decision if the second man shows any sign of choosing differently. The second man, however, decides entirely on his ②own to perform the very action Black wanted, and the device never activates at all. Black's hidden mechanism made it impossible for the man to have chosen otherwise, yet most people still consider him ③fully responsible for what he freely decided to do. Frankfurt used this scenario to argue that moral responsibility depends on the ④irrelevant reasoning behind a choice, not on some abstract guarantee that an alternative path ⑤remained available the entire time.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a now-famous thought experiment not to describe an actual laboratory procedure, but to ①conceal an absurdity hidden within a leading interpretation of quantum mechanics. Imagine a cat sealed inside a closed box together with a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and a vial of poison gas rigged to break open the instant the atom decays. Because the atom's decay is governed by genuine quantum randomness, standard quantum theory describes the atom, before anyone looks, as existing in a ②superposition of having decayed and not having decayed at the same time. If the theory is applied consistently to the entire box, the cat itself would have to be considered ③simultaneously alive and dead until an observer opens the lid and looks inside. Schrödinger intended this image to sound obviously ④ridiculous, using the cat's absurd fate to question whether the act of observation truly determines physical reality, or whether the mathematics is simply being pushed ⑤further than it was ever meant to go.

Financial markets occasionally experience episodes in which asset prices rise far beyond any level that careful analysis of underlying fundamentals could justify, a phenomenon commonly attributed to herd psychology. During such episodes, individual investors often conclude that continuing to buy is reasonable simply because so many others are doing the same, rather than because any independent evaluation supports the purchase. Understanding market bubbles thus requires looking beyond conventional economic fundamentals toward the ___________ that binds individual investors into a single, momentum-driven crowd.

The ethical debate surrounding nudging often intensifies when the technique is applied to particularly vulnerable populations. (A) Elderly individuals facing complex decisions about long-term care, for example, may be especially susceptible to defaults and framing effects, raising the stakes of any given choice architecture considerably. (B) Some ethicists argue that heightened vulnerability actually strengthens the case for carefully designed nudges, since vulnerable individuals may otherwise fall prey to more overtly exploitative influences, such as aggressive sales tactics, if a beneficial default is not established first. (C) Others insist that heightened vulnerability demands greater caution rather than more intervention, since those least equipped to resist a nudge are also least equipped to recognize when it no longer serves their genuine interests.

The influence of the status quo bias extends well beyond personal finance into the design of public policy itself. (A) Consequently, policymakers who wish to encourage socially beneficial behavior, such as organ donation or energy conservation, have increasingly turned to adjusting default settings rather than relying solely on persuasion or financial incentives. (B) Countries that changed their organ donation systems from opt-in to opt-out, for example, observed dramatic increases in the proportion of citizens registered as donors, without any change in the underlying laws governing consent. (C) This outcome demonstrates that the default option itself functions as an implicit recommendation, one that citizens are reluctant to override even when doing so would take only a moment.

The framing effect becomes especially consequential in public health communication, where the stakes of a misunderstood message can be severe. (A) Campaigns that frame vaccination as an opportunity to protect ninety-five percent of recipients from a disease tend to generate calm, sustained interest, since the message emphasizes what individuals stand to gain. (B) By contrast, campaigns that frame the same behavior negatively, warning that failure to act will result in a specific number of preventable illnesses, tend to provoke stronger short-term compliance, though sometimes at the cost of inducing anxiety rather than genuine understanding. (C) Public health officials must therefore weigh not only whether a message is factually accurate but also whether its emotional framing serves the audience's long-term well-being.

This puzzling inconsistency is not, as it turns out, a matter of chance. Two patients diagnosed with the same disease and prescribed the same medication can respond in strikingly different ways, one recovering quickly while the other experiences little benefit or even harmful side effects. ( ① ) Precision medicine starts from the observation that this variation often traces back to differences buried in each patient's genome. ( ② ) These differences determine how efficiently a body absorbs, breaks down, or responds to a given drug. ( ③ ) 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 tailored fit. ( ④ ) This approach has proven especially valuable in cancer treatment, where tumors from two patients with the same diagnosis may carry entirely different genetic mutations that respond to entirely different drugs. ( ⑤ ) Widespread adoption still faces real obstacles, since genetic sequencing remains expensive in many regions and few doctors have been trained to interpret the flood of genetic data such tests now produce.