영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Military researchers have developed weapons systems ①capable of identifying and engaging targets without a human pressing the final button, a prospect that has ②alarmed arms control experts for over a decade. Advocates within defense agencies argue that autonomous systems can react faster than any human operator and may even reduce casualties by removing fear and fatigue from split-second decisions. Human rights organizations counter that removing a person from the final decision ③strip away moral responsibility at the exact moment it matters most, since a machine cannot be held accountable in any meaningful sense. Diplomatic negotiations toward an international treaty have repeatedly ④stalled, partly because military powers disagree on how to define autonomy precisely enough to regulate it. Meanwhile, the underlying technology continues to advance regardless of ⑤whether the diplomacy meant to govern it keeps pace.

Hospitals are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence tools that can scan medical images and flag potential tumors faster and, in some trials, more accurately than experienced radiologists. Patients understandably welcome any technology that catches disease earlier, yet the growing reliance on these tools raises an uncomfortable legal question that hospitals ①have only begun to address. When an AI system misses a diagnosis that a human doctor would likely ②have caught, responsibility becomes difficult to assign. The doctor may argue that they simply trusted a tool the hospital ③required them to use, the hospital may argue that the software company guaranteed its accuracy, and the software company may argue that no algorithm can ④expect to be perfect. Until legal systems clarify this chain of responsibility, patients harmed by an algorithmic error may find themselves with no clear party ⑤to hold accountable.

Biodegradable plastics have been promoted as a ①promising solution to plastic waste, since they are designed to decompose into natural substances rather than persist for centuries. Manufacturers derive these materials from renewable resources such as corn starch, blending them with additives that ②accelerate microbial breakdown once discarded. However, their environmental benefits are often exaggerated, largely because decomposition depends on specific conditions rarely found outside industrial composting facilities. For example, a bag labeled biodegradable may take years, not the weeks advertised, to break down in a landfill or ocean, where temperature and microbial activity remain ③high. In addition, when mixed with conventional plastics in recycling streams, they can ④contaminate the process, weakening the quality of materials produced afterward. Some engineers therefore compare biodegradable plastics to a bridge that leads nowhere unless paired with infrastructure that completes the journey. Ultimately, realizing their ⑤genuine potential requires not only technological refinement but also facilities capable of providing the precise conditions decomposition demands.

Imagine standing at a crowded party where dozens of conversations blend into a wall of noise, yet you ①effortlessly track the words of the friend beside you. Curiously, if someone across the room utters your name, your attention snaps toward that voice almost ②instantly. This happens even though you had not consciously been listening to that conversation at all. This phenomenon, known as the cocktail party effect, reveals that selective attention does not simply block out every unattended sound. Early theorists such as Donald Broadbent proposed that unattended information is ③filtered out entirely before reaching awareness. Yet the fact that a person's own name can break through this filter ④contradicts such a rigid model. Anne Treisman later refined this account, suggesting that unattended channels are merely attenuated rather than eliminated altogether. Especially meaningful stimuli, including one's own name, can still surpass the threshold of conscious recognition. This refinement suggests that attention operates less like a gate and more like a dimmer switch, ⑤ignoring the salience of competing streams of information.

Standard economic theory assumes that money is fungible, meaning that a dollar earned as salary is functionally identical to a dollar received as a tax refund or won in a lottery. In practice, however, people routinely sort their finances into separate mental accounts, treating money differently depending on its source or intended purpose, a process economists call mental accounting. The practice thus reveals that financial behavior is guided less by pure arithmetic than by ___________ that money's origin and purpose.

For much of the twentieth century, memory researchers assumed that once a memory had been consolidated—transformed from a fragile, short-term trace into a stable, long-term representation—it remained essentially fixed, immune to further modification unless the underlying neural circuitry was physically damaged. This assumption, however, was overturned by a body of research demonstrating that _______________, rendering it temporarily susceptible to alteration before it is, in a sense, filed away again. During this narrow window, which typically lasts only a few hours, the memory can be strengthened, weakened, or even subtly distorted by new information encountered in the interim, after which it must undergo a second round of stabilization, a process now widely referred to as reconsolidation. Consequently, what we experience as a stable recollection may actually be a continuously revised construction, reshaped every time it is summoned into conscious awareness and returned to storage.

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 that allow people to cooperate for mutual benefit. Robert Putnam popularized the concept by documenting a decline in civic participation, a trend he captured in the phrase bowling alone. Communities rich in social capital tend to enjoy lower crime and more effective local government, because neighbors who know and trust one another can coordinate informally without relying entirely on formal institutions. However, _______________. For this reason, researchers increasingly distinguish between bonding capital, which strengthens ties within a single group, and bridging capital, which connects otherwise separate communities.

Many large companies now rely on artificial intelligence to screen job applications before a human ever sees them. These systems promise efficiency, 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 troubling 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 quietly reproduce it, even when no one intended discrimination. Unlike a human interviewer, the system offers no explanation for its choices, which means that _______________. Some researchers argue that fairness cannot be added afterward; it must be built into the system's design from the very beginning.

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. 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. The resulting curve revealed a consistent pattern: _______________. 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 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.

Change blindness refers to a striking limitation of human perception in which observers fail to notice substantial alterations to a visual scene, provided the change occurs during a brief disruption such as an eye movement or a momentary obstruction. (A) In a now-famous demonstration, researchers showed participants two versions of a photograph in alternation, separated by a short blank screen, and asked them to identify what had changed. Even when an entire building disappeared or a person's clothing shifted color, many viewers stared at the picture without detecting anything unusual. (B) Consequently, change blindness demonstrates that our impression of a rich, complete visual world is, to a surprising extent, an illusion constructed by the mind, not a faithful record of external reality. (C) This phenomenon occurs because visual attention, rather than passively recording every detail like a camera, actively selects only a narrow subset of information for processing at any given moment. Whatever falls outside that narrow spotlight is represented only sparsely, if at all, leaving it vulnerable to being overwritten without notice.