영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Medieval philosophers told the story of a hungry donkey placed exactly midway between two identical, equally fragrant piles of hay, with no factor whatsoever tipping the balance toward either option. Because the donkey is assumed to be a perfectly ①rational creature that always chooses the option supported by the strongest reason, and because neither pile offers any advantage over the other, the donkey supposedly finds itself with no rational basis for choosing one pile rather than the other. ②Paralyzed by this perfect symmetry, the donkey starves to death precisely because it can find no reason to move in either direction. Critics of the story point out that real animals, and real humans, rarely face situations of such flawless symmetry, and that even a tiny, ③arbitrary preference is usually enough to break the tie in practice. The paradox nevertheless raises a serious question about whether purely rational deliberation can ever ④generate action on its own, without some additional nudge that reason alone ⑤willingly supplies.

Many large companies now rely on artificial intelligence to screen job applications before a human ever sees them. These systems promise ①efficiency, scanning thousands of resumes in seconds and ranking candidates according to patterns drawn from previous hiring decisions. However, this reliance on historical data creates a ②troubling risk. If a company's past hiring favored a particular group, the algorithm may learn to treat that pattern as a marker of success and ③loudly reproduce it, even when no one intended discrimination. Unlike a human interviewer, the system offers no explanation for its choices, which makes the bias ④difficult to detect until an outside audit reveals it. Some researchers argue that fairness cannot be added afterward; it must be built into the system's design from the very ⑤beginning.

Factories that once employed hundreds of workers on an assembly line now run with a ①fraction of that staff, as robotic arms handle tasks that used to require human hands. Economists have long debated whether this shift destroys jobs or simply transforms them. Historical evidence offers some ②comfort: previous waves of automation eventually created new categories of work that no one had predicted. However, critics point out that earlier transitions unfolded over generations, giving workers ③ample time to retrain, whereas today's robots are being deployed at a pace that leaves little room for adjustment. A factory worker displaced this year cannot simply wait for a new industry to emerge decades from now. For this reason, many economists argue that the real ④challenge is not the robots themselves, but the ⑤sluggish speed at which society is expected to adapt to them.

Behavioral economists have long observed that people tend to feel the pain of losing something more ①intensely than the pleasure of gaining an equivalent amount, a tendency known as loss aversion. Consider an investor who refuses to sell a declining stock, clinging to the hope that its price will eventually ②recover, even when all available evidence indicates that selling and reinvesting elsewhere would be more rational. Such behavior, though it appears ③rational from a purely economic standpoint, becomes understandable once we recognize that the investor is trying to avoid the sharp discomfort associated with realizing a loss. Similarly, consumers often demand a much ④higher price to give up an item they already own than they would be willing to pay to acquire the same item in the first place. As a result, loss aversion frequently pushes individuals toward decisions that ⑤minimize potential regret over losses rather than toward outcomes that maximize their overall welfare.

Classical economic models typically assume that people discount future rewards at a constant rate. Empirical observation, however, reveals a different pattern: people apply a much steeper discount to the immediate future than to the distant future, a phenomenon termed hyperbolic discounting. This dynamic helps explain chronic procrastination, since tasks that carry long-term benefits are perpetually deferred in favor of activities offering ___________ satisfaction.

When a country physician named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had caught cowpox seemed immune to smallpox, he set in motion a medical revolution without fully understanding why it worked. _______________. This method produced genuine successes, eventually eliminating smallpox worldwide and reducing diseases such as polio and measles, but each new vaccine still required years of laboratory work with no guarantee of success. Advances in molecular biology eventually allowed researchers to isolate a single protein from a pathogen's surface rather than using the whole organism, producing vaccines with fewer side effects and a more predictable safety profile. The most recent shift, toward delivering genetic instructions rather than proteins themselves, represents the latest chapter in a story that began with an eighteenth-century doctor's curiosity about a puzzling immunity among dairy workers.

Long before humans learned to drill for oil, microorganisms had already mastered 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 refined into fuel usable in existing engines. _______________. 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 difficult, since harvesting and processing the organisms consumes a substantial share of the energy the fuel itself will eventually provide.

The anchoring effect is not limited to shopping decisions; it also plays a subtle but powerful role in legal and financial judgments. (A) Similarly, jurors who are told that a plaintiff is seeking an unusually large sum in damages tend to award higher compensation than jurors who hear no specific figure at all, even when the evidence presented is identical. (B) This pattern suggests that anchors can distort judgments requiring careful, case-by-case reasoning, not merely quick, intuitive estimates of price. (C) For instance, experienced judges asked to set a sentence after being exposed to an arbitrary number, such as one generated by rolling dice, have been shown in experimental settings to hand down harsher sentences when the number was high.

Convenience installed today, in other words, can quietly become control tomorrow. City governments increasingly market dense networks of surveillance cameras as a straightforward safety upgrade, promising faster emergency response and lower crime rates. ( ① ) In many cases, the technology delivers exactly what it promises, helping investigators identify suspects within hours rather than weeks. ( ② ) Yet the same infrastructure that catches criminals also creates a permanent record of where ordinary, law-abiding citizens go about their daily lives. ( ③ ) Once a camera network exists, its purpose can quietly expand, often without new public debate or explicit approval. ( ④ ) Civil liberties groups argue that a city should decide how much surveillance it wants before the cameras go up, not years afterward when the infrastructure is already impossible to remove. ( ⑤ )

The cell then acts as a temporary factory, translating that instruction into an actual protein without ever altering the cell's permanent genetic code. 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. ( ① ) 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. ( ② ) 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. ( ③ ) 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. ( ④ ) This is far shorter than the years-long process required for traditional vaccines. ( ⑤ ) This speed, first proven on a global scale during a recent pandemic, has convinced many researchers that the same platform could eventually be adapted to fight diseases far beyond infectious illness, including certain cancers.