영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

When sociologist Émile Durkheim studied suicide rates across different societies, he noticed something ①puzzling: rates rose not only during economic depression but also during sudden prosperity. He concluded that both crises share a common feature, the collapse of shared norms that once told individuals what to expect and how ②to behave. Durkheim called this state of normlessness anomie, arguing that rapid social change can strip away the moral guidelines ③what regulate human desire, leaving individuals disoriented even when material conditions improve. Decades later, Robert Merton extended the concept to explain deviance within stable societies, ④proposing that anomie also arises when a culture insists that everyone pursue identical goals. Faced with this gap between aspiration and opportunity, some individuals conform, but others turn to innovation, ritual, retreat, ⑤or rebellion.

Psychologists studying human judgment often describe the mind as operating through two distinct systems rather than a single unified process. System 1 works ①quickly and automatically, generating impressions and snap judgments without any noticeable sense of effort. System 2, by contrast, is slow, ②deliberate, and demanding, engaged only when a problem requires careful calculation or conscious reasoning. Most daily decisions are handled almost entirely by System 1, which allows people to function ③efficiently without exhausting their limited mental resources. This efficiency comes at a cost, however, because System 1 relies on simple shortcuts that can produce systematic errors, and System 2 is frequently too ④diligent or too occupied to double-check them. As a result, a judgment often feels most confident precisely at the moment when it has skipped the careful scrutiny that could have caught its own mistake, leaving the thinker ⑤unaware of how easily the impression was formed.

Anyone designing a presentation, a curriculum, or a grocery list should attend to a well-documented pattern in human memory known as the serial position effect. When people are asked to recall items from a list right after studying it, they ①consistently remember the items presented at the beginning and end far better than those buried in the middle. The advantage for early items, called the primacy effect, arises because those items receive ②less rehearsal and are more likely to be transferred into long-term storage before subsequent items compete for attention. The advantage for final items, known as the recency effect, occurs because those items remain ③accessible in short-term memory at the moment of recall. Middle items suffer because they must compete for ④limited rehearsal opportunities while lacking the stability afforded by extended processing. Communicators who ignore this pattern risk burying their most important point where it will predictably be forgotten. A more effective strategy, therefore, places the crucial message at the beginning or end, precisely where memory proves most ⑤reliable.

Conventional economic wisdom holds that more options are always preferable to fewer. Empirical research on consumer behavior, however, complicates this assumption considerably. When shoppers are presented with an extensive array of choices, they frequently experience heightened anxiety about making the wrong selection and, paradoxically, become less likely to make any purchase or decision at all. Businesses that recognize this dynamic have begun deliberately curating smaller, carefully selected assortments, betting that ___________ can sometimes generate more sales and greater customer satisfaction than abundance.

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.

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. (A) 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. (B) 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. (C) Instead, such feats arise from a learned skill known as chunking, whereby scattered pieces of information are consolidated into larger, meaningful units.

Factories that once employed hundreds of workers on an assembly line now run with a fraction of that staff, as robotic arms handle tasks that used to require human hands. (A) However, critics point out that earlier transitions unfolded over generations, giving workers time to retrain, whereas today's robots are being deployed much faster. (B) Historical evidence offers some comfort: previous waves of automation eventually created new categories of work that no one had predicted. (C) A factory worker displaced this year, therefore, cannot simply wait for a new industry to emerge decades from now.

A small bakery once sold a basic loaf of bread for three dollars and a premium loaf for six dollars, and most customers, uncertain about the added value of the pricier option, simply bought the cheaper one. (A) Almost nobody chose this new seven-dollar loaf, yet sales of the six-dollar loaf rose sharply, because it now appeared to be an obvious bargain beside the inferior newcomer. (B) This pattern, confirmed across countless pricing experiments in other markets, demonstrates that people rarely judge options in isolation but instead evaluate them relative to whatever alternatives happen to be nearby. (C) The owner then introduced a third option: a slightly larger premium loaf priced at seven dollars, one that was clearly inferior to the six-dollar loaf in terms of value for money.

Social media platforms rarely show users a neutral stream of information. (A) Over time, users exposed to a steady diet of emotionally charged content may come to believe that extreme opinions are far more common than they actually are. (B) Instead, recommendation algorithms are optimized to maximize engagement, and content that provokes strong emotion tends to hold attention longer than balanced reporting ever could. (C) Researchers describe this as a distorted mirror: the platform reflects not society as it truly is, but a version shaped by whatever keeps people scrolling.

Fairness, in other words, is not a feature that can simply be patched in once a problem is discovered. Many large companies now rely on artificial intelligence to screen job applications before a human ever sees them. ( ① ) These systems promise efficiency, scanning thousands of resumes in seconds and ranking candidates according to patterns drawn from previous hiring decisions. ( ② ) However, this reliance on historical data creates a troubling risk. ( ③ ) 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. ( ④ ) Unlike a human interviewer, the system offers no explanation for its choices, which makes the bias difficult to detect until an outside audit reveals it. ( ⑤ ) Some researchers argue that fairness cannot be added afterward; it must be built into the system's design from the very beginning.