영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

A plastic bag that fully decomposes within months rather than lingering for centuries sounds almost too convenient to be real, yet certain bioplastics on the market ①do exactly that under the right conditions. Unlike conventional plastic, derived almost entirely from petroleum, many bioplastics are ②synthesized from renewable feedstocks such as corn starch or sugarcane, sometimes with the help of bacteria engineered to produce plastic-like polymers as a byproduct of their metabolism. Not every bioplastic biodegrades quickly, however, and some marketed as eco-friendly break down only in industrial composting facilities ③that reach conditions rarely found in a backyard compost heap or the open ocean. Critics point out that growing crops for bioplastic production can compete with food crops for farmland and water, ④complicating the assumption that a biological origin automatically makes a material more sustainable. Researchers are now exploring bioplastics made from agricultural waste and algae instead of dedicated crops, hoping to ⑤sidestepping this competition for land while preserving the benefits that first made bioplastics appealing.

Eyewitness testimony has long carried weight in courtrooms, yet decades of research reveal that memories of witnessed events are more ①malleable than most people assume. When individuals who observe an event are later exposed to ②misleading information about what they saw, whether through a leading question or a conversation with another witness, their recollections frequently incorporate details that never occurred, a phenomenon known as the misinformation effect. In one classic paradigm, participants who watched a video of a traffic accident and were then asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed into each other reported ③higher speed estimates and were more likely to falsely recall broken glass than participants asked the identical question using the milder verb hit. Crucially, these distorted memories often feel ④genuine to the person experiencing them, since the original memory trace becomes blended with the newly introduced information rather than existing as a separate, contradictory record. Such findings have prompted legal systems to adopt ⑤careless interviewing protocols designed to minimize suggestive questioning during investigations.

Philosopher Robert Nozick asked his readers to imagine a machine capable of producing any experience they ①desired, from writing a great novel to falling in love, all indistinguishable from reality once they were plugged in. Neuroscientists would simply stimulate the brain to generate a lifetime of perfectly satisfying experiences, and the person floating in the tank would have no memory of ever choosing to enter it. If pleasure and the avoidance of pain were truly all that mattered, as classical hedonism claims, then everyone should ②rush to connect themselves permanently to such a machine. Yet when people actually consider the offer, most ③eagerly accept, and many refuse outright. Nozick took this reluctance as evidence that human beings care about more than the quality of their internal sensations; people also want to actually ④do certain things, to actually be a certain kind of person, and to maintain genuine ⑤contact with a reality beyond their own mind.

The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively ①simple question. 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? Most people's first instinct is to answer yes, since each individual replacement seems too ②small to erase the ship's identity. The puzzle grows far ③duller, 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. Two ships would then exist side by side, each with an equal claim to being the ④genuine one, and no obvious way to decide between them. Philosophers return to this old story again and again, not because they care about timber, but because it forces us to ask whether identity depends on continuous material, continuous form, or some deeper thread that neither one can fully ⑤explain.

Two drivers, equally distracted by their phones, run a red light in exactly the same careless manner. By pure chance, a child happens to be crossing the street in front of one driver but not the other; the first driver kills the child, while the second driver drives through safely and never even notices the danger. Although both drivers behaved ①identically and made exactly the same reckless choice, society judges them very differently: one faces criminal charges and lifelong guilt, while the other receives, at most, a minor traffic ticket. Philosophers call this troubling ②asymmetry moral luck, since factors entirely outside a person's control end up determining how severely we judge their moral character. If moral responsibility is supposed to ③depend heavily on luck and circumstance rather than on what a person chooses and intends, this outcome seems deeply unfair, yet few people are willing to excuse the unlucky driver as if nothing worse had happened. Moral luck suggests that our everyday judgments rest on a foundation far ④shakier than we usually like to admit, a fact many find genuinely ⑤unsettling.

Imagine a teleportation device that scans every atom in your body, transmits that information to a distant station, and reconstructs an exact physical duplicate there, while destroying the original body in the process. From the traveler's point of view, stepping into the machine and stepping out on the other side would feel utterly seamless, complete with continuous memories. Philosophers, however, are troubled by a version of the same device that malfunctions: instead of destroying the original, it leaves the original body intact while still creating a perfect duplicate elsewhere. Now two people exist, each with identical memories and an equally strong claim to being the original traveler, and there is no principled way to say that one of them is the real continuation of the person who entered the machine. This malfunction reveals that _______________.

Suppose a mad scientist removed a living brain from its body, placed it in a vat of nutrient fluid, and connected its neurons to a supercomputer capable of generating perfectly realistic sensations. The brain would experience a full and convincing world, complete with a sky, a body, and other people, without ever suspecting that none of it existed outside the simulation. This scenario raises a genuinely difficult question for anyone confident in their own perception: how could a person ever prove that they are not that very brain right now? Ordinary evidence cannot help, since _______________. Some philosophers conclude that absolute certainty about the external world is simply unattainable, while others argue that the mere possibility of deception is not sufficient reason to abandon our everyday trust in what we perceive.

Scaling up in ambition, however, means scaling up in difficulty as well. A biosensor works by pairing a biological component, such as an enzyme or antibody, with an electronic device that converts a biological reaction into a signal a computer can read. ( ① ) When the target molecule, whether glucose in blood or a trace of a pathogen, binds to the biological component, it triggers a small measurable change that the device translates into a readable number. ( ② ) This design has already transformed diabetes management, letting patients monitor blood sugar continuously through a small sensor worn under the skin rather than pricking a finger several times a day. ( ③ ) Engineers are now racing to extend the same principle to detect subtler targets, from cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream to trace contaminants in drinking water. ( ④ ) The central challenge is not detecting the target but doing so reliably outside a controlled laboratory. ( ⑤ ) A sensor that performs well on a clean lab bench can behave erratically once exposed to a real body or a real river.

The same technology, researchers realized, could be pushed even further, from generic drug screening toward medicine tailored to a single individual. A liver no longer has to sit inside a human body to be studied closely. ( ① ) By coaxing stem cells to organize themselves within a nutrient-rich gel, scientists can now grow miniature three-dimensional structures called organoids, which reproduce much of the architecture and function of a real organ despite being no larger than a grain of rice. ( ② ) Unlike flat cultures grown on a plastic dish, which lose many of the cues that guide normal development, organoids let cells interact in three dimensions much as they would inside the body. ( ③ ) This yields tissue that behaves in strikingly realistic ways. ( ④ ) This fidelity has made organoids invaluable for testing how a drug affects human tissue before any patient is exposed, sparing researchers much of the burden of relying on animal models alone. ( ⑤ ) Some laboratories have even grown organoids from a single patient's own cells, raising the possibility of trialing a treatment on a miniature copy of that patient's organ before committing to an actual course of therapy.

By the time Achilles reaches the point where the tortoise started, the tortoise has already crawled a little further ahead. Long before calculus existed, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of paradoxes designed to show that motion itself might be logically impossible. ( ① ) 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. ( ② ) This process repeats endlessly, generating an infinite number of smaller and smaller gaps that Achilles must apparently cross one after another. ( ③ ) Zeno concluded that Achilles could never actually catch the tortoise, a conclusion that plainly contradicts everyday experience. ( ④ ) Modern mathematics eventually resolved the paradox by showing that an infinite series of shrinking distances can still sum to a finite total. ( ⑤ ) Motion, as a result, can still be completed in a finite amount of time after all.