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.

When people estimate the value of an unfamiliar product, they rarely rely on objective calculation alone; instead, they anchor their judgment to whatever numerical reference happens to be presented first, however ①arbitrary that number may be. This phenomenon exerts a ②disproportionate influence on price perception precisely because initial figures function as a kind of cognitive gravity that subsequent estimates struggle to escape. A shopper who first sees a jacket listed at $300 before it is marked down to $150 will likely judge the discounted price as an excellent ③bargain, regardless of whether $150 actually reflects the jacket's true worth. Retailers, well aware of this bias, frequently display a ④deflated "original price" beside a discounted one, not because the higher figure is meaningful, but because it recalibrates customers' expectations. Even professionals are not immune: negotiators who open with an extreme initial offer often secure more ⑤favorable final terms than those who begin with a moderate one.

Students are frequently told that where they study makes little difference, provided that they put in enough hours. Cognitive research on memory retrieval, however, suggests that this advice ①clarifies an important process. According to the encoding specificity principle, information becomes intertwined with the context in which it was originally learned. Cues present during encoding therefore ②facilitate retrieval far more effectively than cues encountered elsewhere. A striking demonstration involved divers who memorized word lists either underwater or on dry land. When tested later, divers recalled substantially more words if the testing environment ③matched the original learning environment. This held true regardless of which environment that happened to be. This finding implies that reviewing material exclusively in a quiet bedroom may not ④adequately prepare a student for the noisy atmosphere of an actual examination hall. Rather than assuming that memorization is a context-free process, students ought to consider ⑤deliberately varying study locations and conditions.

Factories that once employed hundreds of workers on an assembly line now run with a ①fraction of that staff, as robotic arms handle tasks that used to require human hands. Economists have long debated whether this shift destroys jobs or simply transforms them. Historical evidence offers some ②comfort: previous waves of automation eventually created new categories of work that no one had predicted. However, critics point out that earlier transitions unfolded over generations, giving workers ③ample time to retrain, whereas today's robots are being deployed at a pace that leaves little room for adjustment. A factory worker displaced this year cannot simply wait for a new industry to emerge decades from now. For this reason, many economists argue that the real ④challenge is not the robots themselves, but the ⑤sluggish speed at which society is expected to adapt to them.

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. During recent years, this gap became ①impossible to ignore, as families in rural areas or low-income neighborhoods struggled to complete schoolwork that assumed a stable connection and a personal device. Some policymakers initially treated internet access as a ②convenience, comparable to cable television, rather than as infrastructure essential to modern life. That assumption is increasingly being reconsidered, particularly as more essential services move online by default. Closing this divide will require ③far less than simply distributing devices; it will demand ④sustained investment in the physical networks that carry information into every home, ⑤regardless of income or location.

A rational approach to decision-making dictates that only future costs and benefits should influence a choice, since resources already spent cannot be ①recovered regardless of what is decided next. In practice, however, people routinely allow such irrecoverable expenditures, known as sunk costs, to shape their subsequent decisions, a pattern referred to as the sunk cost fallacy. A moviegoer who finds a film thoroughly ②disappointing after the first thirty minutes will often remain in the theater until the credits roll, reasoning that leaving early would somehow waste the money already spent on the ticket. Organizations exhibit the same fallacy on a larger scale: a company that has invested heavily in a failing project frequently ③abandons funding it, arguing that stopping the project now would render the prior investment meaningless. Yet continuing to invest in a venture destined to fail merely adds new losses to old ones, ④compounding the very waste the decision-makers hoped to avoid. Economists therefore urge decision-makers to evaluate each choice based solely on its prospective outcomes, treating past expenditures as ⑤irrelevant to the decision at hand.

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. This group need not be one to which a person actually belongs. 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. 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, because _______________. This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are measured.

Symbolic interactionism approaches society not as a fixed structure imposed from above but as something continuously constructed through everyday face-to-face interaction, in which individuals interpret and respond to the symbolic meanings that objects, actions, and other people hold for them. Sociologist George Herbert Mead argued that the self itself emerges through this interactive process, as individuals learn to see themselves from the perspective of others. Erving Goffman extended this framework with his dramaturgical approach, comparing social life to a theatrical performance in which individuals manage impressions and present different faces in different settings. Unlike structural theories that emphasize large institutions, symbolic interactionism focuses on the small, repeated exchanges through which shared meaning is negotiated, arguing that _______________.

For decades, memory researchers assumed that repetition alone determined how well information would be retained, an assumption that an influential theory proposed by Craik and Lockhart eventually overturned. (A) Shallow processing, which involves attending merely to superficial features such as the shape of letters or the sound of a word, produces memory traces that fade quickly and remain vulnerable to interference. Elaborative processing, by contrast, requires connecting new information to existing knowledge, generating meaningful associations, and analyzing semantic content, thereby producing traces that are considerably more durable. (B) Consequently, a student who merely repeats a definition aloud without considering its implications is less likely to retain it than one who relates the concept to a personal example. This distinction reshaped educational practice, encouraging teachers to design tasks that demand comprehension rather than mechanical repetition, since durable memory depends on the depth, not the frequency, of cognitive engagement. (C) According to their framework, what matters most is not how many times a person rehearses material but how deeply that material is processed during encoding.

A single fertilized egg eventually gives rise to every cell type in the human body, from neurons to bone, a feat that has fascinated biologists for more than a century. (A) Because harvesting these cells traditionally required destroying a human embryo, the research provoked ethical objections fierce enough to slow funding and legislation in several countries for years. (B) A breakthrough arrived when scientists discovered that ordinary adult skin cells could be reprogrammed into a state resembling embryonic versatility without ever touching an embryo, opening a path for stem cell research that far more scientists and funding agencies are now willing to support. (C) Embryonic stem cells retain much of that original versatility, capable in principle of developing into almost any tissue, which is why researchers have long viewed them as a promising raw material for repairing damaged organs.