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 cannot be ①recovered regardless of what is decided next. In practice, however, people routinely allow such irrecoverable expenditures, known as sunk costs, to shape their subsequent decisions, a pattern referred to as the sunk cost fallacy. A moviegoer who finds a film thoroughly ②disappointing after the first thirty minutes will often remain in the theater until the credits roll, reasoning 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 has invested heavily in a failing project frequently ③abandons funding it, arguing that stopping 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, ④compounding the very waste the decision-makers hoped to avoid. Economists therefore urge decision-makers to evaluate each choice based solely on its prospective outcomes, treating past expenditures as ⑤irrelevant to the decision at hand.

Many households save far less for retirement than conventional financial advice would recommend, not necessarily because they lack the resources to do so, but because a combination of procrastination, present bias, and the discomfort of forgoing current consumption repeatedly ①delays the decision to begin saving. Recognizing this gap between intention and action, 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 ②increase their current take-home pay immediately. Because the sacrifice applies only to income not yet received, the commitment feels far less ③painful than an equivalent reduction in present earnings would, making employees considerably more willing to enroll. Once enrolled, the contribution rate automatically rises with each subsequent raise, gradually ④increasing savings without requiring any further deliberate action from participants. Field trials of such programs have reported substantial increases in average savings rates over several years, alongside participant satisfaction that remains notably ⑤high.

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. Reading a familiar word is an automatic process practiced so extensively since childhood that it proceeds almost involuntarily ①, whereas naming a color requires deliberate ②, controlled attention. When these two processes point toward conflicting answers, the automatic pathway tends to intrude ③ upon the controlled one, slowing responses and decreasing ④ errors. 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 ⑤ our efforts at self-control.

It would be comforting to believe that anything sufficiently large or obvious appearing within our field of vision will automatically capture our attention, yet decades of research into inattentional blindness suggest otherwise. When people are absorbed in a demanding task, such as counting how many times a ball is passed between players, they frequently fail to notice an unexpected and conspicuous event unfolding in plain sight, even something as unlikely as a person in a costume walking through the scene. This failure does not stem from a defect in the eyes, which register the stimulus perfectly well, but from the fact that _______________. Policymakers ought to take this finding more seriously than they currently do, because it implies that simply placing a warning sign within someone's visual range offers no guarantee that it will be consciously registered. Designing safer environments, therefore, requires accounting for the limits of attention itself, not merely assuming that visibility alone ensures awareness.

Working memory refers to the mental workspace in which information is temporarily 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 influential that it became widely known as the magic number seven. Subsequent research, however, revealed that Miller's estimate was somewhat generous, since it failed to account for the complexity of the material being remembered. Nelson Cowan later argued that when rehearsal strategies are prevented and attention is tightly controlled, _______________. This discrepancy suggests that what earlier studies had measured was not raw storage capacity itself but a hybrid quantity inflated 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.

Social proof does not operate uniformly; its influence intensifies under specific conditions. (A) It grows especially powerful, for instance, when the situation is ambiguous and individuals lack a clear, independent basis for judging the correct course of action. (B) Conversely, when a task offers unambiguous, verifiable evidence, individuals rely far less on the behavior of others, since they can evaluate the situation directly for themselves. (C) This contrast implies that social proof functions primarily as a substitute for missing information, stepping in precisely where individual certainty runs out.

Generative AI systems learn to write, draw, and compose by studying enormous collections of existing human work, much of which was created without the artists' knowledge or consent. (A) Critics respond that the comparison breaks down at scale, since a single AI model can absorb millions of works in days and compete with the very artists who trained it. (B) Supporters of the technology argue that this process resembles how a human student learns by studying the masters. (C) Courts around the world are now being asked to decide whether training an algorithm on copyrighted material counts as fair use or as infringement.

Loss aversion does not only influence individual financial choices; it also shapes how information is presented and interpreted in everyday transactions, a phenomenon that marketers and policymakers have learned to exploit deliberately. (A) For example, a retailer who frames a price reduction as "avoid losing a $10 discount by ordering today" typically generates a stronger customer response than one who simply advertises "get a $10 discount," even though both messages describe an identical saving. (B) In other words, the manner in which a choice is presented can activate the same psychological aversion to loss that governs decisions about resources already possessed, meaning that framing itself carries real economic weight. (C) This effect is not confined to retail settings, however; negotiators, too, often treat concessions as losses rather than as steps toward mutual gain, which makes compromise feel more costly than it objectively is.

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. Curiously, if someone across the room utters your name, your attention snaps toward that voice almost instantly. This happens even though you had not consciously been listening to that conversation at all. (A) This phenomenon, known as the cocktail party effect, reveals that selective attention does not simply block out every unattended sound. (B) 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. This refinement suggests that attention operates less like a gate and more like a dimmer switch, adjusting the salience of competing streams of information. (C) 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.

Factories that once employed hundreds of workers on an assembly line now run with a fraction of that staff, as robotic arms handle tasks that used to require human hands. (A) However, critics point out that earlier transitions unfolded over generations, giving workers time to retrain, whereas today's robots are being deployed much faster. (B) Historical evidence offers some comfort: previous waves of automation eventually created new categories of work that no one had predicted. (C) A factory worker displaced this year, therefore, cannot simply wait for a new industry to emerge decades from now.