영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Imagine a distant planet ①identically to Earth in every visible respect, except that the clear liquid its inhabitants call "water" is not H2O but a different compound, XYZ, that happens ②to look, taste, and behave exactly the same. When an Earthling and a Twin Earthling each say the word "water," they seem to mean the same thing, since neither could tell the substances apart without a chemistry lab. Philosopher Hilary Putnam ③used this scenario to argue that the meaning of a word is not determined solely by what happens inside a speaker's head. Even though the two speakers hold identical thoughts and mental images when they use the word, their statements refer to two different substances, because the underlying chemical composition, not personal belief, ④fixes what a word ultimately picks out. Meaning, Putnam concluded, depends partly on the world outside the mind, not merely on the private mental states of ⑤whoever happens to be speaking.

Anyone who has ever promised to finish a project "by Friday," only ①to still being working on it weeks later, has experienced the planning fallacy firsthand. This term describes the persistent tendency of individuals and organizations ②to underestimate how long a task will take, how much it will cost, and how many complications will inevitably arise. What makes this bias particularly stubborn is that awareness of past failures rarely leads to more accurate predictions; a construction firm that ③finished 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 ④ignoring the broader statistical record of similar projects that came before. Until such external correction becomes standard practice, ambitious deadlines will likely continue to be ⑤broken with remarkable consistency.

Blockchain technology was originally promoted as a way ①to remove the need for trusted middlemen, allowing strangers to exchange value directly and verify transactions through a shared, tamper-resistant ledger rather than through a bank or government agency. In theory, this design ②distributes power away from any single institution and toward the network as a whole. In practice, however, a small number of large players have come to dominate many blockchain networks, ③controlled enough computing power or currency to influence outcomes that were supposed to be decided collectively. Critics note a further irony: when something goes wrong, there is often no institution left ④to appeal to, since the entire system was designed precisely to eliminate that kind of central authority. Whether decentralization can survive this concentration of power ⑤remains one of the technology's most unresolved questions.

A hamburger patty need not come from a slaughtered animal at all if a small sample of muscle cells ①can be persuaded to multiply inside a steel tank. Cultured meat begins with a biopsy of animal muscle tissue, from which scientists isolate cells ②capable of dividing repeatedly, then feed those cells a nutrient broth that supplies the sugars, proteins, and minerals an animal's bloodstream would normally provide. Inside a bioreactor, the cells multiply across scaffolding ③designed to encourage them to align into fibers, gradually thickening into something that begins to resemble muscle tissue rather than a shapeless clump of cells. Supporters argue that because the process never requires raising and slaughtering a whole animal, it could ④shrink the land, water, and greenhouse gas emissions associated with conventional meat production. Skeptics counter that producing the specialized broth at a large enough scale remains prohibitively expensive, meaning cultured meat is unlikely ⑤competing with conventional meat in price until the technology matures considerably further.

Mental accounting also shapes how consumers respond to windfalls of different sizes and origins. (A) A modest windfall, such as a small cash-back reward, tends to be absorbed into everyday spending and disappears almost unnoticed within a household's general budget. (B) A substantial windfall, by contrast, such as an inheritance or a large bonus, is more likely to be mentally assigned to a separate category, sometimes labeled as "extra" money reserved for investment or a significant purchase. (C) This difference in treatment suggests that the perceived significance of a sum, rather than its objective purchasing power, determines the mental account into which it is placed.

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. (A) 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. (B) Advances in molecular biology eventually allowed researchers to isolate a single protein from a pathogen's surface, producing vaccines with fewer side effects, and the most recent shift toward delivering genetic instructions represents the latest chapter in this story. (C) For nearly two centuries afterward, vaccine development proceeded largely by trial and error, weakening or killing a pathogen and testing whether the resulting preparation could train the immune system without causing disease itself.

Factories that once employed hundreds of workers on an assembly line now run with a fraction of that staff, as robotic arms handle tasks that used to require human hands. (A) However, critics point out that earlier transitions unfolded over generations, giving workers time to retrain, whereas today's robots are being deployed much faster. (B) Historical evidence offers some comfort: previous waves of automation eventually created new categories of work that no one had predicted. (C) A factory worker displaced this year, therefore, cannot simply wait for a new industry to emerge decades from now.

Philosopher Robert Nozick devised a thought experiment to test a simple hedonist assumption: that pleasure and the avoidance of pain are all that ultimately matter to human beings. (A) If the hedonist assumption were correct, then everyone should rush to connect themselves permanently to such a machine, since it could deliver a lifetime of perfectly satisfying experiences. (B) Yet when people actually consider the offer, most hesitate and many refuse outright, a reluctance Nozick took as evidence that human beings care about more than the quality of their internal sensations. (C) He asked readers to imagine a machine capable of producing any experience they desired, from writing a great novel to falling in love, all indistinguishable from reality once they were plugged in.

Long before calculus existed, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of paradoxes designed to show that motion itself might be logically impossible. (A) In one version, a swift runner named Achilles races a slow-moving tortoise that is given a modest head start, and common sense insists that Achilles will quickly overtake it. (B) Yet Zeno's argument suggests otherwise: each time Achilles closes the gap, the tortoise has already advanced a little further, generating an infinite number of smaller and smaller gaps. (C) Zeno concluded that Achilles could never actually catch the tortoise, a conclusion that modern mathematics eventually resolved by showing that an infinite series of shrinking distances can still sum to a finite total.

Critics on the other side argue instead that a state limited to bare protection cannot address deeper inequalities that arise naturally in any free market. Political philosophers have long debated how much authority, if any, a government may legitimately claim over free individuals. ( ① ) Robert Nozick imagined a hypothetical starting point in which people live without any state at all, each relying on private arrangements to protect their own person and property. ( ② ) He argued that a minimal state, limited strictly to enforcing contracts and protecting citizens from violence, theft, and fraud, could arise gradually through a series of voluntary exchanges, without anyone's rights ever being violated along the way. ( ③ ) Critics on one side, the anarchists, insist that even this minimal government inevitably violates the rights of those who never consented to join it. ( ④ ) Nozick's thought experiment therefore sits at the center of an unresolved argument about where legitimate political authority actually begins. ( ⑤ )