영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Modern consumer culture often assumes that expanding the range of available options ①will automatically makes people freer and happier, yet a growing body of research suggests the opposite may sometimes be true. When individuals select from an enormous set of alternatives, satisfaction with the final choice frequently declines rather than rises, even when the chosen item ②is objectively excellent. This decline stems not from the difficulty of deciding but from what happens afterward, once a decision ③has already been made. Having considered so many possibilities, a person naturally imagines the specific advantages that a different, unchosen option ④might have offered, and this imagined comparison quietly erodes contentment with what was actually selected. The paradox, therefore, is that abundance can free people from external constraint while simultaneously ⑤trapping them in a private cycle of comparison and regret.

Cognitive psychologists ①distinguish between two modes by which the mind handles information, a distinction that helps explain why experienced drivers can hold conversations while navigating familiar roads without conscious effort. Automatic processing occurs rapidly, ②requires minimal attention, and typically operates outside conscious awareness, allowing multiple automatic tasks to proceed without interfering with one another. Controlled processing, by contrast, unfolds more slowly, demands deliberate attention, and can generally handle only one demanding task at a time, since it draws upon a limited pool of cognitive resources that becomes rapidly depleted under competing demands. Skills that once required intense concentration, such as reading or typing, gradually ③become automatic through extensive practice, freeing attentional resources for other purposes. This shift ④explains why novice drivers find it difficult to talk while merging onto a highway, whereas seasoned drivers manage the same maneuver with comparative ease. However, automaticity ⑤carry hidden costs, since automatized responses can be triggered inappropriately by habitual cues even when circumstances have changed, occasionally producing errors that controlled deliberation would have prevented.

When sociologist Émile Durkheim studied suicide rates across different societies, he noticed something ①puzzling: rates rose not only during economic depression but also during sudden prosperity. He concluded that both crises share a common feature, the collapse of shared norms that once told individuals what to expect and how ②to behave. Durkheim called this state of normlessness anomie, arguing that rapid social change can strip away the moral guidelines ③what regulate human desire, leaving individuals disoriented even when material conditions improve. Decades later, Robert Merton extended the concept to explain deviance within stable societies, ④proposing that anomie also arises when a culture insists that everyone pursue identical goals. Faced with this gap between aspiration and opportunity, some individuals conform, but others turn to innovation, ritual, retreat, ⑤or rebellion.

For decades, most vaccines worked by ①injecting a weakened or inactivated version of a pathogen, coaxing the immune system into recognizing an enemy it had never truly fought. mRNA vaccines take a fundamentally different route, ②delivering only a short genetic instruction wrapped in a protective lipid capsule, one that tells the body's own cells how to manufacture a single harmless piece of a virus's outer surface protein. Once those cells display the fragment, the immune system learns to recognize it as foreign and ③builds a defense, without ever having encountered the actual pathogen. Because the vaccine contains no live virus and cannot alter a cell's own DNA, developers can redesign the genetic instructions within weeks whenever a pathogen ④mutating, rather than starting the years-long process required for traditional vaccines. This speed, first proven on a global scale during a recent pandemic, has convinced many researchers that the same platform could eventually ⑤be adapted to fight diseases far beyond infectious illness, including certain cancers.

Philosophers often pair the classic trolley problem with a companion case designed to test whether our moral intuitions are actually ①consistent. Imagine a brilliant surgeon who has five patients, each dying from the failure of a different organ, and one healthy visitor in the waiting room whose organs happen to be a perfect ②match for all five. If the surgeon secretly killed the healthy visitor and transplanted the organs, five lives would be saved at the cost of one, exactly the same arithmetic used to justify diverting a runaway trolley onto a track with a single worker. Yet almost everyone who accepts the trolley diversion ③recoils immediately at the idea of the surgeon cutting up an unwilling patient, even though the numbers are identical in both cases. Philosophers use this contrast to argue that outcomes alone can ④fully explain our moral judgments, since something about directly using a person's body as a mere means appears to matter deeply to most people's sense of ⑤right and wrong.

Blockchain technology was originally promoted as a way to remove the need for trusted middlemen, allowing strangers to exchange value directly and verify transactions through a shared, ①tamper-resistant ledger rather than through a bank or government agency. In theory, this design distributes power away from any single institution and toward the network as a whole. In practice, however, a small number of large players have come to ②dominate many blockchain networks, controlling enough computing power or currency to influence outcomes that were supposed to be decided collectively. Critics note a further irony: when something goes wrong, such as a hacked exchange or a lost password, there is often ③ample institutional support to appeal to, since the entire system was designed precisely to eliminate that kind of central authority. Whether decentralization can ④survive this concentration of power remains one of the technology's most ⑤unresolved questions.

When anthropologists first began systematically studying societies far removed from their own, many unconsciously judged unfamiliar customs against the standards of their home culture, a tendency now known as ethnocentrism. Cultural relativism emerged as a ①disruptive principle, holding that a society's practices should be understood within their own cultural context rather than measured against an outside standard presumed to be universal. Anthropologist Franz Boas argued that no culture possesses an inherently ②superior set of values, and that apparent oddities, once examined closely, typically serve ③coherent functions within their own social systems. Cultural relativism transformed fields ranging from anthropology to international development, encouraging researchers to ④suspend quick judgment and seek local meaning before drawing conclusions. Critics caution, however, that taken to an extreme, the principle risks excusing practices that cause ⑤genuine harm.

A liver no longer has to sit inside a human body to be studied closely. 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. Unlike flat cultures grown on a plastic dish, organoids let cells interact in three dimensions much as they would inside the body, yielding tissue that behaves in strikingly realistic ways. This fidelity has made organoids invaluable for testing how a drug affects human tissue before any patient is exposed, _______________. 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 before committing to an actual course of therapy.

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. Some policymakers initially treated internet access as a convenience, comparable to cable television, rather than as infrastructure essential to modern life. That assumption is increasingly being reconsidered, particularly as _______________. Closing this divide will require more than simply distributing devices.

Among the many strategies proposed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, one of the oldest draws on an agricultural technique predating modern industry, converting organic material into a stable form of charcoal known as biochar. Biochar is produced through pyrolysis, _______________. This process leaves behind a carbon-rich solid that resists decomposition far longer than raw organic matter, locking carbon in a form remaining stable in soil for centuries. When mixed into farmland, biochar also improves soil structure, retaining moisture and nutrients otherwise lost, which can boost crop yields in depleted soils. For example, farmers cultivating nutrient-poor tropical soils have reported measurable increases in productivity after adding biochar. Nevertheless, researchers caution that the climate benefits of biochar depend on the feedstock and method used, since poorly managed pyrolysis can release as much carbon as it sequesters, undermining its own purpose.