영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Many households save far less for retirement than conventional financial advice would recommend, not necessarily because they ①lacks the resources to do so, but because a combination of procrastination, present bias, and the discomfort of forgoing current consumption repeatedly delays the decision to begin saving. Recognizing this gap between intention and action, some economists have proposed a savings program in which employees commit today to ②allocating a portion of their future salary increases toward retirement savings, rather than being asked to reduce their current take-home pay immediately. Because the sacrifice applies only to income not yet received, the commitment ③feels far less painful than an equivalent reduction in present earnings would, making employees considerably more willing to enroll. Once enrolled, the contribution rate automatically rises with each subsequent raise, ④gradually increasing savings without requiring any further deliberate action from participants. Field trials of such programs have reported substantial increases in average savings rates over several years, alongside participant satisfaction that ⑤remains notably high.

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.

Every time a smartphone connects to a cell tower or a Wi-Fi network, it quietly records a data point that can later ①be pieced together into a detailed map of where its owner has been. Most users agree to this tracking without ②reading the fine print, assuming that a single company's database poses little threat. The real danger, however, emerges when location data from multiple sources ③combining. A pattern that reveals a person's home, workplace, and daily route can expose far more than any single app ever intended to share. Companies often argue that anonymized data cannot be traced back to individuals, yet researchers have repeatedly ④shown that a handful of location points is enough to identify a specific person. As a result, privacy experts increasingly insist that location data ⑤deserves the same legal protection as medical records.

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.

Standard economic theory assumes that money is fungible, meaning that a dollar earned as salary is functionally identical to a dollar received as a tax refund or won in a lottery. In practice, however, people routinely sort their finances into separate mental accounts, treating money differently depending on its source or intended purpose, a process economists call mental accounting. The practice thus reveals that financial behavior is guided less by pure arithmetic than by ___________ that money's origin and purpose.

Conventional economic wisdom holds that more options are always preferable to fewer. Empirical research on consumer behavior, however, complicates this assumption considerably. When shoppers are presented with an extensive array of choices, they frequently experience heightened anxiety about making the wrong selection and, paradoxically, become less likely to make any purchase or decision at all. Businesses that recognize this dynamic have begun deliberately curating smaller, carefully selected assortments, betting that ___________ can sometimes generate more sales and greater customer satisfaction than abundance.

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. 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. Because these circuits are built from interchangeable parts rather than designed from scratch each time, _______________. 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.

This evidentiary standard, ironically, has made behavioral interventions more rigorously tested than many of the traditional programs they were designed to complement. Government adoption of behavioral insights has generally been governed by a strict evidentiary standard: officials demand proof that a proposed intervention works before authorizing its use. ( ① ) This demand led to the routine use of randomized controlled trials, in which a proposed change is tested on a small population before being rolled out more broadly. ( ② ) Such trials allow policymakers to determine with reasonable confidence whether an intervention produces the intended effect before committing significant public resources to it. ( ③ ) Many long-standing government programs, by contrast, were implemented decades ago without ever being subjected to comparably rigorous evaluation. ( ④ ) Behavioral units within government have, as a result, gradually earned a reputation for evidence-based rigor that extends well beyond their original, narrow mandate. ( ⑤ ) That reputation has, in turn, given behavioral approaches an outsized voice in policy discussions relative to their still-modest budgets.

This admission, however, is precisely what the sunk cost fallacy makes so difficult to accept. Consider a construction firm that has spent several years and a substantial budget building a bridge, only to discover partway through that a cheaper and safer alternative route has since become available. ( ① ) A purely forward-looking analysis would compare the remaining cost of finishing the original bridge against the total cost of switching to the new route, ignoring whatever has already been spent. ( ② ) If the new route is genuinely cheaper going forward, the rational choice is to abandon the original project regardless of how much money it has already consumed. ( ③ ) Abandoning the project, however, requires the firm's leadership to publicly acknowledge that a significant portion of the original investment produced no lasting value. ( ④ ) As a result, firms often continue projects long after the numbers clearly favor stopping, simply to avoid confronting this uncomfortable truth. ( ⑤ ) The bridge, in such cases, becomes less a matter of engineering than a monument to the difficulty of admitting a costly mistake.

In purely material terms, of course, rejecting the offer leaves the responder objectively worse off than accepting it would have. In a typical round of the ultimatum game, a proposer offers to keep eighty percent of a sum of money, leaving only twenty percent for the responder. ( ① ) A responder who values only material gain should accept this offer without hesitation, since twenty percent of something is still more than one hundred percent of nothing. ( ② ) In practice, however, a substantial proportion of responders reject such lopsided offers outright. ( ③ ) Both participants then receive nothing, an outcome that a purely self-interested calculator would never choose voluntarily. ( ④ ) Researchers interpret this pattern as evidence that people are willing to incur a personal cost in order to punish behavior they perceive as exploitative. ( ⑤ ) This willingness to sacrifice material gain for the sake of fairness appears consistently across many different cultures, though the specific threshold for what counts as an unfair offer can vary considerably.