영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. This group ①need not be one to which a person actually belongs. A struggling artist may judge success not against neighbors but against celebrated painters in art history, a comparison ②that can inspire ambition or, just as easily, breed persistent dissatisfaction. Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, ③which merely provide a benchmark for self-assessment. Robert Merton showed that soldiers who compared their promotion chances to peers within their own slow-moving unit often felt more satisfied than soldiers in units with faster promotion rates, because the latter could see colleagues ④advance while they themselves ⑤lagging behind.

As cities have expanded across landscapes once covered with absorbent soil, impervious surfaces have turned stormwater from a resource that ①recharges groundwater into a hazard that floods streets and carries pollutants into waterways. Green infrastructure, which ②mimic the hydrological functions that natural landscapes once performed, offers planners a way to treat the city as a sponge rather than a rigid drainage pipe. Rain gardens, shallow depressions planted with deep-rooted vegetation, are designed to capture runoff from rooftops, ③allowing it to filter slowly through soil before reaching underground aquifers. Permeable pavement, made of porous materials ④that let water pass directly through, serves a similar purpose along sidewalks, where asphalt would remain impenetrable. For example, cities that replaced pavement with permeable alternatives have reported notable reductions in flooding during storms that once overwhelmed sewers. However, engineers caution that green infrastructure cannot entirely replace conventional pipes in dense cores, where heavy runoff still ⑤requires structural reinforcement. Consequently, municipalities now regard green and gray infrastructure as complementary systems, each compensating for the other's limitations.

Philosophers sometimes ask their students to imagine a creature physically ①identically to an ordinary human being in every measurable respect, one that walks, talks, laughs, and even cries out in apparent pain when injured, yet that has no inner conscious experience whatsoever. This imagined being, commonly called a philosophical zombie, ②behaves exactly as a conscious person would, since every neuron fires in precisely the same pattern, but there is supposedly nothing it is like to be that creature from the inside. Defenders of the argument claim that because such a zombie is at least ③conceivable without any logical contradiction, consciousness itself cannot be fully explained by physical processes alone. Critics respond that mere conceivability ④proves very little about what is genuinely possible in the real world, and that our intuition about zombies may simply ⑤reflect the limits of imagination rather than a real gap in nature.

The ecological footprint, a widely cited measure of how much biologically productive land and water a population ①require to sustain its consumption, has become one of the most familiar tools for communicating humanity's environmental impact. By ②converting 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, it can obscure important differences among problems ③that require distinct policy responses. A region might reduce its footprint by lowering carbon emissions while simultaneously ④depleting 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, ⑤treating a hectare of forest as equivalent to a hectare of farmland, even though the two provide markedly different ecological functions.

When people evaluate their personal contribution to water scarcity, they often consider only the water that flows directly from household taps, overlooking a far larger quantity consumed indirectly through the goods they purchase. The water footprint, a concept that extends this ①broad view, measures the total volume of freshwater used to produce the goods and services an individual or a nation consumes. Central to this concept is the notion of virtual water, the water embedded ②invisibly within a product, from irrigating cotton fields to livestock raised for meat. For instance, producing a kilogram of beef can require several thousand liters of water, whereas a kilogram of vegetables typically demands a fraction of that amount. Nations that import water-intensive goods rather than producing them domestically are importing virtual water from regions that may face ③severe shortages. Critics caution, however, that focusing ④exclusively on aggregate volume can mislead policymakers, since a liter of water drawn from a region suffering drought carries far greater consequences than one drawn from a water-⑤abundant area.

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 ①unlimited and disposal as if costless. A circular economy proposes an alternative framework in which materials are kept in continuous use through reuse, repair, and recycling, thereby ②reducing 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 ③increase the environmental damage caused by mining. Consequently, the circular economy is increasingly regarded as a ④viable economic strategy that ⑤conserves resources for future generations.

Scientists have long searched for a way to describe, in a single coherent framework, the outer limits within which human activity can safely continue without ①stabilizing the planet's fundamental systems. The concept of planetary boundaries, introduced by earth-system researchers, identifies nine interconnected processes, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and nitrogen pollution, each possessing a threshold beyond which abrupt and ②irreversible change becomes likely. Unlike conventional environmental limits, often defined locally, these boundaries are framed at a planetary scale, reflecting the idea that the Earth functions as a single ③interdependent system rather than a collection of isolated regions. Crossing one boundary, proponents argue, does not merely damage the system involved but can also ④destabilize others, since climate, oceans, and land are bound together by feedback loops that transmit disturbance across the system. Some philosophers have likened this framework to a ship's safe operating margin, within which passengers may move freely without risking the vessel's stability. Critics, however, contend that the boundaries are drawn with more ⑤confidence than the data can support.

For patients born with a single faulty gene, the disease has traditionally been treated indirectly, managing symptoms for a lifetime rather than addressing the genetic error itself. (A) Early trials were haunted by serious setbacks, including cases in which the delivery virus triggered a dangerous immune reaction, but refined delivery methods have since made the treatment considerably safer, leading regulators in several countries to approve gene therapies for a small but growing number of rare inherited disorders. (B) Gene therapy attempts something more ambitious: delivering a corrected copy of the gene directly into a patient's cells, often using a disabled virus stripped of its ability to cause illness as a delivery vehicle. (C) Once inside the nucleus, the corrected gene can begin producing the protein the patient's body had always lacked, in some cases reversing symptoms that medication alone had never been able to touch.

When a resource is shared among many users, none of whom bears the full cost of its depletion, each individual is tempted to extract as much value as possible before others do the same. (A) This dynamic, famously labeled the tragedy of the commons, describes how shared pastures and fisheries can be degraded even when every participant privately understands the danger of overuse. (B) A single herder who adds one more animal to a communal pasture gains the entire benefit of that addition, whereas the resulting damage to the grass is shared among other herders who depend on the land. Because self-interest offers no incentive to restrain consumption unilaterally, the resource tends to be exhausted long before any user intends such an outcome. (C) For decades, economists assumed that only two remedies existed: strict regulation or the conversion of shared resources into private property. Elinor Ostrom challenged this assumption, however, by documenting communities that had sustainably managed fisheries and forests for generations through locally devised rules and mutual monitoring rather than external control.

주어진 문장: In practice, however, building such extensive networks demands years of planning and substantial financial resources. As solar and wind power expand rapidly across national grids, engineers face a challenge that receives far less public attention than the construction of the generating facilities themselves. ① Unlike conventional power plants, which can adjust their output to match demand at almost any moment, solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity only when sunlight or wind is available, producing supply that fluctuates constantly. ② This intermittency means that grid operators must balance supply and demand even when renewable output suddenly drops, such as when clouds cover a solar farm or wind speeds fall. ③ One proposed solution involves large-scale battery storage systems, which absorb surplus electricity generated during periods of high output and release it later when generation declines. Another approach relies on expanding transmission networks across wider regions, so that electricity generated in a sunny area can be redirected to places experiencing a shortfall. ④ Grid operators must therefore invest in infrastructure capable of accommodating this variability, rather than assuming renewable sources can simply replace fossil fuels without adjustment. ⑤ Without such investment, integrating renewable energy could paradoxically undermine the very reliability that modern electricity grids are expected to provide. ① ② ③ ④ ⑤