영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

A rational approach to decision-making dictates that only future costs and benefits should influence a choice, since resources already spent ①cannot be recovered regardless of what is decided next. In practice, however, people routinely allow such irrecoverable expenditures, known as sunk costs, ②to shape their subsequent decisions, a pattern referred to as the sunk cost fallacy. A moviegoer who finds a film thoroughly disappointing after the first thirty minutes will often remain in the theater until the credits roll, ③reasoning that leaving early would somehow waste the money already spent on the ticket. Organizations exhibit the same fallacy on a larger scale: a company that ④have invested heavily in a failing project frequently continues funding it, arguing that abandoning the project now would render the prior investment meaningless. Yet continuing to invest in a venture destined to fail merely adds new losses to old ones, ⑤compounding the very waste the decision-makers hoped to avoid.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a now-famous thought experiment not to describe an actual laboratory procedure, but ①to expose an absurdity hidden within a leading interpretation of quantum mechanics. Imagine a cat sealed inside a closed box together with a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and a vial of poison gas ②rigged to break open the instant the atom decays. Because the atom's decay is governed by genuine quantum randomness, standard quantum theory describes the atom, before anyone looks, ③as existing in a superposition of having decayed and not having decayed at the same time. If the theory is applied consistently to the entire box, the cat itself would have to ④be considered simultaneously alive and dead until an observer opens the lid and looks inside. Schrödinger intended this image to sound obviously ridiculous, using the cat's absurd fate to question whether the act of observation truly determines physical reality, or whether the mathematics is simply being pushed further than it ⑤ever meaning to go.

When engineers design the software ①that controls a self-driving car, they inevitably face a question that philosophers have debated for decades. If a crash becomes unavoidable, should the vehicle protect its own passenger at all costs, or should it be programmed ②minimizing total harm, even if that means steering toward the person inside? Surveys reveal an uncomfortable contradiction: most people say a car should be programmed to save the greater number of lives, yet the same people admit ③they would never buy a vehicle designed to sacrifice its own owner. This gap between the ideal and the personal choice suggests that ethical programming cannot ④be settled by public opinion alone. Manufacturers, regulators, and philosophers must instead agree on transparent rules before autonomous vehicles ⑤are allowed to make such decisions on the road.

Working memory refers to the mental workspace in which information is ①temporarily 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 ②influential that it became widely known as the magic number seven. Subsequent research, however, revealed that Miller's estimate was somewhat ③conservative, since it failed to account for the complexity of the material being remembered. Nelson Cowan later argued that when rehearsal strategies are ④prevented 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.

Factories that once employed hundreds of workers on an assembly line now run with a ①fraction of that staff, as robotic arms handle tasks that used to require human hands. Economists have long debated whether this shift destroys jobs or simply transforms them. Historical evidence offers some ②comfort: previous waves of automation eventually created new categories of work that no one had predicted. However, critics point out that earlier transitions unfolded over generations, giving workers ③ample time to retrain, whereas today's robots are being deployed at a pace that leaves little room for adjustment. A factory worker displaced this year cannot simply wait for a new industry to emerge decades from now. For this reason, many economists argue that the real ④challenge is not the robots themselves, but the ⑤sluggish speed at which society is expected to adapt to them.

Sociologist Mark Granovetter challenged a common assumption when he found that job seekers were more likely to hear about new opportunities from casual acquaintances than from close friends and family. This finding, published as the strength of weak ties, rests on a structural insight: close friends tend to belong to the same tight social circle and therefore already share most of the same information, whereas casual acquaintances typically move in different circles and can act as bridges to information a person would otherwise never encounter. Weak ties, precisely because they connect otherwise separate networks, _______________. Granovetter's insight has since been applied well beyond job searches, informing research on how innovations spread and how epidemics travel through a population.

