영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Sociologist William Ogburn observed that when a society undergoes technological change, its material culture, meaning tools and inventions, tends ①to advance faster than its nonmaterial culture, meaning norms, laws, and values. He termed the resulting gap cultural lag, ②describing the friction that appears when institutions have not yet caught up with new technological realities. The rise of the automobile, for instance, ③transforming daily mobility long before traffic laws, insurance systems, and urban planning fully adapted to the risks it introduced. A contemporary example can be found in genetic testing, which now ④allows individuals to learn detailed information about inherited disease risk. Cultural lag theory reminds us that technological progress is not automatically matched by social progress, and that the resulting gap can produce confusion until laws and customs eventually ⑤adjust to new material conditions.

When people are ①asked to judge how risky or beneficial a particular technology is, they rarely conduct anything ②resembling a careful cost-benefit analysis. Instead, they consult a quick emotional impression, an instinctive sense of whether the technology feels good or feels bad, and let that impression guide their entire judgment. This mental shortcut, ③known as the affect heuristic, produces a curious pattern that traditional risk theory struggles to explain: activities people like tend to be judged as both safer and more beneficial, while activities they dislike are judged as both riskier and less beneficial, even when no logical relationship between risk and benefit exists. For example, when researchers ④presented a fictional industrial chemical alongside a brief description emphasizing its convenience, participants rated it not only as more useful but also, illogically, as less dangerous. Because emotional impressions form so rapidly and feel so trustworthy, correcting for this heuristic requires deliberate effort; simply presenting more accurate statistics to already anxious or enthusiastic audiences rarely ⑤change their underlying judgment.

Few ideas in policy debate provoke as much philosophical unease as the notion that a government might ①deliberately steer citizens toward better choices while leaving every option technically available. Defenders insist that freedom is ②preserved as long as no option is banned and no penalty is attached, arguing that a citizen who is merely steered, rather than coerced, remains free to choose otherwise. Critics counter that this defense rests on an ③impoverished notion of liberty, one that ignores 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 be called ④autonomous, even though no law was broken? The dispute ultimately turns on what freedom actually requires: the mere absence of coercion, or a decision-making process that remains ⑤opaque and undistorted.

Prospect theory proposes that the subjective value of money is not a straight line but a curved function. In the domain of gains, the function bends downward as amounts increase. A parallel pattern appears among losses, where the curve bends in the opposite direction, yet sensitivity still fades as the amount grows larger. This tendency, known as diminishing sensitivity, explains why _______________. Understanding this curvature allows economists to predict decisions that a simple, linear model of value could never anticipate.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a now-famous thought experiment not to describe an actual laboratory procedure, but to expose an absurdity hidden within a leading interpretation of quantum mechanics. Imagine a cat sealed inside a closed box together with a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and a vial of poison gas rigged to break open the instant the atom decays. Because the atom's decay is governed by genuine quantum randomness, standard quantum theory describes the atom, before anyone looks, as existing in a superposition of having decayed and not having decayed at the same time. If the theory is applied consistently to the entire box, the cat itself would have to be considered simultaneously alive and dead until an observer opens the lid and looks inside. Schrödinger intended this image to sound obviously ridiculous, using the cat's absurd fate to question whether _______________.

German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that the psychological experience of city life differs fundamentally from life in small towns, primarily because urban residents are bombarded with a much greater volume of stimuli than the human nervous system evolved to process. To cope with this constant sensory overload, Simmel proposed, city dwellers develop what he called a blasé attitude, a protective indifference in which individuals mentally blunt their emotional reaction to the surrounding crowd. This detachment, while sometimes criticized as cold or impersonal, also grants urban residents a distinctive freedom: because so few people know or judge them personally, _______________. Simmel therefore viewed anonymity as a double-edged feature of modern life.

People often recognize, in calm reflection, that their future selves will be tempted to abandon a goal they currently value. Rather than relying solely on willpower at the critical moment, they may choose to restrict their own future options in advance, a strategy known as precommitment. (A) What unites these examples is a simple insight: because future desires cannot always be trusted, the wisest moment to act may be now, while judgment remains clear and temptation has not yet taken hold. (B) By making certain choices costly, inconvenient, or impossible to reverse, individuals can protect a long-term goal from a short-term impulse that has not yet arisen. (C) A person hoping to save money might lock funds into an account that penalizes early withdrawal, removing the very temptation that would otherwise be difficult to resist. Similarly, someone determined to finish a project might publicly announce a deadline, transforming private intentions into a commitment that carries social consequences if broken.

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt devised a scenario to challenge a long-held assumption about moral responsibility: that a person can be blamed for an action only if they could genuinely have done otherwise. (A) Frankfurt used this scenario to argue that moral responsibility depends on the actual reasoning behind a choice, not on some abstract guarantee that an alternative path remained available. (B) Black's hidden mechanism made it impossible for the man to have chosen otherwise, yet most people still consider him fully responsible for what he freely decided to do. (C) Imagine a man named Black who secretly implants a device in another man's brain, ready to force a particular decision, though the second man ends up deciding entirely on his own to do exactly what Black wanted.

Picture a woman who receives 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. (A) In fact, before she owned 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. (B) Researchers have repeatedly observed this pattern across many everyday objects, from coffee mugs and concert tickets to office chairs and old furniture inherited from relatives. (C) Owners consistently demand more money to 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 attaches a different value to what it currently holds. Understanding this bias, therefore, helps explain why simply owning something, even briefly, can distort how fairly people judge its true worth.

Anyone who has ever promised to finish a project "by Friday," only to still be working on it weeks later, has experienced the planning fallacy firsthand. (A) One proposed remedy, known as reference class forecasting, requires planners to deliberately consult outcomes from comparable past projects rather than relying solely on their own optimistic intuition. Until such external correction becomes standard practice, ambitious deadlines will likely continue to be broken with remarkable consistency. (B) This term describes the persistent tendency of individuals and organizations to underestimate how long a task will take, how much it will cost, and how many complications will inevitably arise. (C) What makes this bias particularly stubborn is that awareness of past failures rarely leads to more accurate predictions; a construction firm that finished its last three projects late will often insist, with genuine confidence, that this next project will be different. Researchers argue that planners focus almost exclusively on the specific steps of the current task while ignoring the broader statistical record of similar projects that came before.