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.

In a classic experiment inspired by Keynes's beauty contest analogy, participants choose a number between zero and one hundred, and the winner is whoever selects the number ①farthest from two-thirds of the average of all guesses submitted. A perfectly rational player, assuming every other participant reasons with unlimited depth, would conclude the equilibrium number is zero, since reasoning about others' reasoning ②collapses the average toward that single point. In practice, however, actual guesses rarely ③converge on zero; most participants stop reasoning after a round or two of imagining what others might guess. This gap between theoretical equilibrium and observed behavior reveals that human reasoning is ④bounded. Economists use this game as a ⑤diagnostic tool, since the number a person submits reveals how many levels of strategic thinking that person is willing to perform.

When workers receive a five percent raise in a year when prices have climbed five percent as well, their real purchasing power has not changed at all, yet many still report feeling ①noticeably better off. This tendency to judge economic well-being by ②nominal figures printed on a paycheck, rather than by what that money can actually purchase, is known among economists as money illusion. Employers exploit this pattern by favoring modest nominal raises over deeper structural adjustments, since a visible increase on a payslip ③disappoints employees more effectively than an explanation about inflation could. The illusion persists even among people who claim to understand inflation well, which suggests that the bias operates at an ④intuitive level that formal knowledge does not easily override. Some economists argue that policymakers should exploit this illusion strategically, since workers resist nominal wage cuts far more ⑤fiercely than they resist the equivalent erosion of real wages.

Behavioral economists have long observed that people tend to feel the pain of losing something more intensely than the pleasure of gaining an equivalent amount, a tendency known as loss aversion. Consider an investor who refuses to sell a declining stock, clinging to the hope that its price will eventually recover, even when all available evidence indicates that selling and reinvesting elsewhere would be more rational. As a result, loss aversion frequently pushes individuals toward ___________ rather than toward the outcome that would maximize their overall welfare.

When engineers design the software that controls a self-driving car, they face a question philosophers have debated for decades: should a crashing vehicle protect its own passenger, or minimize total harm even at the passenger's expense? Surveys reveal an uncomfortable contradiction: most people say a car should be programmed to save the greater number of lives, yet the same people admit they would never buy a vehicle designed to sacrifice its own owner. This suggests that _______________. Manufacturers, regulators, and philosophers must instead agree on transparent rules before autonomous vehicles are allowed to make such decisions.

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. (A) Critics respond that the comparison breaks down at scale, since a single AI model can absorb millions of works in days and compete with the very artists who trained it. (B) Supporters of the technology argue that this process resembles how a human student learns by studying the masters. (C) Courts around the world are now being asked to decide whether training an algorithm on copyrighted material counts as fair use or as infringement.

Mental accounting also shapes how consumers respond to windfalls of different sizes and origins. (A) A modest windfall, such as a small cash-back reward, tends to be absorbed into everyday spending and disappears almost unnoticed within a household's general budget. (B) A substantial windfall, by contrast, such as an inheritance or a large bonus, is more likely to be mentally assigned to a separate category, sometimes labeled as "extra" money reserved for investment or a significant purchase. (C) This difference in treatment suggests that the perceived significance of a sum, rather than its objective purchasing power, determines the mental account into which it is placed.

As private companies develop the technology to mine asteroids for rare metals and water, a legal question once confined to science fiction has suddenly become urgent: who, if anyone, owns the resources of outer space? (A) Some governments have already passed domestic laws granting their own companies rights to material mined in space, a move other nations view as a unilateral attempt to settle a shared question. (B) Existing international treaties state that no nation may claim sovereignty over celestial bodies, but they say remarkably little about whether a private company may extract and sell what it finds there. (C) Supporters of space mining argue that new resources could ease shortages on Earth, while critics warn that treating space as an open frontier for extraction risks repeating past mistakes.

This reveals an uncomfortable truth about the underlying business model itself. Social media platforms rarely show users a neutral stream of information. ( ① ) Instead, recommendation algorithms are optimized to maximize engagement, and content that provokes strong emotion tends to hold attention longer than balanced reporting ever could. ( ② ) Researchers describe this as a distorted mirror: the platform reflects not society as it truly is, but a version shaped by whatever keeps people scrolling. ( ③ ) Some platforms have experimented with reducing the visibility of outrage-driven content. ( ④ ) Yet these experiments consistently saw user engagement drop. ( ⑤ )

Convenience installed today, in other words, can quietly become control tomorrow. City governments increasingly market dense networks of surveillance cameras as a straightforward safety upgrade, promising faster emergency response and lower crime rates. ( ① ) In many cases, the technology delivers exactly what it promises, helping investigators identify suspects within hours rather than weeks. ( ② ) Yet the same infrastructure that catches criminals also creates a permanent record of where ordinary, law-abiding citizens go about their daily lives. ( ③ ) Once a camera network exists, its purpose can quietly expand, often without new public debate or explicit approval. ( ④ ) Civil liberties groups argue that a city should decide how much surveillance it wants before the cameras go up, not years afterward when the infrastructure is already impossible to remove. ( ⑤ )