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.

Classical economic theory long assumed that decision makers ①gather all relevant information, calculate every possible outcome, and select the single option that maximizes their benefit. Herbert Simon, however, questioned this assumption, ②arguing that human beings operate under real constraints of time, knowledge, and mental capacity that make such exhaustive calculation practically impossible. Instead of searching endlessly for the theoretically perfect choice, people typically stop once they find an option that seems good enough to meet their immediate needs, a strategy Simon ③termed satisficing. A shopper comparing refrigerators, for example, rarely examines every model available; she instead sets a few practical criteria, such as price and size, and selects the first appliance that satisfies them adequately. This approach is not a failure of reasoning but rather a sensible adaptation to a world where information is costly and time is genuinely limited. Consequently, models assuming unlimited rationality often fail to predict actual behavior, while frameworks ④acknowledge these cognitive boundaries offer a far more realistic account of how ordinary decisions are ⑤made.

Picture a woman who receives a plain ceramic mug as a free gift at a conference and, later that afternoon, ①refuses to sell it for anything less than triple its price in the gift shop downstairs. Before she owned the mug, she would never have paid extra for it; once it became hers, however, its value in her mind ②declined sharply, simply because she now possessed it. Researchers have ③repeatedly observed this pattern across many everyday objects, from coffee mugs and concert tickets to office chairs and old furniture inherited from relatives. Owners ④consistently 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 ⑤collapse, since each side quietly attaches a different value to what it currently holds.

Prospect theory proposes that the subjective value of money is not a straight line but a ①curved function. In the domain of gains, the function bends downward as amounts increase, so the psychological difference between earning zero and one hundred dollars feels far ②greater than between earning one thousand and eleven hundred. A parallel pattern appears among losses, where the curve bends in the ③opposite direction, yet sensitivity still fades as the amount grows larger. This tendency, known as diminishing sensitivity, explains why a shopper ④acutely notices a ten dollar increase on a two thousand dollar purchase, though the same ten dollars would matter enormously as the price of a meal. Researchers illustrate this curvature with graphs shaped like an S turned sideways, ⑤flattening toward both extremes.

Imagine rewriting a bacterium's code the way a programmer edits a line of software, and much of what synthetic biology promises begins to make sense. Researchers in this field assemble standardized genetic parts into circuits that can be inserted into a cell, instructing it to perform a task that no natural organism would carry out. Because these circuits are built from interchangeable parts rather than designed from scratch each time, _______________. Critics note that biological systems rarely behave as predictably as electronic circuits, since a gene inserted into a new cell can interact with existing pathways in unexpected ways. Even so, as the catalog of standardized parts keeps expanding, engineers are gaining confidence to design increasingly complex systems.

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 _______________.

Every time an antibiotic kills off a population of bacteria, a handful of cells carrying a random mutation that resists the drug are left behind to multiply without competition. Repeated over decades, across hospitals, farms, and households worldwide, this simple process of natural selection has produced strains of bacteria that survive treatments once considered reliably effective. _______________. Researchers are therefore searching in unconventional places, screening soil microbes, ocean sediment, and even genetic databases for molecules that kill bacteria through mechanisms resistant strains have not yet learned to evade. Some scientists have also revived an older approach, using viruses that infect only bacteria to hunt down resistant strains with a precision no broad-spectrum drug could ever match.

Facial recognition software has moved rapidly into shopping malls, schools, and apartment buildings. Proponents note that it can unlock doors and speed up identity checks far faster than any human guard. Independent studies, however, have repeatedly found that many commercial systems perform less accurately on women and people with darker skin tones, which means that _______________. Several cities have already reported cases in which an innocent person was detained based on a flawed match.

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.

It is often assumed that memory operates independently of bodily context, yet research suggests that this assumption deserves reconsideration. (A) Critics might argue that such effects are minor and inconsistent, yet accumulated evidence across pharmacological and emotional studies is difficult to dismiss. Policymakers designing assessments should therefore weigh not only content difficulty but also the physiological continuity between preparation and examination, since ignoring this dimension risks underestimating certain students' actual knowledge. (B) This finding should prompt educators to reconsider the assumption that a single optimal testing environment exists for every learner, since matching internal states across encoding and retrieval provides retrieval cues that a mismatched state cannot supply. (C) When information is learned under a particular physiological or emotional condition, retrieval tends to improve if that same condition is reinstated at recall, a phenomenon researchers call state-dependent memory. Individuals who study while mildly anxious, for instance, often recall material more accurately when tested under similarly anxious conditions than when tested while calm, even though calmness is typically considered more conducive to concentration.