영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

In the late nineteenth century, the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus undertook a rigorous investigation of forgetting ①by serve as his own experimental subject. He memorized thousands of meaningless three-letter syllables ②so that prior knowledge could not skew his results. After learning each list to perfection, he tested his retention at intervals ③ranging from twenty minutes to a month later. He recorded how many repetitions were required to relearn the material each time. The resulting curve revealed a consistent pattern. Forgetting proceeds rapidly during the initial hours following learning, then gradually ④decelerates until the rate of loss becomes almost imperceptible. Roughly half of the acquired information vanished within the first hour alone. Yet whatever survived that initial plunge tended to persist for much longer periods. Ebbinghaus further found that ⑤distributing study sessions across several days produced better retention than cramming the same repetition into one sitting.

Economists traditionally measured a community's wealth in terms of factories, income, or infrastructure, yet sociologists increasingly point to a less visible resource: social capital, the networks of trust and reciprocity ①that allow people to cooperate for mutual benefit. Robert Putnam popularized the concept by ②documenting a decline in civic participation, noting that fewer Americans joined bowling leagues, parent associations, or local clubs even as bowling itself remained popular, a trend he ③captured in the phrase bowling alone. Communities rich in social capital tend to enjoy lower crime and more effective local government, because neighbors ④who know and trust one another can coordinate informally without relying entirely on formal institutions. However, social capital is not uniformly beneficial; tightly bonded networks can also exclude outsiders and ⑤reinforcing existing inequality.

Facial recognition software has moved rapidly from airport security lines into shopping malls, schools, and even private apartment buildings, ①promising convenience in exchange for a quick scan of one's face. Proponents note that the technology can unlock doors, catch shoplifters, and speed up identity checks far faster than any human guard ②could manage. Independent studies, however, have repeatedly found that many commercial systems ③performs less accurately on women and people with darker skin tones, a gap that can lead to wrongful identification with serious real-world consequences. Several cities have already reported cases in which an innocent person ④was detained based on a flawed match. Until these systems can prove equally reliable for everyone, deploying them at all represents a form of quiet discrimination ⑤dressed up as efficiency.

Classical economic theory long assumed that decision makers ①gather all relevant information, calculate every possible outcome, and select the single option that maximizes their benefit. Herbert Simon, however, questioned this assumption, ②arguing that human beings operate under real constraints of time, knowledge, and mental capacity that make such exhaustive calculation practically impossible. Instead of searching endlessly for the theoretically perfect choice, people typically stop once they find an option that seems good enough to meet their immediate needs, a strategy Simon ③termed satisficing. A shopper comparing refrigerators, for example, rarely examines every model available; she instead sets a few practical criteria, such as price and size, and selects the first appliance that satisfies them adequately. This approach is not a failure of reasoning but rather a sensible adaptation to a world where information is costly and time is genuinely limited. Consequently, models assuming unlimited rationality often fail to predict actual behavior, while frameworks ④acknowledge these cognitive boundaries offer a far more realistic account of how ordinary decisions are ⑤made.

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.

Two patients diagnosed with the same disease and prescribed the same medication can respond in ①strikingly different ways, one recovering quickly while the other experiences little benefit or even harmful side effects. Precision medicine starts from the observation that this variation often traces back to differences buried in each patient's genome, differences that determine how ②efficiently a body absorbs, breaks down, or responds to a given drug. By sequencing a patient's DNA before treatment begins, doctors can increasingly predict which medication is likely to work best and at what dose, replacing a strategy once described as one-size-fits-all with something closer to a ③tailored fit. This approach has proven especially valuable in cancer treatment, where tumors from two patients with the same diagnosis may carry entirely ④identical genetic mutations that respond to entirely different drugs. Widespread adoption still faces real obstacles, since genetic sequencing remains ⑤expensive in many regions and few doctors have been trained to interpret the flood of genetic data such tests now produce.

Devices that translate brain activity directly into digital commands have moved from laboratory experiments to real medical use, allowing paralyzed patients to control a robotic arm or type a message using thought alone. As the technology ①improves, some developers envision a future in which brain-computer interfaces extend beyond restoring lost function toward enhancing healthy minds. This prospect raises a philosophical question that medicine alone cannot answer: if a device can alter memory, mood, or decision-making, at what point does the assistance stop being a tool and start ②reshaping the very identity of the person using it. Neuroethicists argue that mental privacy, the ability to keep one's own thoughts ③exposed to external access or manipulation, may need to be recognized as a fundamental right before this technology becomes ④widespread. This concern is likely to grow ⑤more urgent as the devices become more powerful.

Classical economic theory assumes that consumers evaluate every price change in the same rational way, weighing marginal benefit against marginal cost regardless of the absolute numbers involved. Behavioral economists, however, have discovered a striking exception: the moment a price drops to exactly zero, people's judgment shifts in a way that ordinary discounting cannot explain. In a well-known laboratory experiment, participants chose between two chocolates, one of higher quality priced at a small fee and one of lower quality offered for free. When both prices were merely reduced by the same amount, most participants still preferred the higher-quality option. Yet once the cheaper chocolate's price was lowered to zero, the majority abruptly switched their preference, even though the price gap between the two options had not actually changed. Researchers explain this reversal by noting that _______________.

Imagine two travelers preparing for the same trip: one refuses to fly after watching news coverage of a recent plane crash, while the other books a flight without hesitation. Statistically, air travel remains far safer than driving the same distance by car, yet vivid, emotionally charged images tend to dominate human judgment more powerfully than dry statistics ever could. This tendency, in which people estimate how likely an event is based on _______________, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. News broadcasts that repeatedly feature rare disasters can leave viewers convinced that such events are common, even though official records clearly show the opposite. Advertisers and politicians alike exploit this pattern, knowing that a single striking anecdote often persuades audiences more effectively than pages of careful statistics ever manage to.

Critics note a further irony: when something goes wrong, such as a hacked exchange or a lost password, there is often no institution left to appeal to. Blockchain technology was originally promoted as a way to remove the need for trusted middlemen, allowing strangers to exchange value directly and verify transactions through a shared, tamper-resistant ledger. ( ① ) In theory, this design distributes power away from any single institution and toward the network as a whole. ( ② ) In practice, however, a small number of large players have come to dominate many blockchain networks. ( ③ ) They control enough computing power or currency to influence outcomes that were supposed to be decided collectively. ( ④ ) Whether decentralization can survive this concentration of power remains one of the technology's most unresolved questions. ( ⑤ )