영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Classical economic theory assumes that consumers ①evaluate every price change in the same rational way, weighing marginal benefit against marginal cost regardless of the absolute numbers involved. Behavioral economists, however, have discovered a striking exception: the moment a price drops to exactly zero, people's judgment ②shift in a way that ordinary discounting cannot explain. In a well-known laboratory experiment, participants chose between two chocolates, one of higher quality ③priced at a small fee and one of lower quality offered for free. When both prices were merely ④reduced 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 ⑤changed.

A plastic bag that fully decomposes within months rather than lingering for centuries sounds almost too convenient to be real, yet certain bioplastics on the market ①do exactly that under the right conditions. Unlike conventional plastic, derived almost entirely from petroleum, many bioplastics are ②synthesized from renewable feedstocks such as corn starch or sugarcane, sometimes with the help of bacteria engineered to produce plastic-like polymers as a byproduct of their metabolism. Not every bioplastic biodegrades quickly, however, and some marketed as eco-friendly break down only in industrial composting facilities ③that reach conditions rarely found in a backyard compost heap or the open ocean. Critics point out that growing crops for bioplastic production can compete with food crops for farmland and water, ④complicating the assumption that a biological origin automatically makes a material more sustainable. Researchers are now exploring bioplastics made from agricultural waste and algae instead of dedicated crops, hoping to ⑤sidestepping this competition for land while preserving the benefits that first made bioplastics appealing.

Philosopher Robert Nozick asked his readers ①to imagine a machine capable of producing any experience they desired, from writing a great novel to falling in love, all indistinguishable from reality once they were plugged in. Neuroscientists would simply stimulate the brain to generate a lifetime of perfectly satisfying experiences, and the person floating in the tank would have no memory of ever ②choose to enter it. If pleasure and the avoidance of pain were truly all that mattered, as classical hedonism claims, then everyone ③should rush to connect themselves permanently to such a machine. Yet when people actually consider the offer, most hesitate, and many refuse outright. Nozick took this reluctance as evidence ④that human beings care about more than the quality of their internal sensations. People also want to actually be a certain kind of person, and to ⑤maintain genuine contact with a reality beyond their own mind.

Cognitive psychologists distinguish between two modes by which the mind handles information, a distinction that helps explain why experienced drivers can hold conversations while navigating familiar roads without conscious effort. Automatic processing occurs ①slowly, requires minimal attention, and typically operates outside conscious awareness, allowing multiple automatic tasks to proceed without interfering with one another. Controlled processing, by contrast, unfolds more slowly, demands ②deliberate attention, and can generally handle only one demanding task at a time, since it draws upon a limited pool of cognitive resources that becomes rapidly depleted under competing demands. Skills that once required intense concentration, such as reading or typing, gradually become automatic through ③extensive practice, freeing attentional resources for other purposes. This shift explains why novice drivers find it difficult to talk while merging onto a highway, whereas seasoned drivers manage the same maneuver with ④comparative ease. However, automaticity carries hidden costs, since automatized responses can be triggered ⑤inappropriately by habitual cues even when circumstances have changed, occasionally producing errors that controlled deliberation would have prevented.

Prospect theory proposes that the subjective value of money is not a straight line but a ①curved function. In the domain of gains, the function bends downward as amounts increase, so the psychological difference between earning zero and one hundred dollars feels far ②greater than between earning one thousand and eleven hundred. A parallel pattern appears among losses, where the curve bends in the ③opposite direction, yet sensitivity still fades as the amount grows larger. This tendency, known as diminishing sensitivity, explains why a shopper ④acutely notices a ten dollar increase on a two thousand dollar purchase, though the same ten dollars would matter enormously as the price of a meal. Researchers illustrate this curvature with graphs shaped like an S turned sideways, ⑤flattening toward both extremes.

Consider a large heap containing ten thousand grains of sand. Nearly everyone agrees that removing a single grain from such a heap leaves another heap behind; surely one grain could never make the difference between a heap and a non-heap. Yet if this principle is applied repeatedly, grain by grain, the heap eventually ②grows to a single lonely grain, or even to no grains at all, and logic alone seems to force us to accept that this final result still counts as a heap. Something has clearly ①gone wrong along the way, since no reasonable person would call one grain of sand a heap, but pinpointing exactly which single removal transformed a heap into a non-heap seems ③impossible. The puzzle exposes a deep discomfort with vague terms like "heap," "tall," or "bald," concepts that seem to admit no sharp ④boundary yet are used confidently in everyday language. Some philosophers conclude that classical logic itself may need to be ⑤revised to accommodate the genuine vagueness built into ordinary human language.

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 closest to 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. In practice, however, actual guesses rarely converge on zero; most participants stop reasoning after a round or two of imagining what others might guess, producing _______________. This gap between theoretical equilibrium and observed behavior reveals that human reasoning is bounded.

When people look back on a multi-day journey, they rarely recall every hour with equal clarity; instead, memory tends to compress the entire experience into just a few representative moments. Psychologists have found that two points carry disproportionate weight in this process: the single moment when emotion reached its highest intensity, and whatever happened right before the experience concluded. (A) Even though both hikers faced comparable hardship overall, the second is far more likely to remember the journey fondly, simply because the trip ended pleasantly. This pattern reveals that overall satisfaction is not calculated as an average of every experienced moment, but is shaped disproportionately by whichever moments felt most intense and by however the experience happened to end. (B) The first finishes with a grueling, rain-soaked final climb, while the second enjoys a calm, scenic descent on the last afternoon despite having endured an equally difficult ascent earlier in the trip. (C) Consider two hikers who complete an identical five-day trek.

Imagine two travelers preparing for the same trip: one refuses to fly after watching news coverage of a recent plane crash, while the other books a flight without hesitation. (A) This tendency, in which people estimate how likely an event is based on how easily examples come to mind rather than on actual data, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. (B) Statistically, air travel remains far safer than driving the same distance by car, yet vivid, emotionally charged images tend to dominate human judgment more powerfully than dry statistics ever could. (C) News broadcasts that repeatedly feature rare disasters can leave viewers convinced that such events are common, even though official records clearly show the opposite. Advertisers and politicians alike exploit this pattern, knowing that a single striking anecdote often persuades audiences more effectively than pages of careful statistics ever manage to. Recognizing why memorable examples overshadow objective probability therefore matters, both for making sound personal choices and for noticing when public fear has drifted far from measurable reality.

Imagine watching a fair coin land on heads five times in a row and feeling an increasingly strong intuition that the next flip is somehow due to produce tails. (A) This intuition, though psychologically compelling, rests on a basic misunderstanding of probability, since each flip of a fair coin remains entirely independent of every flip that came before it. (B) The coin possesses no memory of its previous outcomes, and its probability of landing on tails on the sixth flip stays fixed at fifty percent regardless of how many heads preceded it. (C) Casinos have long profited from this misconception, watching gamblers place larger bets after a losing streak simply because they mistakenly believe that a win has become statistically overdue.