영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly ①built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? This puzzle, which researchers ②named 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 ③assembled a plain storage box were willing to pay nearly as much for their own imperfect 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 ④pour into a task, individuals become reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly ⑤wasted.

Sociologist Karl Mannheim argued that individuals ①who come of age during the same historical period tend to share a distinctive outlook shaped by the events, technologies, and crises that defined their formative years, a phenomenon he called a generational unit. Because each generation absorbs its foundational assumptions during adolescence and early adulthood, when identity ②are still forming, later generations raised amid different circumstances often ③develop noticeably different values regarding work, authority, and communication, even within the same family. This divergence produces what is commonly called a generational gap, most visible when older members of a household ④interpret a younger relative's habits as a rejection of tradition rather than a rational adaptation to a genuinely different social environment. Mannheim cautioned against viewing either generation as simply right or wrong, insisting instead that each generation's worldview ⑤reflects a coherent response to the particular historical conditions it encountered.

A cotton plant that manufactures its own insecticide sounds like science fiction, yet it has been growing in fields around the world for decades. Scientists achieved this by isolating a gene from a soil bacterium that produces a protein toxic to specific insect pests but harmless to humans, then inserting that gene into the plant's own genome so that every cell manufactures the protective protein. _______________. Supporters point to yield increases and reduced pesticide spraying documented across millions of hectares, while critics worry about weeds and insects evolving resistance to these built-in defenses over time, much as bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics. Regulatory agencies in most countries now require extensive testing before a genetically modified crop reaches the market, evaluating everything from its nutritional content to its potential effects on nearby ecosystems.

The discovery of CRISPR gene-editing technology gave scientists a tool precise enough to correct a single mistaken letter in the human genome. Yet editing a gene in a sperm, egg, or early embryo does not simply change one patient; it alters the genetic code passed down to every future generation. Scientific organizations around the world have therefore drawn a careful line, permitting gene editing to treat disease in existing patients while banning any edit that would be inherited by their descendants. Critics worry, however, that _______________.

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.

Psychologists studying human judgment often describe the mind as operating through two distinct systems rather than a single unified process. System 1 works quickly and automatically, generating impressions without any noticeable sense of effort. System 2, by contrast, is slow, deliberate, 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 efficiently without exhausting their limited mental resources. This efficiency comes at a cost, however, because _______________. 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.

Picture a woman who receives a plain ceramic mug as a free gift at a conference and, later that afternoon, refuses to sell it for anything less than triple its price in the gift shop downstairs. (A) In fact, before she owned the mug, she would never have paid extra for it; once it became hers, however, its value in her mind rose sharply, simply because she now possessed it. (B) Researchers have repeatedly observed this pattern across many everyday objects, from coffee mugs and concert tickets to office chairs and old furniture inherited from relatives. (C) Owners consistently demand more money to give something up than buyers are willing to offer for that very same item, revealing a curious asymmetry rooted purely in possession itself. Some economists argue that this effect explains why negotiations over inherited property so often collapse, since each side quietly attaches a different value to what it currently holds. Understanding this bias, therefore, helps explain why simply owning something, even briefly, can distort how fairly people judge its true worth.

This reduction in cognitive burden, rather than a reduction in variety itself, appears to be the decisive factor in easing customers' decisions. An online retailer once tested how the size of a product display affected customer behavior. ( ① ) In one setting, customers encountered a table displaying twenty-four varieties of a specialty product, while in another setting they encountered a table displaying only six varieties. ( ② ) A larger proportion of customers stopped to sample items at the larger display, suggesting that abundance initially attracts attention and curiosity. ( ③ ) When it came to actual purchases, however, customers exposed to the smaller display were significantly more likely to buy something than those exposed to the larger one. ( ④ ) Follow-up interviews revealed that customers at the larger display often felt overwhelmed and uncertain about which option truly suited their preferences. ( ⑤ ) The retailer concluded that presenting a carefully limited selection, rather than an exhaustive one, could improve both sales and customer confidence.

주어진 문장: The same reflexive shift can occur when a smoke alarm suddenly interrupts a deep conversation, even though no one had been monitoring it consciously. Imagine standing at a crowded party where dozens of conversations blend into a wall of noise, yet you effortlessly track the words of the friend beside you. ( ① ) Curiously, if someone across the room utters your name, your attention snaps toward that voice almost instantly. ( ② ) 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. ( ③ ) Early theorists such as Donald Broadbent proposed that unattended information is filtered out entirely before reaching awareness. Yet the fact that a person's own name can break through this filter contradicts such a rigid model. ( ④ ) 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. ( ⑤ ) This refinement suggests that attention operates less like a gate and more like a dimmer switch, adjusting the salience of competing streams of information.

주어진 문장: Beyond these practical objections, some conservationists raise a more fundamental theoretical concern about what rewilding is ultimately trying to achieve. Rewilding, a conservation strategy that seeks to restore natural processes with minimal human interference, has gained attention as traditional conservation struggles to halt biodiversity loss. ① Rather than managing landscapes according to a fixed blueprint, rewilding projects often reintroduce key species, such as large predators, whose presence can trigger cascading effects. ② Advocates point to the reintroduction of wolves in certain parks, where predation altered grazing behavior, allowing riverside vegetation to recover and stabilizing soil that had long been eroding. ③ Skeptics, however, warn that rewilding can provoke serious conflict with nearby communities, particularly when predators prey on livestock or restored habitats limit land for agriculture. ④ Moreover, critics argue that restoring landscapes to an imagined pristine state is scientifically dubious, since ecosystems have long been shaped by human activity. ⑤ Compensation programs reimbursing farmers for livestock losses, alongside ecotourism initiatives creating local income, have proven essential to sustaining public support. Ultimately, rewilding succeeds not by removing human influence but by renegotiating the relationship between people and the wild species they must coexist with. ① ② ③ ④ ⑤