영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Long before humans learned to drill for oil, microorganisms had already ①mastered the art of converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into stored chemical energy. Modern biofuel research borrows this ability, cultivating algae or engineered bacteria in large tanks where they can be coaxed into producing oils and sugars that can be ②refined into fuel usable in existing engines. Unlike crops grown for corn-based ethanol, which ③compete directly with food production for arable land, many algae strains can thrive in shallow ponds, wastewater, or even coastal seawater unsuitable for conventional agriculture. Engineers have also learned to tinker with the metabolic pathways of these organisms, boosting oil yield far beyond what any wild strain would naturally produce on its own. Despite this progress, producing biofuel at a cost competitive with fossil fuel remains ④difficult, since harvesting and processing the organisms ⑤conserves a substantial share of the energy the fuel itself will eventually provide.

Extended producer responsibility, a policy requiring manufacturers to bear responsibility for their products even after use, has been adopted by governments seeking to reduce landfill waste. Under such schemes, companies must finance the collection and recycling of goods once consumers discard them, rather than leaving municipalities to absorb the cost. Advocates maintain that _______________. Critics counter that the policy, whatever its theoretical merits, often fails to reduce waste meaningfully unless paired with rigorous enforcement and transparent reporting requirements. For instance, some manufacturers merely pass the added cost of compliance on to consumers, without making substantive changes to how products are designed. In contrast, jurisdictions that combine producer responsibility with strict eco-design standards and independent audits tend to witness genuine improvements in recyclability. Therefore, policymakers hoping to harness this approach must resist treating it as self-executing and instead invest in oversight that determines whether producers actually change behavior.

Even highly capable individuals can make disastrous collective decisions once they are absorbed into a tightly knit group, a phenomenon psychologist Irving Janis termed groupthink. Within cohesive committees, boards, and advisory councils, members often prioritize consensus and group harmony over a rigorous evaluation of alternatives, silencing doubts rather than risking the discomfort of dissent. Sociologists extend this analysis beyond small committees, noting that entire organizations can develop cultures that reward conformity and punish employees who raise inconvenient questions. Historical inquiries into policy failures and corporate disasters frequently reveal that critical information existed within the organization but never reached decision makers, not because it was hidden, but because _______________.

Imagine a man locked inside a room who does not understand a single word of Chinese, yet who possesses a giant rulebook written entirely in English, and who uses it to answer notes slipped in through a slot. (A) This scenario was designed to challenge the assumption that a computer running a sophisticated program truly understands language simply because it produces convincing output. (B) Yet the man inside understands nothing at all; he is merely manipulating shapes according to formal rules, without grasping their meaning. (C) From the perspective of a native speaker reading the responses, the room seems to understand Chinese perfectly.

For decades, most vaccines worked by injecting a weakened or inactivated version of a pathogen, coaxing the immune system into recognizing an enemy it had never truly fought. (A) mRNA vaccines take a fundamentally different route, delivering only a short genetic instruction wrapped in a protective lipid capsule, one that tells the body's own cells how to manufacture a single harmless piece of a virus's outer surface protein. (B) Once those cells display the fragment, the immune system learns to recognize it as foreign and builds a defense, without ever having encountered the actual pathogen. (C) Because the vaccine contains no live virus and cannot alter a cell's own DNA, developers can redesign the genetic instructions within weeks whenever a pathogen mutates, a speed that has convinced many researchers the same platform could eventually fight diseases far beyond infectious illness.

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.

Two drivers, equally distracted by their phones, run a red light in exactly the same careless manner. (A) Although both drivers behaved identically and made exactly the same reckless choice, society judges them very differently: one faces criminal charges and lifelong guilt, while the other receives, at most, a minor traffic ticket. (B) Philosophers call this troubling asymmetry moral luck, since factors entirely outside a person's control end up determining how severely we judge their moral character. (C) By pure chance, a child happens to be crossing the street in front of one driver but not the other, and the first driver kills the child while the second drives through safely.

German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that the psychological experience of city life differs fundamentally from life in small towns, primarily because urban residents are bombarded with a much greater volume of stimuli than the human nervous system evolved to process. (B) This detachment, while sometimes criticized as cold or impersonal, also grants urban residents a distinctive freedom, since so few people know or judge them personally. (A) To cope with this constant sensory overload, Simmel proposed, city dwellers develop what he called a blasé attitude, treating most encounters with calculated detachment rather than genuine engagement. (C) Simmel therefore viewed anonymity as a double-edged feature of modern life, one that isolates individuals from deep communal bonds while liberating them from constant surveillance.

Robert Putnam popularized the concept by documenting a decline in civic participation, noting that fewer Americans joined bowling leagues, parent associations, or local clubs even as bowling itself remained popular, a trend he captured in the phrase bowling alone. Economists traditionally measured a community's wealth in terms of factories, income, or infrastructure, yet sociologists increasingly point to a less visible resource: social capital, the networks of trust and reciprocity that allow people to cooperate for mutual benefit. ( ① ) Communities rich in social capital tend to enjoy lower crime and more effective local government, because neighbors who know and trust one another can coordinate informally without relying entirely on formal institutions. ( ② ) However, social capital is not uniformly beneficial. ( ③ ) Tightly bonded networks can also exclude outsiders and reinforce existing inequality. ( ④ ) For this reason, researchers increasingly distinguish between bonding capital, which strengthens ties within a single group, and bridging capital, which connects otherwise separate communities. ( ⑤ )

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.