영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Social mobility ①refer to the movement of individuals or families between different positions within a society's system of stratification, whether upward, downward, or sideways. Sociologists distinguish intragenerational mobility, changes within a single person's lifetime, from intergenerational mobility, differences between the social position of parents and their children. A society is often judged by how much intergenerational mobility it permits, since high mobility suggests that outcomes ②depend more on effort and ability than on the accident of birth. Structural mobility, caused by large-scale economic shifts such as the growth of new industries, must ③be distinguished from individual mobility, which results from a single person's particular choices. Research across many nations has found that education ④functions as the primary channel of upward mobility, yet access to quality education is itself unevenly distributed, meaning the very mechanism meant to promote fairness can end up ⑤reproducing the inequality it was designed to overcome.

For much of its history, economic theory treated emotion as a distortion ①to be eliminated from otherwise rational calculation, an obstacle standing between decision-makers and their true self-interest. More recent research, however, suggests that emotion ②function not merely as noise but as an integral component of sound judgment, one that supplies information conventional reasoning alone cannot readily access. Individuals who, due to specific neurological conditions, lose the capacity to experience emotion while retaining otherwise normal cognitive abilities frequently ③struggle to make even simple decisions, spending excessive time weighing options that most people resolve almost instantly through a felt sense of what seems right. This observation suggests that emotional responses often ④function as rapid heuristics, allowing individuals to bypass exhaustive deliberation by relying on accumulated affective associations built from past experience. Financial regulators have begun incorporating this understanding into policy design, recognizing that decisions made under conditions of acute emotional arousal often ⑤depart substantially from the measured judgment that individuals would exhibit under calmer circumstances.

Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly ①built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? This puzzle, which researchers ②named 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 ③assembled 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 ④pour into a task, individuals become reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly ⑤wasted.

Imagine two travelers preparing for the same trip: one ①agrees to fly after watching news coverage of a recent plane crash, while the other books a flight without hesitation. Statistically, air travel remains far ②safer than driving the same distance by car, yet vivid, emotionally charged images tend to ③dominate human judgment more powerfully than dry statistics ever could. This tendency, in which people estimate how likely an event is based on how easily examples come to mind rather than on actual data, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. News broadcasts that repeatedly feature rare disasters can leave viewers convinced that such events are ④common, even though official records clearly show the opposite. Advertisers and politicians alike ⑤exploit this pattern, knowing that a single striking anecdote often persuades audiences more effectively than pages of careful statistics ever manage to.

It is often assumed that memory operates independently of bodily context, yet research suggests that this assumption deserves reconsideration. When information is learned under a particular physiological or emotional condition, _______________, 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. 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. 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.

Conventional economic wisdom holds that more options are always preferable to fewer. Empirical research on consumer behavior, however, complicates this assumption considerably. When shoppers are presented with an extensive array of choices, they frequently experience heightened anxiety about making the wrong selection and, paradoxically, become less likely to make any purchase or decision at all. Businesses that recognize this dynamic have begun deliberately curating smaller, carefully selected assortments, betting that ___________ can sometimes generate more sales and greater customer satisfaction than abundance.

Many large companies now rely on artificial intelligence to screen job applications before a human ever sees them. (A) Unlike a human interviewer, the system offers no explanation for its choices, which makes the bias difficult to detect until an outside audit reveals it. (B) These systems promise efficiency, scanning thousands of resumes in seconds and ranking candidates according to patterns drawn from previous hiring decisions. (C) However, this reliance on historical data creates a troubling risk, because the algorithm may learn to treat a past discriminatory pattern as a marker of success.

Blockchain technology was originally promoted as a way to remove the need for trusted middlemen, allowing strangers to exchange value directly through a shared, tamper-resistant ledger. (A) In practice, however, a small number of large players have come to dominate many blockchain networks, controlling enough power to influence outcomes that were supposed to be decided collectively. (B) In theory, this design distributes power away from any single institution and toward the network as a whole. (C) Critics note a further irony: when something goes wrong, there is often no institution left to appeal to, since the system was designed to eliminate central authority.

Suppose you meet a quiet, gentle man who speaks softly, tends a small garden, and organizes his bookshelf with meticulous care. (A) This judgment, however, ignores a crucial fact: truck drivers vastly outnumber florists in almost every country, which means that, statistically, he is far more likely to belong to the larger group regardless of how well he fits the flower-shop image. (B) Relying on resemblance to a familiar category rather than on underlying numerical proportions, known among researchers as representativeness, leads people to overlook these base rates almost automatically. Even trained professionals, who should know better, often fall into the same trap when a vivid description feels more convincing than plain statistics. Consequently, teaching people to pause and ask how common something actually is, instead of merely how typical it appears, can meaningfully improve the accuracy of everyday predictions and reduce costly errors in judgment. (C) Asked whether he is more likely a florist or a truck driver, most people instinctively choose florist, since his personality matches the stereotype so neatly.

Imagine watching a fair coin land on heads five times in a row and feeling an increasingly strong intuition that the next flip is somehow due to produce tails. (A) This intuition, though psychologically compelling, rests on a basic misunderstanding of probability, since each flip of a fair coin remains entirely independent of every flip that came before it. (B) The coin possesses no memory of its previous outcomes, and its probability of landing on tails on the sixth flip stays fixed at fifty percent regardless of how many heads preceded it. (C) Casinos have long profited from this misconception, watching gamblers place larger bets after a losing streak simply because they mistakenly believe that a win has become statistically overdue.