영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

When people estimate the value of an unfamiliar product, they rarely rely on objective calculation alone; instead, they anchor their judgment to whatever numerical reference ①happens to be presented first, however arbitrary that number may be. This phenomenon, ②known as the anchoring effect, exerts a disproportionate influence on price perception precisely because initial figures function as a kind of cognitive gravity that subsequent estimates struggle to escape. A shopper who ③first sees a jacket listed at $300 before it is marked down to $150 will likely judge the discounted price as an excellent bargain. Retailers, well aware of this bias, frequently display an inflated "original price" beside a discounted one, not because the higher figure is meaningful, but because it ④recalibrate customers' expectations. Even professionals are not immune: negotiators who open with an extreme initial offer often secure more favorable final terms than those ⑤who begin with a moderate one.

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.

Identical information can provoke strikingly different reactions depending on how it is worded, a phenomenon economists call the framing effect. Patients told that a surgical procedure carries a ninety percent survival rate tend to ①consent to it far more readily than patients told that the same procedure carries a ten percent mortality rate. This discrepancy arises because language does more than transmit facts; it also supplies an ②emotional lens through which those facts are interpreted. Positive framing, which emphasizes what will be ③preserved or gained, tends to encourage risk-averse choices, whereas negative framing, which emphasizes what might be lost, often pushes people toward ④safer alternatives in an attempt to avoid the loss altogether. Marketers, healthcare providers, and policymakers alike ⑤exploit this asymmetry, sometimes to help audiences make sounder decisions and sometimes merely to steer them toward a predetermined conclusion.

Facial recognition software has moved rapidly from airport security lines into shopping malls, schools, and even private apartment buildings, promising ①convenience in exchange for a quick scan of one's face. Proponents note that the technology can unlock doors, catch shoplifters, and speed up identity checks far faster than any human guard could manage. Independent studies, however, have repeatedly found that many commercial systems perform ②less accurately on women and people with darker skin tones, a gap that can lead to wrongful identification with serious real-world consequences. Several cities have already reported cases in which an innocent person was ③detained based on a flawed match. Until these systems can prove equally reliable for everyone, critics argue, deploying them at all represents a form of quiet ④discrimination dressed up as ⑤inefficiency.

Factories that once employed hundreds of workers on an assembly line now run with a ①fraction of that staff, as robotic arms handle tasks that used to require human hands. Economists have long debated whether this shift destroys jobs or simply transforms them. Historical evidence offers some ②comfort: previous waves of automation eventually created new categories of work that no one had predicted. However, critics point out that earlier transitions unfolded over generations, giving workers ③ample time to retrain, whereas today's robots are being deployed at a pace that leaves little room for adjustment. A factory worker displaced this year cannot simply wait for a new industry to emerge decades from now. For this reason, many economists argue that the real ④challenge is not the robots themselves, but the ⑤sluggish speed at which society is expected to adapt to them.

Among the many strategies proposed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, one of the oldest draws on an agricultural technique predating modern industry, converting organic material into a ①stable form of charcoal known as biochar. Biochar is produced through pyrolysis, a process in which crop residues or wood chips are heated in an environment with little or no oxygen, preventing the material from burning away as in an open fire. This process leaves behind a carbon-rich solid that ②accelerates decomposition far longer than raw organic matter, locking carbon in a form remaining stable in soil for centuries. When mixed into farmland, biochar also improves soil structure, retaining moisture and nutrients otherwise lost, which can ③boost crop yields in depleted soils. For example, farmers cultivating nutrient-poor tropical soils have reported ④measurable increases in productivity after adding biochar. Nevertheless, researchers caution that the climate benefits of biochar depend on the feedstock and method used, since poorly managed pyrolysis can release as much carbon as it sequesters, ⑤undermining its own purpose.

When individuals face uncertainty about how to behave, they frequently look to the actions of others for guidance, assuming that a behavior adopted by many people is more likely to be correct or appropriate than one adopted by few, a tendency known as social proof. Because conformity can substitute for independent judgment so seamlessly, individuals rarely notice when their own decisions have become ___________ rather than genuinely deliberated.

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 _______________.

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 familiar 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. (A) Because the footprint aggregates dissimilar impacts, such as carbon emissions and water scarcity, into one composite figure, it can obscure 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, concealing damage that demands urgent attention. (B) This simplicity, however, is also the source of its most persistent criticism. (C) Furthermore, the method assumes that all bio-productive land is roughly interchangeable, treating a hectare of forest as equivalent to a hectare of farmland, even though the two provide markedly different ecological functions.

The debate over nudging often centers on a single, deceptively simple question: does saving people from their own cognitive errors amount to genuine assistance or subtle manipulation? (A) Supporters respond that every choice architecture, whether intentionally designed or not, already influences behavior in some direction, so deliberately choosing a beneficial default is preferable to leaving the arrangement to chance or to the interests of profit-driven designers. (B) Opponents of nudging argue that any attempt to steer behavior, however gently, treats citizens as incapable of making sound decisions on their own and therefore undermines the very autonomy it claims to respect. (C) This rebuttal shifts the debate away from whether influence should exist at all and toward the more practical question of who should be trusted to design it and for what purpose.