영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Picture a woman who ①receive 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. Before she ②owned 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. Researchers have repeatedly observed this pattern across many everyday objects, from coffee mugs and concert tickets to office chairs and old furniture ③inherited from relatives. Owners consistently demand more money ④to 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 ⑤attaches a different value to what it currently holds.

Prospect theory proposes that the subjective value of money is not a straight line but a curved function, ①differing sharply from the assumptions of classical economic models. In the domain of gains, the function bends downward as amounts ②increase, so the psychological difference between earning zero and one hundred dollars feels far greater than between earning one thousand and eleven hundred. A parallel pattern appears among losses, where the curve ③bend in the opposite direction, yet sensitivity still fades as the amount grows larger. This tendency, ④known as diminishing sensitivity, explains why a shopper barely notices a ten dollar increase on a two thousand dollar purchase. Researchers illustrate this curvature with graphs ⑤shaped like an S turned sideways, sloping gently near the center and flattening toward both extremes.

People routinely seek out information that confirms what they already believe while overlooking or dismissing evidence that ①contradicts those beliefs, a pattern known as confirmation bias. This tendency operates not because individuals are deliberately dishonest, but because the mind finds it cognitively less taxing ②to absorb information that fits an existing framework than to reconstruct that framework from scratch. Investors who believe a particular company will succeed, for instance, tend to interpret ambiguous news about that company favorably, while investors who ③are skeptical of the same company interpret identical news unfavorably, even though both groups are examining the same underlying facts. Social media platforms can intensify this effect by algorithmically presenting users with content similar to what they have previously engaged with, thereby ④narrowing the range of perspectives an individual regularly encounters. Over time, such selective exposure can harden initial impressions into convictions that ⑤feels objectively verified, even though they rest on a systematically filtered sample of evidence.

Few ideas in policy debate ①provoke as much philosophical unease as the notion that a government might deliberately steer citizens toward better choices while leaving every option technically available. Defenders insist that freedom is preserved as long as no option is banned and no penalty is attached, ②arguing that a citizen who is merely steered, rather than coerced, remains free to choose otherwise. Critics counter that this defense rests on an impoverished notion of liberty, one that ③ignores how engineered defaults and calculated framing can shape decisions just as powerfully as an outright prohibition would. If a policy is designed because officials expect it to bypass conscious deliberation, these critics ask, can the resulting choice still ④call autonomous, even though no law was broken? The dispute ultimately turns on what freedom actually ⑤requires: the mere absence of coercion, or a decision-making process that remains transparent and undistorted.

A liver no longer has to sit inside a human body to be studied closely. By coaxing stem cells to organize themselves within a nutrient-rich gel, scientists can now grow miniature three-dimensional structures called organoids, which reproduce much of the architecture and function of a real organ. Unlike flat cultures grown on a plastic dish, organoids let cells interact in three dimensions much as they would inside the body, yielding tissue that behaves in strikingly realistic ways. This fidelity has made organoids invaluable for testing how a drug affects human tissue before any patient is exposed, _______________. Some laboratories have even grown organoids from a single patient's own cells, raising the possibility of trialing a treatment on a miniature copy of that patient's organ before committing to an actual course of therapy.

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.

Behavioral economists have long observed that people tend to feel the pain of losing something more intensely than the pleasure of gaining an equivalent amount, a tendency known as loss aversion. Consider an investor who refuses to sell a declining stock, clinging to the hope that its price will eventually recover, even when all available evidence indicates that selling and reinvesting elsewhere would be more rational. As a result, loss aversion frequently pushes individuals toward ___________ rather than toward the outcome that would maximize their overall welfare.

Many households save far less for retirement than conventional financial advice would recommend. Some economists have proposed a savings program in which employees commit today to allocating a portion of their future salary increases toward retirement savings, rather than being asked to reduce their current take-home pay immediately. Field trials of such programs have reported substantial increases in average savings rates. This approach demonstrates that savings policy grounded in realistic assumptions about human psychology can prove considerably more ___________ than policy grounded in the assumption that individuals will always act in strict accordance with their own long-term rational interests.

주어진 문장: In other words, the coin cannot somehow sense that it owes the observer a tails after so many heads. Imagine watching a fair coin land on heads five times in a row and feeling an increasingly strong intuition that the next flip is somehow due to produce tails. ( ① ) This intuition, though psychologically compelling, rests on a basic misunderstanding of probability, since each flip of a fair coin remains entirely independent of every flip that came before it. ( ② ) The coin possesses no memory of its previous outcomes, and its probability of landing on tails on the sixth flip stays fixed at fifty percent regardless of how many heads preceded it. ( ③ ) Casinos have long profited from this misconception, watching gamblers place larger bets after a losing streak simply because they mistakenly believe that a win has become statistically overdue. ( ④ ) Economists have even documented the same error among trained professionals, including loan officers who grow more likely to approve a risky application simply because they recently rejected several applications in a row. ( ⑤ )

주어진 문장: This insight helps explain why memory athletes can recall astonishing amounts of information despite possessing the same underlying cognitive architecture as everyone else. Working memory refers to the mental workspace in which information is temporarily held and manipulated while a person performs a cognitive task. ( ① ) Such tasks include solving an arithmetic problem, following a rapid conversation, or holding a phone number in mind before dialing it. ( ② ) In the mid-twentieth century, the psychologist George Miller proposed that this workspace could accommodate roughly seven discrete items. His claim proved so influential that it became widely known as the magic number seven. ( ③ ) Subsequent research, however, revealed that Miller's estimate was somewhat generous, since it failed to account for the complexity of the material being remembered. ( ④ ) Nelson Cowan later argued that when rehearsal strategies are prevented 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 inflated by clever strategies. ( ⑤ ) Contemporary psychologists therefore distinguish between the fixed limit of working memory and the flexible techniques that allow individuals to transcend that limit.