영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly ①built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? This puzzle, which researchers ②named after a furniture retailer famous for selling items that require home assembly, challenges the standard economic assumption that value is determined solely by an object's inherent qualities. In a series of experiments, participants who ③assembled a plain storage box were willing to pay nearly as much for their own imperfect creation as they were for a professionally built version, despite being fully aware of its flaws. Labor, it seems, functions as a kind of psychological investment: once effort has been ④pour into a task, individuals become reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly ⑤wasted.

When people look back on a multi-day journey, they ①rarely recall every hour with equal clarity; instead, memory tends to compress the entire experience into just a few representative moments. Psychologists have found that two points carry ②disproportionate weight in this process: the single moment when emotion, whether joy or discomfort, reached its highest intensity, and whatever happened right before the experience concluded. Consider two hikers who complete an identical five-day trek. The first finishes with a ③grueling, rain-soaked final climb, while the second enjoys a calm, scenic descent on the last afternoon despite having endured an equally difficult ascent earlier in the trip. Even though both hikers faced comparable hardship overall, the second is far ④less likely to remember the journey fondly, simply because the trip ended pleasantly. This pattern reveals that overall satisfaction is not calculated as an average of every experienced moment; rather, it is shaped disproportionately by whichever moments felt most ⑤intense and by however the experience happened to end.

As efforts to ①curb greenhouse gas emissions intensify, industries unable to eliminate carbon dioxide from their processes have turned to a technology known as carbon capture and storage. This technology involves separating carbon dioxide from the exhaust of power plants before it is released into the atmosphere, then transporting the captured gas for underground injection. Once injected into porous rock formations, the gas is trapped beneath layers of impermeable rock that prevent it from escaping into the air. Proponents argue that carbon capture and storage functions as a bridge technology, allowing heavy industries to keep operating while more sustainable alternatives are ②developed. For instance, cement and steel production, both of which release carbon dioxide as an ③unavoidable byproduct of chemical reactions, are considered prime candidates for this approach. However, critics contend that the technology remains prohibitively ④cheap and that building pipelines requires investments few companies make voluntarily. Despite such concerns, many governments continue funding pilot projects, convinced that this technology will play an ⑤indispensable role in reaching emission targets.

Suppose a mysterious being with a near-perfect track record of predicting human choices presents a player with two boxes. Box A always contains a visible thousand dollars, while Box B contains either a million dollars or nothing at all, depending on a prediction the being made before the game even began. If the being predicted the player would take only Box B, it ①emptied the box entirely; if it predicted the player would take both boxes, it left Box B empty. The player may choose to take only Box B, or to take both boxes, and the prediction has already been made and cannot change. One line of reasoning says taking both boxes is ②strictly better, since whatever is already inside the boxes cannot be altered by the player's choice at this point. A second line of reasoning says taking only Box B is better, since the being's near-perfect ③accuracy means that choosing both boxes almost guarantees an empty Box B. This apparent ④conflict between two seemingly sound arguments has made the puzzle a lasting ⑤challenge for decision theory.

People often recognize, in ①calm reflection, that their future selves will be tempted to abandon a goal they currently value. Rather than relying solely on willpower at the critical moment, they may choose to restrict their own future options in advance, a strategy known as precommitment. By making certain choices ②affordable, inconvenient, or impossible to reverse, individuals can protect a long-term goal from a short-term impulse that has not yet arisen. A person hoping to save money might lock funds into an account that ③penalizes early withdrawal, removing the very temptation that would otherwise be difficult to resist. Similarly, someone determined to finish a project might ④publicly announce a deadline, transforming private intentions into a commitment that carries social consequences if broken. What unites these examples is a simple insight: because future desires cannot always be ⑤trusted, the wisest moment to act may be now.

When workers receive a five percent raise in a year when prices have climbed five percent as well, their real purchasing power has not changed at all, yet many still report feeling ①noticeably better off. This tendency to judge economic well-being by ②nominal figures printed on a paycheck, rather than by what that money can actually purchase, is known among economists as money illusion. Employers exploit this pattern by favoring modest nominal raises over deeper structural adjustments, since a visible increase on a payslip ③disappoints employees more effectively than an explanation about inflation could. The illusion persists even among people who claim to understand inflation well, which suggests that the bias operates at an ④intuitive level that formal knowledge does not easily override. Some economists argue that policymakers should exploit this illusion strategically, since workers resist nominal wage cuts far more ⑤fiercely than they resist the equivalent erosion of real wages.

Anyone who has ever promised to finish a project "by Friday," only to still be working on it weeks later, has experienced the planning fallacy ①firsthand. This term describes the ②occasional tendency of individuals and organizations to underestimate how long a task will take, how much it will cost, and how many complications will inevitably arise. What makes this bias particularly ③stubborn is that awareness of past failures rarely leads to more accurate predictions; a construction firm that finished its last three projects late will often insist, with genuine confidence, that this next project will be different. Researchers argue that planners focus almost exclusively on the specific steps of the current task while ignoring the ④broader statistical record of similar projects that came before. One proposed remedy, known as reference class forecasting, requires planners to ⑤deliberately consult outcomes from comparable past projects rather than relying solely on their own optimistic intuition.

Traditional industrial systems have relied on a linear model of production, in which raw materials are extracted, transformed into goods, and eventually discarded as waste. This approach treats natural resources as if unlimited and disposal as if costless. A circular economy proposes an alternative framework in which _______________, thereby reducing the extraction of virgin resources. Central to this model is the notion that waste, rather than being an inevitable byproduct, can be redesigned as a resource for another process, much as fallen leaves nourish the trees that shed them. For example, manufacturers design products so that components can be disassembled and reused in new items once their original function ends. Some companies also lease equipment instead of selling it outright, retaining responsibility for refurbishment. Because such practices lessen dependence on finite raw materials, they reduce the environmental damage caused by mining. Consequently, the circular economy is increasingly regarded as a viable economic strategy that conserves resources for future generations.

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. (A) This phenomenon, known as the cocktail party effect, reveals that selective attention does not simply block out every unattended sound. (B) Anne Treisman later refined this account, suggesting that unattended channels are merely attenuated rather than eliminated altogether. 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. (C) 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.

Imagine a brilliant surgeon who has five patients, each dying from the failure of a different organ, and one healthy visitor in the waiting room whose organs happen to be a perfect match for all five. Philosophers often pair the classic trolley problem with a companion case designed to test whether our moral intuitions are actually consistent. ( ① ) If the surgeon secretly killed the healthy visitor and transplanted the organs, five lives would be saved at the cost of one, exactly the same arithmetic used to justify diverting a runaway trolley onto a track with a single worker. ( ② ) Yet almost everyone who accepts the trolley diversion recoils immediately at the idea of the surgeon cutting up an unwilling patient, even though the numbers are identical in both cases. ( ③ ) Philosophers use this contrast to argue that outcomes alone cannot fully explain our moral judgments. ( ④ ) Something about directly using a person's body as a mere means, rather than an unintended side effect of redirecting harm, appears to matter deeply to most people's sense of right and wrong. ( ⑤ )