영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh not only the expected outcome of each option but also how painful it would feel ①to discover later that a different choice had been better. This anticipation of future regret, rather than the size of the potential loss itself, frequently becomes the dominant factor ②shaping the final decision. Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than ③selling it, not because they expect the price to recover, but because selling would force them to confront the possibility ④of having made a clear mistake. Researchers have found that people feel sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing, which ⑤help explain why so many individuals default to inaction whenever a decision feels uncertain.

Traditional economic models predict that a rational individual offered any positive sum of money, however small, should accept it without hesitation, since even a modest gain is preferable to ①receiving nothing at all. A simple experimental exercise known as the ultimatum game, in which one participant proposes how to split a sum of money and a second participant may either accept or reject the proposed division, consistently ②contradicts this prediction. When the proposer offers a division perceived as unfair, the second participant frequently rejects the offer entirely, leaving both parties with nothing rather than ③accepting an outcome viewed as insulting. This behavior indicates that individuals value fairness as an end in itself, sometimes willingly ④sacrificing material gain to punish perceived exploitation. Neuroscientific investigations complement this finding, revealing that unfair offers ⑤activates brain regions associated with disgust and negative emotion.

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.

Every time a smartphone connects to a cell tower or a Wi-Fi network, it ①quietly records a data point that can later be pieced together into a detailed map of where its owner has been. Most users agree to this tracking without reading the fine print, assuming that a single company's database poses ②little threat. The real danger, however, emerges when location data from multiple sources is combined. A pattern that reveals a person's home, workplace, and daily route can ③expose far more than any single app ever intended to share. Companies often argue that anonymized data cannot be traced back to individuals, yet researchers have ④repeatedly shown that a handful of location points is enough to identify a specific person with striking accuracy. As a result, privacy experts increasingly insist that location data deserves ⑤minimal legal protection, similar to that of medical records.

Metacognition, broadly defined as the capacity to monitor and evaluate one's own cognitive processes, is often treated as a ①reliable guide to what we actually know, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the correspondence between subjective confidence and objective accuracy is far weaker than intuition would suggest. Individuals routinely ②overestimate how thoroughly they have understood a passage of text immediately after reading it, a phenomenon partly attributable to the fluency with which the material was processed rather than to any genuine grasp of its underlying structure. Because rereading familiar material tends to feel ③effortless, learners frequently mistake that ease of processing for durable comprehension, a misattribution that can lead them to ④continue further study prematurely. This gap between perceived and actual mastery, sometimes labeled the illusion of knowing, has practical consequences for education, since students who trust their ⑤inflated self-assessments are less likely to seek out the more effortful, retrieval-based strategies that would otherwise consolidate their learning.

Long before humans learned to drill for oil, microorganisms had already ①mastered the art of converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into stored chemical energy. Modern biofuel research borrows this ability, cultivating algae or engineered bacteria in large tanks where they can be coaxed into producing oils and sugars that can be ②refined into fuel usable in existing engines. Unlike crops grown for corn-based ethanol, which ③compete directly with food production for arable land, many algae strains can thrive in shallow ponds, wastewater, or even coastal seawater unsuitable for conventional agriculture. Engineers have also learned to tinker with the metabolic pathways of these organisms, boosting oil yield far beyond what any wild strain would naturally produce on its own. Despite this progress, producing biofuel at a cost competitive with fossil fuel remains ④difficult, since harvesting and processing the organisms ⑤conserves a substantial share of the energy the fuel itself will eventually provide.

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? 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. 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. Labor, it seems, functions as a kind of psychological investment: once effort has been poured into a task, _______________. 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.

Two drivers, equally distracted by their phones, run a red light in exactly the same careless manner. (A) Although both drivers behaved identically and made exactly the same reckless choice, society judges them very differently: one faces criminal charges and lifelong guilt, while the other receives, at most, a minor traffic ticket. (B) Philosophers call this troubling asymmetry moral luck, since factors entirely outside a person's control end up determining how severely we judge their moral character. (C) By pure chance, a child happens to be crossing the street in front of one driver but not the other, and the first driver kills the child while the second drives through safely.

The influence of the status quo bias extends well beyond personal finance into the design of public policy itself. (A) Consequently, policymakers who wish to encourage socially beneficial behavior, such as organ donation or energy conservation, have increasingly turned to adjusting default settings rather than relying solely on persuasion or financial incentives. (B) Countries that changed their organ donation systems from opt-in to opt-out, for example, observed dramatic increases in the proportion of citizens registered as donors, without any change in the underlying laws governing consent. (C) This outcome demonstrates that the default option itself functions as an implicit recommendation, one that citizens are reluctant to override even when doing so would take only a moment.

주어진 문장: Because this competition can occur in either temporal direction, learners cannot avoid it simply by focusing on new material, which is precisely why deliberately spacing out study sessions matters so much. Memory researchers have long recognized that learning is not simply a matter of accumulating information without cost. Newly acquired material can collide with what the mind already holds, producing measurable disruptions in recall. ( ① ) When earlier knowledge interferes with the retrieval of information learned afterward, psychologists call this proactive interference. This phenomenon explains why someone who memorized an old phone number for years may struggle to recall a new one. ( ② ) Conversely, when material learned later undermines the recollection of something acquired earlier, the process is labeled retroactive interference. This second mechanism explains why switching to a new keyboard layout can temporarily impair typing on a familiar one. ( ③ ) Both processes suggest that memories compete for the same limited retrieval pathways rather than resting in isolated compartments. ( ④ ) This insight carries real implications for how students approach studying multiple similar subjects. ( ⑤ ) Instead of cramming closely related material back to back, spacing out review sessions can reduce competition between overlapping traces. Varying study contexts further helps preserve accuracy for both old and new information alike.