영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

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.

Policymakers seeking to improve public welfare without restricting individual freedom have increasingly embraced an approach ①known as nudging, which alters the environment in which choices are made rather than mandating particular outcomes. A nudge preserves every option that ②was previously available; it simply arranges those options so that the choice deemed most beneficial becomes easier or more visible than the alternatives. Placing fruit at eye level in a school cafeteria while keeping dessert accessible but less prominent, for instance, ③do not forbid any student from choosing dessert, yet it measurably shifts consumption patterns toward healthier food. Advocates argue that such interventions ④respect autonomy precisely because no option is removed and no penalty is imposed for choosing differently. Critics, however, contend that even subtle architectural choices exploit predictable cognitive shortcuts, ⑤raising questions about whether influencing behavior through psychological means is meaningfully different from more coercive forms of persuasion.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed the panopticon, a prison structure in which a central watchtower allows a single guard to observe every cell, while inmates can ①always determine whether they are actually being watched at any given moment. French theorist Michel Foucault later transformed this architectural idea into a broader theory of power, arguing that the mere possibility of being observed is often ②sufficient to produce obedient behavior, since individuals internalize the watcher's gaze and begin to discipline themselves even in the watcher's ③absence. Foucault extended this logic beyond prisons to schools, hospitals, and workplaces, suggesting that modern institutions increasingly rely on continuous, often invisible observation rather than physical force to maintain order. Contemporary scholars have applied Foucault's framework to digital surveillance, arguing that smartphones and workplace monitoring software ④recreate panoptic conditions on a vastly larger scale, one that some theorists claim is more effective precisely because it no longer feels like ⑤surveillance at all.

When individuals face uncertainty about how to behave, they frequently look to the actions of others for guidance. This reliance on collective behavior can be remarkably ①efficient, since it allows individuals to benefit from the accumulated judgment of a crowd without having to gather and evaluate every relevant fact themselves. However, social proof can also lead entire groups astray when the initial signal that triggers imitation is itself ②unreliable or coincidental. A restaurant that happens to attract a long line early in the evening may continue attracting customers throughout the night simply because passersby interpret the queue as evidence of ③inferior quality. Financial markets exhibit an analogous pattern: investors who observe others buying a particular asset often join the buying themselves, reasoning that so many participants cannot all be mistaken, a dynamic that can ④inflate prices well beyond any reasonable estimate of underlying value. Because conformity can substitute for independent judgment so ⑤seamlessly, individuals rarely notice when their own decisions have become mere imitations rather than genuinely deliberated.

A striking proportion of individual investors believe their own stock-picking ability to be above average, a statistical impossibility given that only half of any population can genuinely outperform the rest. This tendency, known as overconfidence bias, leads investors to trade more frequently than a more cautious assessment of their own skill would justify. Paradoxically, then, the very confidence that motivates investors to act decisively often undermines the outcomes they are trying to achieve, since ___________ frequently produces worse results than a more modest, diversified strategy.

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.

Identical information can provoke strikingly different reactions depending on how it is worded, a phenomenon economists call the framing effect. Patients told that a surgical procedure carries a ninety percent survival rate tend to consent to it far more readily than patients told that the same procedure carries a ten percent mortality rate, even though the two descriptions convey exactly the same statistical reality. Recognizing how deeply framing shapes judgment is therefore essential, not because the underlying facts change, but because the very same facts, dressed in different language, can lead reasonable people toward ___________ conclusions.

As nudging has moved from academic theory into widespread practice, a persistent ethical question has accompanied its rise: at what point does subtly guiding behavior for someone's own benefit shade into manipulation that undermines their capacity for autonomous choice? This tension suggests that the ethical status of a nudge cannot be evaluated by examining its psychological mechanism alone; instead, it must be judged according to the ___________ of the party who designs it and the outcome that design is intended to produce.

At that distant point in time, the future increase feels almost costless, since no immediate sacrifice is required. One practical application of hyperbolic discounting involves a savings program that gradually raises an employee's contribution rate over several years. ( ① ) Employees are first asked to commit, well in advance, to increasing their savings rate at a specific future date, often timed to coincide with an expected salary raise. ( ② ) Because the commitment applies only to a point far in the future, the vast majority of employees readily agree to the plan. ( ③ ) When the scheduled date finally arrives, the increase takes effect automatically unless the employee actively opts out, and remarkably few do. ( ④ ) The program succeeds precisely because it separates the decision from the discomfort, asking employees to commit when the cost feels abstract rather than immediate. ( ⑤ ) In this way, a well-timed program can help individuals overcome the very bias that would otherwise prevent them from saving adequately for the future.

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 )