영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Marketers have long recognized that perceived scarcity, the sense that a product or opportunity is available only in limited quantity or for a limited time, can dramatically increase its ①desirability, even when the item's intrinsic qualities remain entirely unchanged. This phenomenon, known as the scarcity effect, operates on a simple psychological principle: when something appears ②easy to obtain, people tend to infer that it must be valuable, since truly worthless items rarely generate genuine competition for possession. A retailer who labels a product as "limited edition" or displays a countdown timer beside a discounted offer exploits this inference, prompting customers to make ③hurried purchase decisions they might otherwise postpone or reconsider. Experimental studies confirm that identical products are rated as more desirable and often command ④higher prices when framed as scarce than when the same products are presented as widely and continuously available. Consumers who later reflect calmly on such purchases frequently discover that the item's actual usefulness fell well short of the ⑤urgency they experienced at the moment of decision.

Every time an antibiotic kills off a population of bacteria, a handful of cells carrying a random mutation that resists the drug are left behind to ①multiply without competition. Repeated over decades, across hospitals, farms, and households worldwide, this simple process of natural selection has produced strains of bacteria that survive treatments once considered reliably ②effective. The pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, has slowed the pace at which new antibiotics reach the market, since a drug meant to be taken for only a week or two rarely earns back the ③enormous cost of developing it. Researchers are therefore searching in ④unconventional places, screening soil microbes, ocean sediment, and even genetic databases for molecules that kill bacteria through mechanisms resistant strains have not yet learned to evade. Some scientists have also revived an older approach, using viruses that infect only bacteria to hunt down resistant strains with a ⑤carelessness no broad-spectrum drug could ever match.

Many large companies now rely on artificial intelligence to screen job applications before a human ever sees them. These systems promise ①efficiency, scanning thousands of resumes in seconds and ranking candidates according to patterns drawn from previous hiring decisions. However, this reliance on historical data creates a ②troubling risk. If a company's past hiring favored a particular group, the algorithm may learn to treat that pattern as a marker of success and ③loudly reproduce it, even when no one intended discrimination. Unlike a human interviewer, the system offers no explanation for its choices, which makes the bias ④difficult to detect until an outside audit reveals it. Some researchers argue that fairness cannot be added afterward; it must be built into the system's design from the very ⑤beginning.

A hamburger patty need not come from a slaughtered animal at all if a small sample of muscle cells can be ①discouraged to multiply inside a steel tank. Cultured meat begins with a biopsy of animal muscle tissue, from which scientists isolate cells capable of dividing repeatedly, then feed those cells a nutrient broth that supplies the sugars, proteins, and minerals an animal's bloodstream would ②normally provide. Inside a bioreactor, the cells multiply across scaffolding designed to encourage them to align into fibers, ③gradually thickening into something that begins to resemble muscle tissue rather than a shapeless clump of cells. Supporters argue that because the process never requires raising and slaughtering a whole animal, it could shrink the land, water, and greenhouse gas emissions ④associated with conventional meat production. Skeptics counter that producing the specialized broth at a large enough scale remains prohibitively ⑤expensive, meaning cultured meat is unlikely to compete with conventional meat in price until the technology matures considerably further.

Philosopher Robert Nozick asked his readers to imagine a machine capable of producing any experience they desired, from writing a great novel to falling in love, all indistinguishable from reality once they were plugged in. Neuroscientists would simply stimulate the brain to generate a lifetime of perfectly satisfying experiences. If pleasure and the avoidance of pain were truly all that mattered, as classical hedonism claims, then everyone should rush to connect themselves permanently to such a machine. Yet when people actually consider the offer, most hesitate, and many refuse outright. Nozick took this reluctance as evidence that _______________.

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.

Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? (A) This puzzle, which researchers named 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. (B) In a series of experiments, participants who assembled 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. (C) Labor, it seems, functions as a kind of psychological investment: once effort has been poured into a task, individuals become reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly wasted. This tendency helps explain why consumers often prefer products that demand some degree of personal assembly, even when a comparable finished item is available at a lower price and requires no time investment whatsoever.

Anyone who has tried to name the ink color of a word like red printed in blue letters knows how surprisingly difficult the task can feel. This everyday struggle, known as the Stroop effect, deserves more attention than casual curiosity grants it, because it reveals something fundamental about how the mind allocates its limited resources. (A) Educators should not dismiss this delay as a trivial curiosity confined to laboratories, since the same competition between habit and intention underlies far more consequential situations, such as a driver's struggle to resist checking a phone despite knowing the danger. Recognizing how automatic responses can hijack conscious intentions is essential for designing environments, from classrooms to highways, that support rather than undermine our efforts at self-control. (B) When these two processes point toward conflicting answers, the automatic pathway tends to intrude upon the controlled one, slowing responses and increasing errors. (C) Reading a familiar word is an automatic process practiced so extensively since childhood that it proceeds almost involuntarily, whereas naming a color requires deliberate, controlled attention.

The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively simple question: if every plank of a wooden ship is replaced one by one over many years, is the vessel that eventually results still the same ship it once was? (A) Suppose a careful collector gathered every discarded plank and reassembled them into a second vessel, built exactly as the original once stood. (B) Two ships would then exist side by side, each with an equal claim to being the genuine one, and no obvious way to decide between them. (C) Most people's first instinct is to answer yes, since each individual replacement seems too small to erase the ship's identity, but the puzzle grows far sharper once a second twist is introduced.

Ordinary evidence cannot help here, since any proof gathered through the senses would itself be generated by the same simulation being tested. Suppose a mad scientist removed a living brain from its body, placed it in a vat of nutrient fluid, and connected its neurons to a supercomputer capable of generating perfectly realistic sensations. ( ① ) The brain would experience a full and convincing world, complete with a sky, a body, and other people, without ever suspecting that none of it existed outside the simulation. ( ② ) This scenario, unsettling as it sounds, raises a genuinely difficult question for anyone confident in their own perception: how could a person ever prove that they are not that very brain right now? ( ③ ) Some philosophers conclude that absolute certainty about the external world is simply unattainable. ( ④ ) Others argue, however, that the mere possibility of deception, however vivid, is not sufficient reason to abandon our everyday trust in what we perceive. ( ⑤ ) Ordinary caution, after all, can never fully settle which side is correct.