영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Desalination, the process of ①removing dissolved salts from seawater to produce fresh water, has increasingly been adopted by coastal regions facing chronic water scarcity. Most modern facilities rely on reverse osmosis, a technique in which seawater is ②forced through membranes whose microscopic pores block salt while letting water molecules pass. Because this method consumes far less energy than the thermal distillation once dominant in the industry, it has become the preferred choice for large-scale plants. Nevertheless, desalination remains an inherently costly and environmentally burdensome solution, a fact often overlooked amid enthusiasm for ending water shortages. For instance, the process generates a concentrated byproduct called brine, which, when discharged without adequate dilution, can raise local salinity to levels that ③harms marine life. Pumping seawater through membranes at high pressure also ④demands substantial electricity, so plants powered by fossil fuels can worsen the emissions that intensify drought. Therefore, engineers increasingly argue that desalination should be ⑤treated not as a stand-alone remedy but as one component of a broader conservation strategy.

When consumers compare two products and assume that the one ①labeled "eco-friendly" is automatically the more sustainable choice, they often overlook the complexity involved in verifying such a claim. Life cycle assessment, commonly abbreviated as LCA, is a systematic method ②developed to evaluate the environmental impact of a product across every stage of its existence. This method examines raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, use, and disposal, ③compiling data on energy consumption and emissions generated at each stage. By tracing a product from its origin to its disposal, this approach reveals impacts that might otherwise remain hidden from consumers who ④sees only the finished item on a shelf. Without ⑤accounting for these earlier stages, a superficial comparison could mistakenly present the vehicle as entirely emission-free.

Labeling theory approaches deviance not as a fixed property of certain acts, but as a social process ①created when powerful groups attach a negative label to a person's behavior. According to this view, nearly everyone breaks minor rules at some point, yet only some individuals ②are singled out, caught, and formally branded as delinquents, criminals, or troublemakers. Sociologist Howard Becker argued that this label often becomes what he called a master status, a single identity that ③overshadow every other trait a person has and shapes how others treat them from that point onward. Once labeled, an individual may find legitimate opportunities ④closing off, pushing them toward the very community of offenders that the label predicted they would join. Critics of harsh punitive policies frequently invoke labeling theory to argue that stigmatizing young offenders may ⑤entrench criminal identities rather than correct behavior.

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. 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. 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 _______________. 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.

Imagine standing at a crowded party where dozens of conversations blend into a wall of noise, yet you effortlessly track the words of the friend beside you. Curiously, if someone across the room utters your name, your attention snaps toward that voice almost instantly. This happens even though you had not consciously been listening to that conversation at all. This phenomenon, known as the cocktail party effect, reveals that selective attention does not simply block out every unattended sound. Early theorists such as Donald Broadbent proposed that unattended information is filtered out entirely before reaching awareness. Yet the fact that a person's own name can break through this filter contradicts such a rigid model. Anne Treisman later refined this account, suggesting that _______________. Especially meaningful stimuli, including one's own name, can still surpass the threshold of conscious recognition. This refinement suggests that attention operates less like a gate and more like a dimmer switch, adjusting the salience of competing streams of information.

Bacteria have been cutting up invading viral DNA for billions of years, long before any scientist thought to borrow the trick for use in a laboratory. The CRISPR-Cas9 system relies on a short guide RNA that matches a specific DNA sequence, _______________. Once Cas9 arrives at the target site, it slices both strands of the DNA helix, and the cell's own repair machinery rushes in to mend the cut, often introducing a small change in the process. By supplying the cell with a template during this repair step, scientists can direct that machinery to insert a specific new sequence rather than merely disabling the original gene. What once required years of painstaking work to alter a single gene can now be accomplished within days.

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. (C) 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. (A) 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. (B) This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are measured.

Classical economic theory assumes that consumers evaluate every price change in the same rational way, weighing marginal benefit against marginal cost regardless of the absolute numbers involved. (A) In a well-known laboratory experiment, participants chose between two chocolates, one of higher quality priced at a small fee and one of lower quality offered for free. When both prices were merely reduced by the same amount, most participants still preferred the higher-quality option. Yet once the cheaper chocolate's price was lowered to zero, the majority abruptly switched their preference, even though the price gap between the two options had not actually changed. (B) Researchers explain this reversal by noting that a free item carries no perceived risk of loss, which makes it feel disproportionately attractive compared with any option that still requires payment, however small. (C) Behavioral economists, however, have discovered a striking exception: the moment a price drops to exactly zero, people's judgment shifts in a way that ordinary discounting cannot explain.

Until clearer rules emerge, artists, developers, and publishers remain locked in a legal gray zone that satisfies almost no one. Generative AI systems learn to write, draw, and compose by studying enormous collections of existing human work, much of which was created without the artists' knowledge or consent. ( ① ) Supporters of the technology argue that this process resembles how a human student learns by studying the masters. ( ② ) Critics respond that the comparison breaks down at scale, since a single AI model can absorb millions of works in days. ( ③ ) Courts around the world are now being asked to decide whether training an algorithm on copyrighted material counts as fair use or as infringement. ( ④ ) This is a question the law was never designed to answer. ( ⑤ )

This harms the very community whose rational members, each behaving perfectly rationally as individuals, together caused its collapse. 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. ( ① ) From the perspective of any single herder, adding one more animal to the shared pasture brings a clear personal benefit, since the extra income belongs entirely to that herder alone. ( ② ) 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 damage. Because this calculation favors adding more animals for every rational herder, the shared pasture is gradually overgrazed until it can no longer support any animals at all. ( ③ ) 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 long term. ( ④ ) It is a gap, moreover, that voluntary self-restraint alone rarely closes. ( ⑤ )