영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

As cities have expanded across landscapes once covered with absorbent soil, impervious surfaces have turned stormwater from a resource that ①recharges groundwater into a hazard that floods streets and carries pollutants into waterways. Green infrastructure, which ②mimic the hydrological functions that natural landscapes once performed, offers planners a way to treat the city as a sponge rather than a rigid drainage pipe. Rain gardens, shallow depressions planted with deep-rooted vegetation, are designed to capture runoff from rooftops, ③allowing it to filter slowly through soil before reaching underground aquifers. Permeable pavement, made of porous materials ④that let water pass directly through, serves a similar purpose along sidewalks, where asphalt would remain impenetrable. For example, cities that replaced pavement with permeable alternatives have reported notable reductions in flooding during storms that once overwhelmed sewers. However, engineers caution that green infrastructure cannot entirely replace conventional pipes in dense cores, where heavy runoff still ⑤requires structural reinforcement. Consequently, municipalities now regard green and gray infrastructure as complementary systems, each compensating for the other's limitations.

Medieval philosophers told the story of a hungry donkey placed exactly midway between two identical, equally fragrant piles of hay, with no factor whatsoever tipping the balance toward either option. Because the donkey is assumed to be a perfectly ①rational creature that always chooses the option supported by the strongest reason, and because neither pile offers any advantage over the other, the donkey supposedly finds itself with no rational basis for choosing one pile rather than the other. ②Paralyzed by this perfect symmetry, the donkey starves to death precisely because it can find no reason to move in either direction. Critics of the story point out that real animals, and real humans, rarely face situations of such flawless symmetry, and that even a tiny, ③arbitrary preference is usually enough to break the tie in practice. The paradox nevertheless raises a serious question about whether purely rational deliberation can ever ④generate action on its own, without some additional nudge that reason alone ⑤willingly supplies.

As private companies develop the technology to mine asteroids for rare metals and water, a legal question has become urgent: who owns the resources of outer space? Existing international treaties state that no nation may claim sovereignty over celestial bodies, but they say remarkably little about whether a private company may extract and sell what it finds there. Some governments have already passed domestic laws granting their own companies rights to material mined in space, a move that other nations view as _______________.

Imagine a man locked inside a room who does not understand a single word of Chinese, yet who possesses a giant rulebook written entirely in English. Slips of paper covered with Chinese characters are passed in through a slot, and by following the rulebook's instructions step by step, he produces replies that appear fluent to anyone outside. From the perspective of a native speaker reading the responses, the room seems to understand Chinese perfectly. Yet the man inside understands nothing at all; he is merely manipulating shapes according to formal rules, without grasping their meaning. This scenario was designed to challenge the assumption that a computer running a sophisticated program truly understands language simply because it produces convincing output. Passing every external test of intelligence, the argument suggests, is not the same as possessing genuine understanding, since _______________.

As solar and wind power expand rapidly across national grids, engineers face a challenge that receives far less public attention than the construction of the generating facilities themselves. Unlike conventional power plants, which can adjust their output to match demand at almost any moment, solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity only when sunlight or wind is available, producing supply that fluctuates constantly. This intermittency means that grid operators must balance supply and demand even when renewable output suddenly drops, such as when clouds cover a solar farm or wind speeds fall. One proposed solution involves large-scale battery storage systems, which absorb surplus electricity generated during periods of high output and release it later when generation declines. Another approach relies on expanding transmission networks across wider regions, so that electricity generated in a sunny area can be redirected to places experiencing a shortfall. Grid operators _______________. Without such investment, integrating renewable energy could paradoxically undermine the very reliability that modern electricity grids are expected to provide.

Economists have long debated whether prosperity and environmental quality are fundamentally opposed, or whether the relationship between them changes shape as an economy matures. The Environmental Kuznets Curve, a hypothesis borrowed from earlier theories of income inequality, proposes that _______________. In its early stages, industrializing nations prioritize output over conservation, treating clean air and water as expendable costs of development to be addressed later. Beyond a certain point, however, rising incomes generate both the technological capacity and the political will to demand stricter regulation, so degradation begins to reverse even as production keeps expanding. Some scholars regard this trajectory as a reassuring paradox, suggesting that the very growth blamed for ecological harm may eventually finance its own repair. Critics, by contrast, argue that the curve rests on a narrow selection of pollutants that happen to decline with wealth, while ignoring greenhouse gases and resource depletion, which show no comparable tendency to fall.

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.

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. (A) Early trials were haunted by serious setbacks, including cases in which the delivery virus triggered a dangerous immune reaction, but refined delivery methods have since made the treatment considerably safer, leading regulators in several countries to approve gene therapies for a small but growing number of rare inherited disorders. (B) 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. (C) 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.

The ethical debate surrounding nudging often intensifies when the technique is applied to particularly vulnerable populations. (A) Elderly individuals facing complex decisions about long-term care, for example, may be especially susceptible to defaults and framing effects, raising the stakes of any given choice architecture considerably. (B) Some ethicists argue that heightened vulnerability actually strengthens the case for carefully designed nudges, since vulnerable individuals may otherwise fall prey to more overtly exploitative influences, such as aggressive sales tactics, if a beneficial default is not established first. (C) Others insist that heightened vulnerability demands greater caution rather than more intervention, since those least equipped to resist a nudge are also least equipped to recognize when it no longer serves their genuine interests.

The anchoring effect is not limited to shopping decisions; it also plays a subtle but powerful role in legal and financial judgments. (A) Similarly, jurors who are told that a plaintiff is seeking an unusually large sum in damages tend to award higher compensation than jurors who hear no specific figure at all, even when the evidence presented is identical. (B) This pattern suggests that anchors can distort judgments requiring careful, case-by-case reasoning, not merely quick, intuitive estimates of price. (C) For instance, experienced judges asked to set a sentence after being exposed to an arbitrary number, such as one generated by rolling dice, have been shown in experimental settings to hand down harsher sentences when the number was high.