영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Marketers have long recognized that perceived scarcity, the sense that a product or opportunity is available only in limited quantity or for a limited time, can dramatically increase its ①desirability, even when the item's intrinsic qualities remain entirely unchanged. This phenomenon, known as the scarcity effect, operates on a simple psychological principle: when something appears ②easy to obtain, people tend to infer that it must be valuable, since truly worthless items rarely generate genuine competition for possession. A retailer who labels a product as "limited edition" or displays a countdown timer beside a discounted offer exploits this inference, prompting customers to make ③hurried purchase decisions they might otherwise postpone or reconsider. Experimental studies confirm that identical products are rated as more desirable and often command ④higher prices when framed as scarce than when the same products are presented as widely and continuously available. Consumers who later reflect calmly on such purchases frequently discover that the item's actual usefulness fell well short of the ⑤urgency they experienced at the moment of decision.

The influence of the status quo bias extends well beyond personal finance into the design of public policy itself. (A) Consequently, policymakers who wish to encourage socially beneficial behavior, such as organ donation or energy conservation, have increasingly turned to adjusting default settings rather than relying solely on persuasion or financial incentives. (B) Countries that changed their organ donation systems from opt-in to opt-out, for example, observed dramatic increases in the proportion of citizens registered as donors, without any change in the underlying laws governing consent. (C) This outcome demonstrates that the default option itself functions as an implicit recommendation, one that citizens are reluctant to override even when doing so would take only a moment.

As buildings account for a substantial share of global energy consumption, architects have increasingly turned to a design philosophy known as the passive house standard, which minimizes energy demand through the building's own structure rather than through mechanical systems. (A) Consequently, many architects regard passive house design not as a luxury for wealthy homeowners but as a practical model capable of reshaping mainstream construction. (B) Central to this approach is airtight construction, in which continuous insulation and sealed joints prevent conditioned air from leaking outward, thereby reducing the heating and cooling loads conventional buildings require. Triple-glazed windows, oriented to capture sunlight in winter while shading interiors in summer, further stabilize indoor temperatures without relying heavily on furnaces or air conditioners. (C) Ventilation systems equipped with heat exchangers also recover warmth from outgoing air, transferring it to incoming air so that comfort is maintained without excessive energy use. For example, some passive houses built in cold climates have reduced heating costs by more than ninety percent.

The eventual collapse of a speculative bubble often unfolds with surprising speed compared with the gradual climb that preceded it. (A) As prices begin to fall, investors who bought near the peak, motivated largely by fear of missing further gains, are often the first to sell, since they have the least conviction in the asset's underlying value. (B) Their selling triggers further price declines, which in turn prompt additional investors to sell out of a newly urgent fear of continued loss rather than a fear of missing out. (C) This reversal illustrates that the same herd psychology driving prices upward can just as easily reverse direction, converting collective optimism into collective panic within a remarkably short period.

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.

Loss aversion does not only influence individual financial choices; it also shapes how information is presented and interpreted in everyday transactions, a phenomenon that marketers and policymakers have learned to exploit deliberately. (A) For example, a retailer who frames a price reduction as "avoid losing a $10 discount by ordering today" typically generates a stronger customer response than one who simply advertises "get a $10 discount," even though both messages describe an identical saving. (B) In other words, the manner in which a choice is presented can activate the same psychological aversion to loss that governs decisions about resources already possessed, meaning that framing itself carries real economic weight. (C) This effect is not confined to retail settings, however; negotiators, too, often treat concessions as losses rather than as steps toward mutual gain, which makes compromise feel more costly than it objectively is.

주어진 문장: Yet not everyone finds this reassurance convincing. Few ideas in policy debate provoke as much philosophical unease as the notion that a government might deliberately steer citizens toward better choices while leaving every option technically available. ( ① ) Defenders insist that freedom is preserved as long as no option is banned and no penalty is attached, arguing that a citizen who is merely steered, rather than coerced, remains free to choose otherwise. ( ② ) Critics counter that this defense rests on an impoverished notion of liberty, one that ignores how engineered defaults and calculated framing can shape decisions just as powerfully as an outright prohibition would. ( ③ ) If a policy is designed because officials expect it to bypass conscious deliberation, these critics ask, can the resulting choice still be called autonomous, even though no law was broken? ( ④ ) The dispute ultimately turns on what freedom actually requires: the mere absence of coercion, or a decision-making process that remains transparent and undistorted. ( ⑤ ) Until this question is settled, every new intervention promising to help citizens choose better will continue to invite suspicion of quiet manipulation.

주어진 문장: This durability is especially evident in modern debates about whether people can truly perform two demanding tasks at once. Long before cognitive scientists possessed the tools to observe the brain directly, Donald Broadbent proposed an influential model suggesting that the human capacity to process incoming sensory information is constrained by a structural bottleneck through which only a single stream of input can pass at any given instant. ( ① ) According to this filter theory, multiple channels of stimulation, such as competing voices in a crowded room, are initially registered at a shallow, physical level, but only one channel is selected for further, meaning-based analysis while the rest are blocked from advancing beyond that early filter. ( ② ) Although later researchers challenged the rigidity of this early selection mechanism, pointing to instances in which unattended information, such as one's own name, nevertheless breaks through and captures awareness, ( ③ ) the core insight that attention imposes a genuine processing limit rather than a mere matter of willpower has remained remarkably durable. ( ④ ) This basic bottleneck principle continues to inform contemporary explanations of why multitasking so reliably degrades performance on demanding tasks. ( ⑤ )

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.

주어진 문장: Correcting this bias, therefore, requires more than good intentions or personal willpower. 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 firsthand. ( ① ) This term describes the persistent 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. ( ② ) What makes this bias particularly stubborn 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. ( ③ ) Researchers argue that planners focus almost exclusively on the specific steps of the current task while ignoring the broader statistical record of similar projects that came before. ( ④ ) One proposed remedy, known as reference class forecasting, requires planners to deliberately consult outcomes from comparable past projects rather than relying solely on their own optimistic intuition. ( ⑤ ) Until such external correction becomes standard practice, ambitious deadlines will likely continue to be broken with remarkable consistency.