영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Imagine a distant planet identical 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 to look, taste, and behave exactly the same. When an Earthling and a Twin Earthling each say the word "water," they seem to mean the ①same thing, since neither could tell the substances apart without a chemistry lab. Philosopher Hilary Putnam used 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 ②opposing thoughts and mental images when they use the word, their statements refer to ③two different substances, because the underlying chemical composition, not personal belief, fixes what a word ultimately picks out. Meaning, Putnam concluded, depends ④partly on the world outside the mind, not merely on the ⑤private mental states of whoever happens to be speaking.

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

Psychologists studying human judgment often describe the mind as operating through two distinct systems rather than a single unified process. System 1 works ①quickly and automatically, generating impressions and snap judgments without any noticeable sense of effort. System 2, by contrast, is slow, ②deliberate, and demanding, engaged only when a problem requires careful calculation or conscious reasoning. Most daily decisions are handled almost entirely by System 1, which allows people to function ③efficiently without exhausting their limited mental resources. This efficiency comes at a cost, however, because System 1 relies on simple shortcuts that can produce systematic errors, and System 2 is frequently too ④diligent or too occupied to double-check them. As a result, a judgment often feels most confident precisely at the moment when it has skipped the careful scrutiny that could have caught its own mistake, leaving the thinker ⑤unaware of how easily the impression was formed.

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.

Millions of people now wear devices that continuously track their heart rate, sleep patterns, and daily activity. Users generally assume this information belongs to them, since it is drawn directly from their own bodies. In practice, however, the terms of service that few people read often grant the manufacturer broad rights to store, analyze, and even sell anonymized versions of that data. Advocates for reform argue that biological data deserves a category of protection stronger than ordinary consumer information, precisely because _______________.

Philosophers sometimes ask their students to imagine a creature physically identical to an ordinary human being in every measurable respect, one that walks, talks, laughs, and even cries out in apparent pain when injured, yet that has no inner conscious experience whatsoever. (A) Critics respond that mere conceivability proves very little about what is genuinely possible in the real world. (B) This imagined being, commonly called a philosophical zombie, behaves exactly as a conscious person would, since every neuron fires in precisely the same pattern. (C) Defenders of the argument claim that because such a zombie is at least conceivable without any logical contradiction, consciousness itself cannot be fully explained by physical processes alone.

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. (A) Herbert Simon, however, questioned this assumption, arguing that human beings operate under real constraints of time, knowledge, and mental capacity that make such exhaustive calculation practically impossible. (B) Instead of searching endlessly 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. (C) 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 adequately. This approach is not a failure of reasoning but rather a sensible adaptation to a world where information is costly 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 realistic account of how ordinary decisions are actually made.

This malfunction, harmless as it sounds, reveals something troubling: memory and psychological continuity alone cannot fully settle what personal identity actually requires. Imagine a teleportation device that scans every atom in your body, transmits that information to a distant station, and reconstructs an exact physical duplicate there, while destroying the original body in the process. ( ① ) From the traveler's point of view, stepping into the machine and stepping out on the other side would feel utterly seamless, complete with continuous memories and a sense of having simply walked through a door. ( ② ) Philosophers, however, are troubled by a version of the same device that malfunctions. ( ③ ) Instead of destroying the original, it leaves the original body intact while still creating a perfect duplicate elsewhere. ( ④ ) Now two people exist, each with identical memories and an equally strong claim to being the original traveler, and there is no principled way to say which one is the real continuation of the person who entered the machine. ( ⑤ )

The same mechanism that helps citizens save more for retirement, in other words, can just as easily be turned against their financial interests. Default settings are not inherently virtuous; their ethical value depends entirely on whose interests they serve. ( ① ) A retirement plan that automatically enrolls employees at a reasonable contribution rate generally benefits those employees by overcoming their tendency toward inertia. ( ② ) A subscription service that automatically renews at a higher price unless the customer actively cancels, however, exploits that very same inertia for the company's benefit rather than the customer's. ( ③ ) Both arrangements rely on the identical psychological tendency to accept whatever has been preselected. ( ④ ) Distinguishing between beneficial and exploitative uses of default settings therefore requires examining not the mechanism itself but the intentions and incentives of whoever designed it. ( ⑤ ) Regulators increasingly demand transparency about default settings precisely because the mechanism alone cannot reveal whether it serves the consumer or merely the company offering it.

He termed the resulting gap cultural lag, describing the friction that appears when institutions have not yet caught up with new technological realities. Sociologist William Ogburn observed that when a society undergoes technological change, its material culture, meaning tools and inventions, tends to advance faster than its nonmaterial culture, meaning norms, laws, and values. ( ① ) The rise of the automobile, for instance, transformed daily mobility long before traffic laws, insurance systems, and urban planning fully adapted to the risks it introduced. ( ② ) A contemporary example can be found in genetic testing, which now allows individuals to learn detailed information about inherited disease risk well before most legal systems have settled questions about its use. ( ③ ) Cultural lag theory reminds us that technological progress is not automatically matched by social progress. ( ④ ) The resulting gap can produce confusion or exploitation until laws and customs eventually adjust to new material conditions. ( ⑤ )