영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in ①isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. A struggling artist may judge success not against neighbors but against celebrated painters in art history, a comparison that can inspire ambition or, just as easily, ②breed persistent dissatisfaction. Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, which merely provide a ③benchmark for self-assessment. Robert Merton showed that soldiers who compared their promotion chances to peers within their own slow-moving unit often felt more satisfied than soldiers in units with faster promotion rates, because the latter could see colleagues advancing while they themselves ④surpassed them. This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are ⑤measured.

Labeling theory approaches deviance not as a fixed property of certain acts, but as a social process created when powerful groups attach a negative label to a person's behavior. According to this view, nearly everyone breaks minor rules at some point, yet only some individuals are singled out, caught, and formally branded as delinquents or criminals. Sociologist Howard Becker argued that this label often becomes a master status, a single identity that overshadows every other trait a person has. Once labeled, an individual may find legitimate opportunities closing off, pushing them toward _______________. This process, sometimes called secondary deviance, illustrates how social reaction can produce the outcome it claims merely to describe.

Facial recognition software has moved rapidly into shopping malls, schools, and apartment buildings. Proponents note that it can unlock doors and speed up identity checks far faster than any human guard. Independent studies, however, have repeatedly found that many commercial systems perform less accurately on women and people with darker skin tones, which means that _______________. Several cities have already reported cases in which an innocent person was detained based on a flawed match.

As efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions intensify, industries unable to eliminate carbon dioxide from their processes have turned to a technology known as carbon capture and storage. This technology involves separating carbon dioxide from the exhaust of power plants before it is released into the atmosphere, then transporting the captured gas for underground injection. Once injected into porous rock formations, the gas is trapped beneath layers of impermeable rock that prevent it from escaping into the air. Proponents argue that carbon capture and storage _______________. For instance, cement and steel production, both of which release carbon dioxide as an unavoidable byproduct of chemical reactions, are considered prime candidates for this approach. However, critics contend that the technology remains prohibitively expensive and that building pipelines requires investments few companies make voluntarily. Despite such concerns, many governments continue funding pilot projects, convinced that this technology will play an indispensable role in reaching emission targets.

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.

Sensors buried in the soil now report moisture levels in real time, and automated systems adjust irrigation without a farmer ever walking the rows. (A) Smaller family farms, however, often cannot afford the upfront cost of this equipment, and some worry that the gap between high-tech and traditional operations will only widen. (B) For large operations with the capital to invest, these tools have measurably increased yields while reducing water waste. (C) There is also a quieter cultural cost: generations of farming knowledge risk being replaced by dashboards and automated alerts that few young farmers are taught to question.

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.

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. (C) However, social capital is not uniformly beneficial; tightly bonded networks can also exclude outsiders and reinforce existing inequality. (B) Communities rich in social capital tend to enjoy lower crime and more effective local government, because neighbors who trust one another can coordinate informally. (A) For this reason, researchers increasingly distinguish between bonding capital, which strengthens ties within a single group, and bridging capital, which connects otherwise separate communities.

Among the many strategies proposed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, one of the oldest draws on an agricultural technique predating modern industry, converting organic material into a stable form of charcoal known as biochar. (A) When mixed into farmland, biochar also improves soil structure, retaining moisture and nutrients otherwise lost, which can boost crop yields in depleted soils. For example, farmers cultivating nutrient-poor tropical soils have reported measurable increases in productivity after adding biochar. (B) Biochar is produced through pyrolysis, a process in which crop residues or wood chips are heated in an environment with little or no oxygen, preventing the material from burning away as in an open fire. This process leaves behind a carbon-rich solid that resists decomposition far longer than raw organic matter, locking carbon in a form remaining stable in soil for centuries. (C) Nevertheless, researchers caution that the climate benefits of biochar depend on the feedstock and method used, since poorly managed pyrolysis can release as much carbon as it sequesters, undermining its own purpose.

Social mobility refers to the movement of individuals or families between different positions within a society's system of stratification, whether upward, downward, or sideways. (C) Structural mobility, caused by large-scale economic shifts such as the growth of new industries, must be distinguished from individual mobility, which results from a single person's particular choices. (A) Sociologists distinguish intragenerational mobility, changes within a single person's lifetime, from intergenerational mobility, differences between the social position of parents and their children. (B) Research across many nations has found that education functions as the primary channel of upward mobility, yet access to quality education is itself unevenly distributed.