영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Scientists have long searched for a way to describe, in a single coherent framework, the outer limits within ①which human activity can safely continue without destabilizing the planet's fundamental systems. The concept of planetary boundaries, ②introduced by earth-system researchers, identifies nine interconnected processes, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and nitrogen pollution, each ③possessing a threshold beyond which abrupt and irreversible change becomes likely. Unlike conventional environmental limits, often defined locally, these boundaries are framed at a planetary scale, ④reflecting the idea that the Earth functions as a single interdependent system rather than a collection of isolated regions. Crossing one boundary, proponents argue, does not merely damage the system involved but can also destabilize others, since climate, oceans, and land are bound together by feedback loops that transmit disturbance across the system. Some philosophers have likened this framework to a ship's safe operating margin, within which passengers may move freely without risking the vessel's stability. Critics, however, contend that the boundaries ⑤is drawn with more confidence than the data can support.

When a resource is shared among many users, none of ①whom bears the full cost of its depletion, each individual is tempted to extract as much value as possible before others do the same. This dynamic, famously ②labeled the tragedy of the commons, describes how shared pastures and fisheries can be degraded even when every participant privately understands the danger of overuse. A single herder who adds one more animal to a communal pasture gains the entire benefit of that addition, whereas the resulting damage to the grass ③is shared among other herders who depend on the land. Because self-interest offers no incentive to restrain consumption unilaterally, the resource tends ④to exhausted long before any user intends such an outcome. For decades, economists assumed that only two remedies existed: strict regulation or the conversion of shared resources into private property. Elinor Ostrom challenged this assumption, however, by ⑤documenting communities that had sustainably managed fisheries and forests for generations through locally devised rules and mutual monitoring rather than external control.

Medieval philosophers told the story of a hungry donkey placed exactly midway between two identical, equally fragrant piles of hay, with no factor whatsoever ①tipping the balance toward either option. Because the donkey is assumed to be a perfectly rational creature that always chooses the option ②supported by the strongest reason, and because neither pile offers any advantage over the other, the donkey supposedly finds itself with no rational basis for choosing one pile rather than the other. ③Paralyzed by this perfect symmetry, the donkey starves to death precisely because it can find no reason to move in either direction. Critics of the story point out that real animals, and real humans, rarely face situations of such flawless symmetry, and that even a tiny, arbitrary preference ④is usual enough to break the tie in practice. The paradox nevertheless raises a serious question about whether purely rational deliberation can ever generate action on its own, without some additional nudge that reason alone ⑤cannot supply.

The ecological footprint, a widely cited measure of how much biologically productive land and water a population requires to sustain its consumption, has become one of the most ①familiar tools for communicating humanity's environmental impact. By converting diverse activities, from driving to eating meat, into a single unit of land area, the measure allows policymakers to grasp whether a lifestyle exceeds what the planet can regenerate. This simplicity, however, is also the source of its most ②occasional criticism. Because the footprint aggregates dissimilar impacts, such as carbon emissions and water scarcity, into one composite figure, it can ③obscure important differences among problems that require distinct policy responses. A region might reduce its footprint by lowering carbon emissions while simultaneously depleting a local aquifer, yet the aggregate number could still appear to improve, ④concealing damage that demands urgent attention. Furthermore, the method assumes that all bio-productive land is roughly ⑤interchangeable, treating a hectare of forest as equivalent to a hectare of farmland, even though the two provide markedly different ecological functions.

When consumers compare two products and assume that the one labeled "eco-friendly" is automatically the more sustainable choice, they often overlook the complexity involved in verifying such a claim. Life cycle assessment, commonly abbreviated as LCA, _______________. This method examines raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, use, and disposal, compiling data on energy consumption and emissions generated at each stage. By tracing a product from its origin to its disposal, this approach reveals impacts that might otherwise remain hidden from consumers who see only the finished item on a shelf. For example, an electric vehicle may produce no emissions while being driven, yet the mining of metals for its battery can generate substantial environmental costs elsewhere. Without accounting for these earlier stages, a superficial comparison could mistakenly present the vehicle as entirely emission-free. Therefore, researchers increasingly rely on life cycle assessment to make informed decisions rather than trusting labels alone.

