영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Suppose a mad scientist removed a living brain from its body, ①placed it in a vat of nutrient fluid, and connected its neurons to a supercomputer capable of generating perfectly realistic sensations. The brain would experience a full and convincing world, complete with a sky, a body, and other people, without ever ②suspecting that none of it existed outside the simulation. This scenario, unsettling as it sounds, raises a genuinely difficult question for anyone ③confident in their own perception: how could a person ever prove that they are not that very brain right now? Ordinary evidence cannot help, since any proof gathered through the senses would itself ④be generated by the same simulation being tested. Some philosophers conclude that absolute certainty about the external world is simply unattainable, while others argue that the mere possibility of deception, however vivid, ⑤are not sufficient reason to abandon our everyday trust in what we perceive.

Consider a village green shared freely by every herder in the community, where each individual may graze as many animals as they wish without paying any fee. From the perspective of any single herder, adding one more animal to the shared pasture brings a clear personal ①loss, since the extra income belongs entirely to that herder alone. The cost of the additional grazing, however, is spread thinly across every herder who uses the green, so no single individual bears more than a tiny fraction of the ②damage. Because this calculation favors adding more animals for every rational herder, the shared pasture is gradually ③overgrazed until it can no longer support any animals at all, harming the very community whose rational members caused the collapse. Philosophers use this scenario to illustrate a troubling gap between what benefits an individual in the short term and what preserves a shared resource in the ④long term, a gap that voluntary self-restraint alone rarely ⑤closes.

Political philosophers have long ①debated 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, with everyone's rights ②repeatedly being violated along the way. Critics on one side, the anarchists, insist that even this minimal government inevitably ③violates the rights of those who never consented to join it, since a truly voluntary arrangement would allow individuals to ④opt out entirely. 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 sits at the center of an ⑤unresolved argument about where legitimate political authority actually begins.

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.

Standard economic theory assumes that money is fungible, meaning that a dollar earned as salary is functionally identical to a dollar received as a tax refund or won in a lottery. In practice, however, people routinely sort their finances into separate mental accounts, treating money differently depending on its source or intended purpose, a process economists call mental accounting. The practice thus reveals that financial behavior is guided less by pure arithmetic than by ___________ that money's origin and purpose.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed the panopticon, a prison structure in which a central watchtower allows a single guard to observe every cell, while inmates can never determine whether they are actually being 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 to produce obedient behavior, since _______________. Foucault extended this logic beyond prisons to schools, hospitals, and workplaces, suggesting that modern institutions increasingly rely on continuous, often invisible observation rather than physical force to maintain order.

People routinely seek out information that confirms what they already believe while overlooking or dismissing evidence that contradicts those beliefs, a pattern known as confirmation bias. Investors who believe a particular company will succeed tend to interpret ambiguous news about that company favorably, while skeptical investors interpret identical news unfavorably, even though both groups are examining the same underlying facts. Correcting for this bias therefore requires deliberate effort, since the mind offers no natural signal indicating that its search for information has been ___________ rather than balanced.

When sociologist Émile Durkheim studied suicide rates across different societies, he noticed something puzzling: 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 to behave. Decades later, Robert Merton extended the concept to explain deviance within stable societies, proposing that anomie also arises when a culture insists that everyone pursue identical goals, such as wealth, while denying many people the legitimate means to achieve them. Faced with this gap between aspiration and opportunity, _______________. Anomie theory therefore suggests that crime is less a product of individual failure than of structural imbalance within society itself.

Eyewitness testimony has long carried weight in courtrooms, yet decades of research reveal that memories of witnessed events are more malleable than most people assume. (A) When individuals who observe an event are later exposed to misleading information about what they saw, whether through a leading question or a conversation with another witness, their recollections frequently incorporate details that never occurred, a phenomenon known as the misinformation effect. (B) Crucially, these distorted memories often feel genuine to the person experiencing them, since the original memory trace becomes blended with the newly introduced information rather than existing as a separate, contradictory record. Such findings have prompted legal systems to adopt cautious interviewing protocols designed to minimize suggestive questioning during investigations. (C) In one classic paradigm, participants who watched a video of a traffic accident and were then asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed into each other reported higher speed estimates and were more likely to falsely recall broken glass than participants asked the identical question using the milder verb hit.

Yet this reluctance to accept a small certain loss often leads to a much larger loss later, when the declining trend continues unabated. Loss aversion strongly influences how investors manage their portfolios during periods of market decline. ( ① ) When the value of a stock begins to fall, many investors postpone selling, hoping that the price will rebound to its original level. ( ② ) This tendency is closely tied to the psychological discomfort of converting an unrealized loss into a realized one, since selling forces the investor to formally acknowledge the loss. ( ③ ) Research on trading behavior consistently shows that investors hold declining stocks for longer periods than rising ones, a pattern that runs counter to the basic principle of cutting losses early. ( ④ ) Financial advisors therefore encourage clients to set predetermined selling thresholds in advance, before emotional attachment to a particular price can distort their judgment. ( ⑤ ) By committing to a rule beforehand, investors can partially neutralize the emotional bias that loss aversion introduces into decision-making.