영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Imagine rewriting a bacterium's code the way a programmer ①edits 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 ②that 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, a circuit tested in one lab can often ③reusing, with minor adjustments, in an entirely different application. Critics note that biological systems rarely behave as predictably as electronic circuits, since a gene ④inserted into a new cell can interact with existing pathways in unexpected ways, occasionally producing results no engineer intended. Even so, as the catalog of standardized parts keeps expanding, engineers are gaining confidence ⑤to design increasingly complex systems, treating the cell as a chassis onto which new functions can be loaded.

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.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu introduced the concept of habitus to describe the deeply ingrained dispositions, tastes, and ways of perceiving the world that individuals absorb through years of socialization within a particular social class. Habitus operates below conscious awareness, so that a person's habitus feels entirely natural even though it was produced by specific social conditions. Bourdieu argued that habitus allows privilege to reproduce itself across generations without any explicit coercion, since children raised in advantaged households absorb the tastes and manners that institutions such as elite schools implicitly reward, while children from other backgrounds may find the same institutions subtly unfamiliar. Because habitus feels like personal identity rather than social conditioning, individuals rarely recognize how thoroughly their preferences have been shaped by class position, which helps explain why _______________.

Desalination, the process of removing dissolved salts from seawater to produce fresh water, has increasingly been adopted by coastal regions facing chronic water scarcity. Most modern facilities rely on reverse osmosis, a technique in which seawater is forced through membranes whose microscopic pores block salt while letting water molecules pass. Because this method consumes far less energy than the thermal distillation once dominant in the industry, it has become the preferred choice for large-scale plants. Nevertheless, _______________. For instance, the process generates a concentrated byproduct called brine, which, when discharged without adequate dilution, can raise local salinity to levels that harm marine life. Pumping seawater through membranes at high pressure also demands substantial electricity, so plants powered by fossil fuels can worsen the emissions that intensify drought. Therefore, engineers increasingly argue that desalination should be treated not as a stand-alone remedy but as one component of a broader conservation strategy.

Cities are frequently several degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside, a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect, which intensifies in summer and threatens public health. This disparity arises largely because asphalt and concrete absorb solar radiation during the day and slowly release it as heat throughout the night, preventing urban areas from cooling down. Furthermore, the scarcity of vegetation in densely built areas removes a natural cooling mechanism, since plants lower temperatures by evaporating water from their leaves. To address this problem, urban planners _______________. One widely used solution involves reflective "cool" roofing engineered to reflect more sunlight than dark rooftops absorb. Another strategy, green infrastructure, incorporates rooftop gardens and tree-lined streets that provide shade while releasing moisture. In contrast, some cities have pursued permeable pavements that let water seep through and evaporate, cooling nearby surfaces. Collectively, these strategies show that reducing urban heat depends on combining approaches suited to a city's geography.

Imagine standing at a crowded party where dozens of conversations blend into a wall of noise, yet you effortlessly track the words of the friend beside you. Curiously, if someone across the room utters your name, your attention snaps toward that voice almost instantly. This happens even though you had not consciously been listening to that conversation at all. This phenomenon, known as the cocktail party effect, reveals that selective attention does not simply block out every unattended sound. Early theorists such as Donald Broadbent proposed that unattended information is filtered out entirely before reaching awareness. Yet the fact that a person's own name can break through this filter contradicts such a rigid model. Anne Treisman later refined this account, suggesting that _______________. Especially meaningful stimuli, including one's own name, can still surpass the threshold of conscious recognition. This refinement suggests that attention operates less like a gate and more like a dimmer switch, adjusting the salience of competing streams of information.

The ecological footprint, a widely cited measure of how much biologically productive land and water a population requires to sustain its consumption, has become one of the most familiar tools for communicating humanity's environmental impact. By converting diverse activities, from driving to eating meat, into a single unit of land area, the measure allows policymakers to grasp whether a lifestyle exceeds what the planet can regenerate. This simplicity, however, is also the source of its most persistent criticism. Because the footprint aggregates dissimilar impacts, such as carbon emissions and water scarcity, into one composite figure, _______________. A region might reduce its footprint by lowering carbon emissions while simultaneously depleting a local aquifer, yet the aggregate number could still appear to improve, concealing damage that demands urgent attention. Furthermore, the method assumes that all bio-productive land is roughly interchangeable, treating a hectare of forest as equivalent to a hectare of farmland, even though the two provide markedly different ecological functions.

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 do exactly that under the right conditions. (A) Not every bioplastic biodegrades quickly, however, and some marketed as eco-friendly break down only in industrial composting facilities that reach conditions rarely found in a backyard compost heap or the open ocean. (B) Unlike conventional plastic, derived almost entirely from petroleum, many bioplastics are synthesized 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. (C) Critics point out that growing crops for bioplastic production can compete with food crops for farmland and water, which is why researchers are now exploring bioplastics made from agricultural waste and algae instead of dedicated crops.

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) 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 average guesses that cluster between twenty and thirty-five. (B) A perfectly rational player, assuming every other participant reasons with unlimited depth, would conclude the equilibrium number is zero, since reasoning about others' reasoning collapses the average toward that single point. (C) This gap between theoretical equilibrium and observed behavior reveals that human reasoning is bounded, and economists use this simple game as a diagnostic tool for measuring the depth of that reasoning.

Bacteria have been cutting up invading viral DNA for billions of years, long before any scientist thought to borrow the trick for use in a laboratory. (A) Once Cas9 arrives at the target site, it slices both strands of the DNA helix, and the cell's own repair machinery rushes in to mend the cut, often introducing a small change in the process. (B) By supplying the cell with a template during this repair step, scientists can direct that machinery to insert a specific new sequence, and what once required years of painstaking work to alter a single gene can now be accomplished within days. (C) The CRISPR-Cas9 system, as it is now known, relies on a short guide RNA that matches a specific DNA sequence, leading a scissor-like enzyme called Cas9 directly to that exact location in the genome.