When a country physician named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had caught cowpox seemed immune to smallpox, he set in motion a medical revolution without fully understanding why it worked. _______________. This method produced genuine successes, eventually eliminating smallpox worldwide and reducing diseases such as polio and measles, but each new vaccine still required years of laboratory work with no guarantee of success. Advances in molecular biology eventually allowed researchers to isolate a single protein from a pathogen's surface rather than using the whole organism, producing vaccines with fewer side effects and a more predictable safety profile. The most recent shift, toward delivering genetic instructions rather than proteins themselves, represents the latest chapter in a story that began with an eighteenth-century doctor's curiosity about a puzzling immunity among dairy workers.

Economists have long debated whether prosperity and environmental quality are fundamentally opposed, or whether the relationship between them changes shape as an economy matures. The Environmental Kuznets Curve, a hypothesis borrowed from earlier theories of income inequality, proposes that _______________. In its early stages, industrializing nations prioritize output over conservation, treating clean air and water as expendable costs of development to be addressed later. Beyond a certain point, however, rising incomes generate both the technological capacity and the political will to demand stricter regulation, so degradation begins to reverse even as production keeps expanding. Some scholars regard this trajectory as a reassuring paradox, suggesting that the very growth blamed for ecological harm may eventually finance its own repair. Critics, by contrast, argue that the curve rests on a narrow selection of pollutants that happen to decline with wealth, while ignoring greenhouse gases and resource depletion, which show no comparable tendency to fall.

A struggling artist may judge success not against neighbors but against celebrated painters in art history, a comparison that can inspire ambition or, just as easily, breed persistent dissatisfaction. Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. ( ① ) This group need not be one to which a person actually belongs. ( ② ) Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, which merely provide a benchmark for self-assessment. ( ③ ) Robert Merton showed that soldiers who compared their promotion chances to peers within their own slow-moving unit often felt more satisfied than soldiers in units with faster promotion rates. ( ④ ) This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are measured. ( ⑤ )

주어진 문장: Even so, long-term monitoring in several cities indicates that combining both approaches lowers total infrastructure costs more effectively than relying on either strategy alone. As cities have expanded across landscapes once covered with absorbent soil, impervious surfaces have turned stormwater from a resource that recharges groundwater into a hazard that floods streets and carries pollutants into waterways. ① Green infrastructure, which mimics the hydrological functions that natural landscapes once performed, offers planners a way to treat the city as a sponge rather than a rigid drainage pipe. ② Rain gardens, shallow depressions planted with deep-rooted vegetation, are designed to capture runoff from rooftops, allowing it to filter slowly through soil before reaching underground aquifers. ③ Permeable pavement, made of porous materials that let water pass directly through, serves a similar purpose along sidewalks, where asphalt would remain impenetrable. ④ For example, cities that replaced pavement with permeable alternatives have reported notable reductions in flooding during storms that once overwhelmed sewers. However, engineers caution that green infrastructure cannot entirely replace conventional pipes in dense cores, where heavy runoff still requires structural reinforcement. ⑤ Consequently, municipalities now regard green and gray infrastructure as complementary systems, each compensating for the other's limitations. ① ② ③ ④ ⑤

Philosophers return to this old story again and again, not because they care about timber, but because it forces us to ask a far deeper question about identity itself. The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively simple question. ( ① ) 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? ( ② ) Most people's first instinct is to answer yes, since each individual replacement seems too small to erase the ship's identity. ( ③ ) The puzzle grows far sharper, however, once a second twist is introduced: suppose a careful collector gathered every discarded plank and reassembled them into a second vessel, built exactly as the original once stood. ( ④ ) 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. ( ⑤ ) Whether identity depends on continuous material, continuous form, or some deeper thread, no single answer has ever fully satisfied everyone who has taken up the question.