영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Working memory refers to the mental workspace in which information ①is temporarily held and manipulated while a person performs a cognitive task. Such tasks include solving an arithmetic problem, following a rapid conversation, or holding a phone number in mind before dialing it. In the mid-twentieth century, the psychologist George Miller proposed that this workspace could accommodate roughly seven discrete items. His claim proved so influential that it ②become widely known as the magic number seven. Subsequent research, however, revealed that Miller's estimate was somewhat generous, since it failed to account for the complexity of the material ③being remembered. Nelson Cowan later argued that when rehearsal strategies ④are prevented and attention is tightly controlled, genuine capacity hovers closer to four items rather than seven. This discrepancy suggests that what earlier studies had measured was not raw storage capacity itself but a hybrid quantity ⑤inflated by clever strategies. Contemporary psychologists therefore distinguish between the fixed limit of working memory and the flexible techniques that allow individuals to transcend that limit.

When individuals face uncertainty about how to behave, they frequently look to the actions of others for guidance, ①assuming that a behavior adopted by many people is more likely to be correct or appropriate than one adopted by few, a tendency known as social proof. This reliance on collective behavior can be remarkably efficient, since it allows individuals ②to benefit from the accumulated judgment of a crowd without having to gather and evaluate every relevant fact themselves. However, social proof can also lead entire groups astray when the initial signal that ③trigger imitation is itself unreliable or coincidental. A restaurant that happens to attract a long line early in the evening may continue attracting customers throughout the night simply because passersby ④interpret the queue as evidence of superior quality. Financial markets exhibit an analogous pattern: investors who observe others buying a particular asset often join the buying themselves, ⑤reasoning that so many participants cannot all be mistaken.

Why do people often ①overvalue objects they have partly built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively ②inferior to something they could have simply purchased? This puzzle, which researchers named after a furniture retailer famous for selling items that require home assembly, challenges the standard economic assumption that value is determined solely by an object's inherent qualities. In a series of experiments, participants who assembled a plain storage box were willing to pay nearly as much for their own ③imperfect creation as they were for a professionally built version, despite being fully aware of its flaws. Labor, it seems, functions as a kind of psychological investment: once effort has been poured into a task, individuals become ④reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly wasted. This tendency helps explain why consumers often prefer products that demand some degree of personal assembly, even when a comparable finished item is available at a ⑤higher price and requires no time investment whatsoever.

Identical information can provoke strikingly different reactions depending on how it is worded, a phenomenon economists call the framing effect. Patients told that a surgical procedure carries a ninety percent survival rate tend to consent to it far more readily than patients told that the same procedure carries a ten percent mortality rate, even though the two descriptions convey exactly the same statistical reality. Recognizing how deeply framing shapes judgment is therefore essential, not because the underlying facts change, but because the very same facts, dressed in different language, can lead reasonable people toward ___________ conclusions.

A rational approach to decision-making dictates that only future costs and benefits should influence a choice, since resources already spent cannot be recovered regardless of what is decided next. In practice, however, people routinely allow such irrecoverable expenditures, known as sunk costs, to shape their subsequent decisions, a pattern referred to as the sunk cost fallacy. Economists therefore urge decision-makers to evaluate each choice based solely on its prospective outcomes, treating past expenditures as ___________ to the decision at hand.

When people encounter an individual who appears to memorize enormous quantities of specialized information effortlessly, they often assume that person possesses an innate gift. Cognitive psychologists, however, contend that such feats rarely stem from raw talent alone. Instead, such feats arise from _______________. A landmark study of chess players demonstrated this principle. When shown a board arranged according to plausible game positions, grandmasters reproduced the layout perfectly. Yet when the same pieces were scattered randomly, their performance collapsed to the level of novices. This pattern reveals that expert memory is not larger in raw capacity but is instead organized around patterns accumulated through years of deliberate practice. If chunking, rather than innate aptitude, underlies expert performance, then educators should stop treating talent as fixed and destiny-bound. Curricula ought to be redesigned to cultivate pattern recognition explicitly, since doing so would grant far more students access to expertise once presumed reserved for the naturally gifted.

Overconfidence bias is not confined to amateur investors; even seasoned financial professionals display strikingly similar patterns. (A) Fund managers surveyed about the accuracy of their own market predictions, for example, consistently rate their forecasts as more reliable than an objective analysis of their historical track record would support. (B) This gap between perceived and actual accuracy suggests that professional training and experience do not automatically immunize individuals against overconfidence. (C) Some researchers argue instead that professionals may be especially susceptible, since repeated exposure to a domain can breed a false sense of mastery over outcomes that remain fundamentally unpredictable.

Mental accounting also shapes how consumers respond to windfalls of different sizes and origins. (A) A modest windfall, such as a small cash-back reward, tends to be absorbed into everyday spending and disappears almost unnoticed within a household's general budget. (B) A substantial windfall, by contrast, such as an inheritance or a large bonus, is more likely to be mentally assigned to a separate category, sometimes labeled as "extra" money reserved for investment or a significant purchase. (C) This difference in treatment suggests that the perceived significance of a sum, rather than its objective purchasing power, determines the mental account into which it is placed.

주어진 문장: This is not because they expect the price to recover, but because selling would force them to confront the possibility of having made a clear mistake. When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh not only the expected outcome of each option but also how painful it would feel to discover later that a different choice had been better. ( ① ) This anticipation of future regret, rather than the size of the potential loss itself, frequently becomes the dominant factor shaping the final decision. ( ② ) Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than selling it. ( ③ ) Researchers have found that people feel sharper 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 uncertain. ( ④ ) Ironically, this strategy of avoiding regret can itself produce outcomes that are later regretted even more deeply than the ones it was originally designed to prevent. ( ⑤ )

주어진 문장: In other words, memory is not a fixed archive but an ever-changing record that is rewritten each time it is accessed. 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. ( ① ) This assumption, however, was overturned by a body of research demonstrating that the act of retrieval itself can destabilize a previously consolidated memory, rendering it temporarily susceptible to alteration before it is, in a sense, filed away again. ( ② ) 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. ( ③ ) Consequently, what we experience as a stable recollection may actually be a continuously revised construction, ( ④ ) reshaped every time it is summoned into conscious awareness and returned to storage. ( ⑤ )