영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

People routinely seek out information that confirms what they already believe while overlooking or dismissing evidence that ①contradicts those beliefs, a pattern known as confirmation bias. This tendency operates not because individuals are deliberately dishonest, but because the mind finds it cognitively less taxing ②to absorb information that fits an existing framework than to reconstruct that framework from scratch. Investors who believe a particular company will succeed, for instance, tend to interpret ambiguous news about that company favorably, while investors who ③are skeptical of the same company interpret identical news unfavorably, even though both groups are examining the same underlying facts. Social media platforms can intensify this effect by algorithmically presenting users with content similar to what they have previously engaged with, thereby ④narrowing the range of perspectives an individual regularly encounters. Over time, such selective exposure can harden initial impressions into convictions that ⑤feels objectively verified, even though they rest on a systematically filtered sample of evidence.

When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh not only the expected outcome of each option but also how ①pleasant it would feel to discover later that a different choice had been better. This anticipation of future regret, rather than the size of the potential loss itself, frequently becomes the ②dominant factor shaping the final decision. Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than selling it, not because they expect the price to recover, but because selling would force them to confront the possibility of having made a clear mistake. Researchers have found that people feel ③sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing, which helps explain why so many individuals default to inaction whenever a decision feels ④uncertain. Ironically, this strategy of avoiding regret can itself produce outcomes that are later regretted even more ⑤deeply than the ones it was originally designed to prevent.

Picture a woman who receives a plain ceramic mug as a free gift at a conference and, later that afternoon, refuses to sell it for anything less than triple its price in the gift shop downstairs. Before she owned the mug, she would never have paid extra for it; once it became hers, however, its value in her mind rose sharply, simply because she now possessed it. Owners consistently demand more money to give something up than buyers are willing to offer for that very same item, _______________. Some economists argue that this effect explains why negotiations over inherited property so often collapse, since each side quietly attaches a different value to what it currently holds.

Desalination, the process of removing dissolved salts from seawater to produce fresh water, has increasingly been adopted by coastal regions facing chronic water scarcity. Most modern facilities rely on reverse osmosis, a technique in which seawater is forced through membranes whose microscopic pores block salt while letting water molecules pass. Because this method consumes far less energy than the thermal distillation once dominant in the industry, it has become the preferred choice for large-scale plants. Nevertheless, _______________. For instance, the process generates a concentrated byproduct called brine, which, when discharged without adequate dilution, can raise local salinity to levels that harm marine life. Pumping seawater through membranes at high pressure also demands substantial electricity, so plants powered by fossil fuels can worsen the emissions that intensify drought. Therefore, engineers increasingly argue that desalination should be treated not as a stand-alone remedy but as one component of a broader conservation strategy.

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 _______________. 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. 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, the core insight that attention imposes a genuine processing limit rather than a mere matter of willpower has remained remarkably durable. This basic bottleneck principle continues to inform contemporary explanations of why multitasking so reliably degrades performance on demanding tasks.

Conventional industrial zones typically operate as isolated facilities, each purchasing raw materials independently and disposing of waste without regard for neighboring plants, even when one factory's discarded byproduct could serve as valuable input for another. An eco-industrial park _______________. A power plant's surplus heat, for example, might be piped to a nearby greenhouse, while a food processing facility's organic waste could be converted into biogas that powers another factory's equipment. Such exchanges require companies to coordinate schedules and share information they might otherwise regard as proprietary, a level of cooperation rarely achieved without deliberate institutional support. Local governments therefore often play a coordinating role, mapping which industries could exchange resources and providing incentives for companies willing to participate. Consequently, eco-industrial parks have come to be seen as a model capable of reducing both waste disposal costs and raw material expenses simultaneously.

Among the many tools available to those who design choice environments, few are as quietly powerful as the default option, the alternative that takes effect automatically unless a person actively selects something else. Because changing a default requires deliberate effort, many individuals simply accept whatever arrangement has been preselected for them. Designers of public policy and digital platforms alike have consequently come to recognize that setting a thoughtful default can achieve outcomes that ___________ often struggle to accomplish through persuasion or financial incentive alone.

People often recognize, in calm 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. (A) What unites these examples is a simple insight: because future desires cannot always be trusted, the wisest moment to act may be now, while judgment remains clear and temptation has not yet taken hold. (B) By making certain choices costly, inconvenient, or impossible to reverse, individuals can protect a long-term goal from a short-term impulse that has not yet arisen. (C) A person hoping to save money might lock funds into an account that penalizes early withdrawal, removing the very temptation that would otherwise be difficult to resist. Similarly, someone determined to finish a project might publicly announce a deadline, transforming private intentions into a commitment that carries social consequences if broken.

In the late nineteenth century, the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus undertook a rigorous investigation of forgetting by serving as his own experimental subject. He memorized thousands of meaningless three-letter syllables so that prior knowledge could not skew his results. (A) Ebbinghaus further found that distributing study sessions across several days produced better retention than cramming the same repetition into one sitting. This finding, now central to modern learning theory, implies that revisiting material shortly before it would otherwise be forgotten interrupts the decline of the forgetting curve. (B) After learning each list to perfection, he tested his retention at intervals ranging from twenty minutes to a month later. He recorded how many repetitions were required to relearn the material each time. (C) The resulting curve revealed a consistent pattern. Forgetting proceeds rapidly during the initial hours following learning, then gradually decelerates 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.

In other instances, the danger came not from the immune system at all but from where the new gene happened to land. 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. ( ① ) 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. ( ② ) 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. ( ③ ) Early trials were haunted by serious setbacks, including cases in which the delivery virus triggered a dangerous immune reaction. ( ④ ) The virus, in such cases, inserted the new gene in a spot that disrupted other essential genes. ( ⑤ ) Refined delivery methods have since made the treatment considerably safer, and regulators in several countries have now approved gene therapies for a small but growing number of rare inherited disorders.