영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Long before calculus existed, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of paradoxes ①designed to show that motion itself might be logically impossible. In one version, a swift runner named Achilles races a slow-moving tortoise that ②is given a modest head start. Common sense insists that Achilles will quickly overtake the tortoise, yet Zeno's argument ③suggests otherwise. By the time Achilles reaches the tortoise's starting point, the tortoise has crawled a little further ahead, and this process ④repeating endlessly, generating an infinite number of smaller and smaller gaps that Achilles must apparently cross one after another. Modern mathematics eventually resolved the paradox by showing that an infinite series of shrinking distances can still sum to a finite total, ⑤allowing motion to be completed in a finite amount of time after all.

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

Social unrest does not always emerge from the poorest conditions; it frequently erupts when circumstances are improving but not quickly enough to satisfy ①rising expectations. This paradox lies at the heart of relative deprivation theory, which holds that discontent arises less from objective hardship than from a ②perceived gap between what people expect and what they actually receive. Political scientist Ted Gurr illustrated the pattern with what is often called the J-curve: revolutions tend to follow a period of sustained improvement that is then followed by a sudden ③reversal, leaving citizens feeling suddenly cheated of gains they had come to regard as their due. Because the theory centers on perception rather than raw statistics, it helps explain why relatively prosperous societies can experience ④intense protest while societies mired in long-standing poverty sometimes remain comparatively ⑤turbulent, having adjusted their expectations to match a bleak and unchanging reality.

Medieval philosophers told the story of a hungry donkey placed exactly midway between two identical, equally fragrant piles of hay, with no factor whatsoever tipping the balance toward either option. Because the donkey is assumed to be a perfectly ①rational creature that always chooses the option supported by the strongest reason, and because neither pile offers any advantage over the other, the donkey supposedly finds itself with no rational basis for choosing one pile rather than the other. ②Paralyzed by this perfect symmetry, the donkey starves to death precisely because it can find no reason to move in either direction. Critics of the story point out that real animals, and real humans, rarely face situations of such flawless symmetry, and that even a tiny, ③arbitrary preference is usually enough to break the tie in practice. The paradox nevertheless raises a serious question about whether purely rational deliberation can ever ④generate action on its own, without some additional nudge that reason alone ⑤willingly supplies.

Sociologist Mark Granovetter challenged a common assumption when he found that job seekers were more likely to hear about new opportunities from casual acquaintances than from close friends and family. This finding, published as the strength of weak ties, rests on a structural insight: close friends tend to belong to the same tight social circle and therefore already share most of the same information, whereas casual acquaintances typically move in different circles and can act as bridges to information a person would otherwise never encounter. Weak ties, precisely because they connect otherwise separate networks, _______________. Granovetter's insight has since been applied well beyond job searches, informing research on how innovations spread and how epidemics travel through a population.

When sociologist Émile Durkheim studied suicide rates across different societies, he noticed something puzzling: rates rose not only during economic depression but also during sudden prosperity. He concluded that both crises share a common feature, the collapse of shared norms that once told individuals what to expect and how to behave. Decades later, Robert Merton extended the concept to explain deviance within stable societies, proposing that anomie also arises when a culture insists that everyone pursue identical goals, such as wealth, while denying many people the legitimate means to achieve them. Faced with this gap between aspiration and opportunity, _______________. Anomie theory therefore suggests that crime is less a product of individual failure than of structural imbalance within society itself.

The human gut hosts trillions of microorganisms whose combined genetic material outnumbers that of the human genome itself many times over. Once dismissed as passive hitchhikers, these bacteria are now understood to actively shape digestion, regulate immune responses, and even influence the production of chemicals that affect mood and behavior. A microbiome disrupted by antibiotics, poor diet, or chronic stress can leave the gut lining more permeable than it should be, allowing substances to leak into the bloodstream that would normally stay contained. _______________. Still, scientists caution that the microbiome varies enormously between individuals, which means a treatment that restores balance in one person's gut may do little for someone else's.

Social mobility refers to the movement of individuals or families between different positions within a society's system of stratification, whether upward, downward, or sideways. (C) Structural mobility, caused by large-scale economic shifts such as the growth of new industries, must be distinguished from individual mobility, which results from a single person's particular choices. (A) Sociologists distinguish intragenerational mobility, changes within a single person's lifetime, from intergenerational mobility, differences between the social position of parents and their children. (B) Research across many nations has found that education functions as the primary channel of upward mobility, yet access to quality education is itself unevenly distributed.

None of them knows in advance their own race, gender, wealth, talents, or position in the society they are designing. John Rawls proposed an unusual thought experiment to determine what principles of justice a society ought to adopt. ( ① ) Imagine a group of rational people gathered behind what he called a veil of ignorance to design the basic rules of their future society. ( ② ) Since no one can predict whether they will be born into privilege or poverty, each person has a strong incentive to choose rules that protect the worst-off members of society. ( ③ ) Rawls argued that rational people placed in this position would not gamble on inequality. ( ④ ) Instead, they would favor arrangements that guarantee basic liberties for everyone and permit unequal outcomes only when those outcomes actually benefit the least advantaged. ( ⑤ ) Justice, on this view, is what impartial reasoning produces once self-interest is stripped away.

People also want to actually do certain things and to actually be a certain kind of person, not merely to feel as though they had. Philosopher Robert Nozick asked his readers to 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. ( ① ) 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 choosing to enter it. ( ② ) If pleasure and the avoidance of pain were truly all that mattered, as classical hedonism claims, then everyone should rush to connect themselves permanently to such a machine. ( ③ ) Yet when people actually consider the offer, most hesitate, and many refuse outright. ( ④ ) Nozick took this reluctance as evidence that human beings care about more than the quality of their internal sensations. ( ⑤ ) Maintaining genuine contact with a reality beyond one's own mind, it turns out, matters just as much as how that mind happens to feel.