주어진 문장: This durability is especially evident in modern debates about whether people can truly perform two demanding tasks at once. Long before cognitive scientists possessed the tools to observe the brain directly, Donald Broadbent proposed an influential model suggesting that the human capacity to process incoming sensory information is constrained by a structural bottleneck through which only a single stream of input can pass at any given instant. ( ① ) According to this filter theory, multiple channels of stimulation, such as competing voices in a crowded room, are initially registered at a shallow, physical level, but only one channel is selected for further, meaning-based analysis while the rest are blocked from advancing beyond that early filter. ( ② ) Although later researchers challenged the rigidity of this early selection mechanism, pointing to instances in which unattended information, such as one's own name, nevertheless breaks through and captures awareness, ( ③ ) the core insight that attention imposes a genuine processing limit rather than a mere matter of willpower has remained remarkably durable. ( ④ ) This basic bottleneck principle continues to inform contemporary explanations of why multitasking so reliably degrades performance on demanding tasks. ( ⑤ )

주어진 문장: This effect has been demonstrated so consistently across age groups and subject areas that few findings in cognitive psychology are considered more reliable. Dual coding theory, first proposed to explain why certain kinds of information are remembered more readily than others, holds that the mind processes verbal and visual material through two partially independent channels rather than a single unified system. ( ① ) According to this account, words and other linguistic symbols are encoded primarily through a verbal channel that represents meaning in an abstract, sequential form, while pictures and concrete objects are encoded through an imagery channel that preserves spatial and perceptual detail. ( ② ) When information engages both channels simultaneously, as when a textbook pairs a written explanation with an accompanying diagram, the resulting memory trace benefits from two separate, mutually reinforcing pathways of retrieval rather than just one. ( ③ ) This redundancy explains the well-documented picture superiority effect, whereby concrete, easily visualized words tend to be recalled more accurately than abstract terms that resist mental imagery. ( ④ ) Consequently, dual coding theory has profound implications for instructional design, suggesting that combining carefully chosen visuals with concise verbal explanations can strengthen students' long-term retention of complex material. ( ⑤ )

주어진 문장: The comparison, notably, is not with reality but with an imagined alternative that may never have been as good as it seems in retrospect. Modern consumer culture often assumes that expanding the range of available options will automatically make people freer and happier, yet a growing body of research suggests the opposite may sometimes be true. ( ① ) When individuals select from an enormous set of alternatives, satisfaction with the final choice frequently declines rather than rises, even when the chosen item is objectively excellent. ( ② ) This decline stems not from the difficulty of deciding but from what happens afterward, once a decision has already been made. ( ③ ) Having considered so many possibilities, a person naturally imagines the specific advantages that a different, unchosen option might have offered, and this imagined comparison quietly erodes contentment with what was actually selected. ( ④ ) By contrast, someone who chose from only two or three alternatives rarely constructs such an elaborate fantasy of missed advantages. ( ⑤ ) The paradox, therefore, is that abundance can free people from external constraint while simultaneously trapping them in a private cycle of comparison and regret.

주어진 문장: As a result, the frequency of an event in someone's memory can feel like solid proof of its real-world frequency, even when the two have little real connection. Imagine two travelers preparing for the same trip: one refuses to fly after watching news coverage of a recent plane crash, while the other books a flight without hesitation. ( ① ) Statistically, air travel remains far safer than driving the same distance by car, yet vivid, emotionally charged images tend to dominate human judgment more powerfully than dry statistics ever could. ( ② ) This tendency, in which people estimate how likely an event is based on how easily examples come to mind rather than on actual data, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. ( ③ ) News broadcasts that repeatedly feature rare disasters can leave viewers convinced that such events are common, even though official records clearly show the opposite. ( ④ ) Advertisers and politicians alike exploit this pattern, knowing that a single striking anecdote often persuades audiences more effectively than pages of careful statistics ever manage to. ( ⑤ ) Recognizing why memorable examples overshadow objective probability therefore matters, both for making sound personal choices and for noticing when public fear has drifted far from measurable reality.