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.

Working memory refers to the mental workspace in which information is temporarily held and manipulated while a person performs a cognitive task. Such tasks include solving an arithmetic problem, following a rapid conversation, or holding a phone number in mind before dialing it. In the mid-twentieth century, the psychologist George Miller proposed that this workspace could accommodate roughly seven discrete items. His claim proved so influential that it became widely known as the magic number seven. Subsequent research, however, revealed that Miller's estimate was somewhat generous, since it failed to account for the complexity of the material being remembered. Nelson Cowan later argued that when rehearsal strategies are prevented and attention is tightly controlled, _______________. This discrepancy suggests that what earlier studies had measured was not raw storage capacity itself but a hybrid quantity inflated by clever strategies. Contemporary psychologists therefore distinguish between the fixed limit of working memory and the flexible techniques that allow individuals to transcend that limit.

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt devised a scenario to challenge a long-held assumption about moral responsibility: that a person can be blamed for an action only if they could genuinely have done otherwise. Imagine a man named Black who secretly implants a device in another man's brain, ready to force a particular decision if the second man shows any sign of choosing differently. The second man, however, decides entirely on his own to perform the very action Black wanted, and the device never activates at all. Black's hidden mechanism made it impossible for the man to have chosen otherwise, yet most people still consider him fully responsible for what he freely decided to do. Frankfurt used this scenario to argue that _______________.

For much of the twentieth century, memory researchers assumed that once a memory had been consolidated—transformed from a fragile, short-term trace into a stable, long-term representation—it remained essentially fixed, immune to further modification unless the underlying neural circuitry was physically damaged. This assumption, however, was overturned by a body of research demonstrating that _______________, rendering it temporarily susceptible to alteration before it is, in a sense, filed away again. During this narrow window, which typically lasts only a few hours, the memory can be strengthened, weakened, or even subtly distorted by new information encountered in the interim, after which it must undergo a second round of stabilization, a process now widely referred to as reconsolidation. Consequently, what we experience as a stable recollection may actually be a continuously revised construction, reshaped every time it is summoned into conscious awareness and returned to storage.

Cities are frequently several degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside, a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect, which intensifies in summer and threatens public health. This disparity arises largely because asphalt and concrete absorb solar radiation during the day and slowly release it as heat throughout the night, preventing urban areas from cooling down. Furthermore, the scarcity of vegetation in densely built areas removes a natural cooling mechanism, since plants lower temperatures by evaporating water from their leaves. To address this problem, urban planners _______________. One widely used solution involves reflective "cool" roofing engineered to reflect more sunlight than dark rooftops absorb. Another strategy, green infrastructure, incorporates rooftop gardens and tree-lined streets that provide shade while releasing moisture. In contrast, some cities have pursued permeable pavements that let water seep through and evaporate, cooling nearby surfaces. Collectively, these strategies show that reducing urban heat depends on combining approaches suited to a city's geography.

Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. (C) Robert Merton showed that soldiers who compared their promotion chances to peers within their own slow-moving unit often felt more satisfied than soldiers in units with faster promotion rates. (A) Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, which merely provide a benchmark for self-assessment. (B) This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are measured.

Emissions trading, a market-based mechanism for curbing greenhouse gases, allows governments to set an overall limit on carbon output while letting firms trade permits within that limit. (A) Under this system, known as cap-and-trade, companies that cut emissions more cheaply than required can sell surplus allowances to firms facing higher reduction costs. Proponents argue that this flexibility lets society reach a given environmental target at the lowest overall cost, since abatement shifts toward whoever can achieve it most economically. (B) Consequently, many economists now advocate combining trading with a price floor, a minimum permit price that keeps the market from collapsing during weak demand, thereby preserving the cost-effectiveness for which trading is valued. (C) Critics, however, contend that trading schemes frequently allocate too many permits, a flaw that has historically depressed carbon prices and blunted incentives to invest in cleaner technology. For example, early phases of several regional markets granted allowances so generously that permit prices collapsed, leaving polluters with little pressure to change their practices.

A cotton plant that manufactures its own insecticide sounds like science fiction, yet it has been growing in fields around the world for decades. (A) Supporters point to yield increases and reduced pesticide spraying documented across millions of hectares, while critics worry about resistance evolving over time, which is why regulatory agencies in most countries now require extensive testing before a genetically modified crop reaches the market. (B) Other genetically modified crops carry a gene that allows them to survive direct exposure to a particular herbicide, letting farmers spray a field to kill weeds without harming the crop growing among them. (C) Scientists achieved this by isolating a gene from a soil bacterium that produces a protein toxic to specific insect pests but harmless to humans, then inserting that gene into the plant's own genome so that every cell manufactures the protective protein.

주어진 문장: This is not because they expect the price to recover, but because selling would force them to confront the possibility of having made a clear mistake. When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh not only the expected outcome of each option but also how painful it would feel to discover later that a different choice had been better. ( ① ) This anticipation of future regret, rather than the size of the potential loss itself, frequently becomes the dominant factor shaping the final decision. ( ② ) Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than selling it. ( ③ ) Researchers have found that people feel sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing, which helps explain why so many individuals default to inaction whenever a decision feels uncertain. ( ④ ) Ironically, this strategy of avoiding regret can itself produce outcomes that are later regretted even more deeply than the ones it was originally designed to prevent. ( ⑤ )

The lining, weakened in this way, no longer functions as the tight barrier it is meant to be. The human gut hosts trillions of microorganisms whose combined genetic material outnumbers that of the human genome itself many times over. ( ① ) Once dismissed as passive hitchhikers, these bacteria are now understood to actively shape digestion, regulate immune responses, and even influence the production of chemicals that affect mood and behavior. ( ② ) A microbiome disrupted by antibiotics, poor diet, or chronic stress can leave the gut lining more permeable than it should be. ( ③ ) This allows substances to leak into the bloodstream that would normally stay contained. ( ④ ) Researchers studying this connection have found that transplanting gut bacteria from a healthy donor into a patient can, in some cases, relieve symptoms of certain digestive disorders that conventional medication had failed to treat. ( ⑤ ) Still, scientists caution that the microbiome varies enormously between individuals, which means a treatment that restores balance in one person's gut may do little for someone else's.