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.

When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh not only the expected outcome of each option but also how painful it would feel ①to discover later that a different choice had been better. This anticipation of future regret, rather than the size of the potential loss itself, frequently becomes the dominant factor ②shaping the final decision. Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than ③selling it, not because they expect the price to recover, but because selling would force them to confront the possibility ④of having made a clear mistake. Researchers have found that people feel sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing, which ⑤help explain why so many individuals default to inaction whenever a decision feels uncertain.

It is often assumed that memory operates independently of bodily context, yet research suggests that this assumption deserves reconsideration. When information is learned under a particular physiological or emotional condition, _______________, a phenomenon researchers call state-dependent memory. Individuals who study while mildly anxious, for instance, often recall material more accurately when tested under similarly anxious conditions than when tested while calm, even though calmness is typically considered more conducive to concentration. This finding should prompt educators to reconsider the assumption that a single optimal testing environment exists for every learner, since matching internal states across encoding and retrieval provides retrieval cues that a mismatched state cannot supply. Critics might argue that such effects are minor and inconsistent, yet accumulated evidence across pharmacological and emotional studies is difficult to dismiss. Policymakers designing assessments should therefore weigh not only content difficulty but also the physiological continuity between preparation and examination, since ignoring this dimension risks underestimating certain students' actual knowledge.

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. 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. This tendency, in which people estimate how likely an event is based on _______________, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. 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.

Imagine rewriting a bacterium's code the way a programmer edits a line of software, and much of what synthetic biology promises begins to make sense. (A) Critics note that biological systems rarely behave as predictably as electronic circuits, since a gene inserted into a new cell can interact with existing pathways in unexpected ways; even so, as the catalog of standardized parts keeps expanding, engineers are gaining confidence to design increasingly complex systems. (B) Because these circuits are built from interchangeable parts rather than designed from scratch each time, a circuit tested in one lab can often be reused, with minor adjustments, in an entirely different application. (C) Researchers in this field assemble standardized genetic parts into circuits that can be inserted into a cell, instructing it to perform a task that no natural organism would carry out.

Psychologists studying human judgment often describe the mind as operating through two distinct systems rather than a single unified process. (A) This efficiency comes at a cost, however, because System 1's shortcuts can produce systematic errors that an overburdened System 2 rarely catches. (B) Most daily decisions are therefore handled almost entirely by System 1, which allows people to function efficiently without exhausting their limited mental resources. (C) System 1 works quickly and automatically, generating impressions without any noticeable effort, while System 2 is slow and deliberate, engaged only when a problem requires careful reasoning.

When people are asked to judge how risky or beneficial a particular technology is, they rarely conduct anything resembling a careful cost-benefit analysis. (A) This mental shortcut, known as the affect heuristic, produces a curious pattern that traditional risk theory struggles to explain: activities people like tend to be judged as both safer and more beneficial, while activities they dislike are judged as both riskier and less beneficial, even when no logical relationship between risk and benefit exists. (B) Instead, they consult a quick emotional impression, an instinctive sense of whether the technology feels good or feels bad, and let that impression guide their entire judgment. (C) For example, when researchers presented a fictional industrial chemical alongside a brief description emphasizing its convenience, participants rated it not only as more useful but also, illogically, as less dangerous. Because emotional impressions form so rapidly and feel so trustworthy, correcting for this heuristic requires deliberate effort; simply presenting more accurate statistics to already anxious or enthusiastic audiences rarely changes their underlying judgment.

주어진 문장: This asymmetry alone can be enough to prevent an otherwise reasonable deal from ever being reached. Picture a woman who receives a plain ceramic mug as a free gift at a conference and, later that afternoon, refuses to sell it for anything less than triple its price in the gift shop downstairs. ( ① ) Before she owned the mug, she would never have paid extra for it; once it became hers, however, its value in her mind rose sharply, simply because she now possessed it. ( ② ) Researchers have repeatedly observed this pattern across many everyday objects, from coffee mugs and concert tickets to office chairs and old furniture inherited from relatives. ( ③ ) Owners consistently demand more money to give something up than buyers are willing to offer for that very same item, revealing a curious asymmetry rooted purely in possession itself. ( ④ ) Some economists argue that this effect explains why negotiations over inherited property so often collapse, since each side quietly attaches a different value to what it currently holds. ( ⑤ ) Understanding this bias, therefore, helps explain why simply owning something, even briefly, can distort how fairly people judge its true worth.

주어진 문장: In other words, the coin cannot somehow sense that it owes the observer a tails after so many heads. 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. ( ① ) 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. ( ② ) 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. ( ③ ) 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. ( ④ ) Economists have even documented the same error among trained professionals, including loan officers who grow more likely to approve a risky application simply because they recently rejected several applications in a row. ( ⑤ )

주어진 문장: Businesses have since learned to design such decoys deliberately, not expecting them to be purchased at all, but hoping they will make a specific target option look far more attractive by comparison. A small bakery once sold a basic loaf of bread for three dollars and a premium loaf for six dollars, and most customers, uncertain about the added value of the pricier option, simply bought the cheaper one. ( ① ) The owner then introduced a third option: a slightly larger premium loaf priced at seven dollars, one that was clearly inferior to the six-dollar loaf in terms of value for money. ( ② ) Almost nobody chose the new seven-dollar loaf, yet sales of the six-dollar loaf rose sharply. ( ③ ) It now appeared to be an obvious bargain when placed beside the inferior newcomer. ( ④ ) This pattern, confirmed across countless pricing experiments in other markets, demonstrates that people rarely judge options in isolation; instead, they evaluate choices relative to whatever alternatives happen to be nearby. ( ⑤ )