영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Financial markets occasionally experience episodes in which asset prices rise far beyond any level that careful analysis of underlying fundamentals could justify, a phenomenon commonly ①attributed to herd psychology. During such episodes, individual investors, observing that prices have already risen substantially, often conclude that continuing to buy is reasonable simply because so many others ②are doing the same, rather than because any independent evaluation supports the purchase. This dynamic can become self-perpetuating: rising prices attract new buyers, whose purchases push prices higher still, thereby ③attracting yet another wave of buyers convinced that the upward trend itself constitutes reliable evidence of underlying value. Historical episodes of speculative excess display a strikingly similar pattern, suggesting that the underlying psychological mechanism ④remain constant even as the specific assets involved change considerably across centuries. Eventually, however, some triggering event, however minor, prompts a portion of investors to reconsider their assumptions, and the resulting wave of selling can ⑤trigger a collapse every bit as rapid and self-reinforcing as the original ascent.

When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh not only the expected outcome of each option but also how painful it would feel ①to discover later that a different choice had been better. This anticipation of future regret, rather than the size of the potential loss itself, frequently becomes the dominant factor ②shaping the final decision. Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than ③selling it, not because they expect the price to recover, but because selling would force them to confront the possibility ④of having made a clear mistake. 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 ⑤help explain why so many individuals default to inaction whenever a decision feels uncertain.

Modern consumer culture often assumes that expanding the range of available options will automatically make people ①freer and happier, yet a growing body of research suggests the opposite may sometimes be true. When individuals select from an enormous set of alternatives, satisfaction with the final choice frequently ②increases rather than declines, even when the chosen item is objectively excellent. This decline stems not from the difficulty of deciding but from what happens afterward, once a decision has already been made. Having considered so many possibilities, a person naturally imagines the specific advantages that a different, unchosen option might have offered, and this imagined comparison ③quietly erodes contentment with what was actually selected. By contrast, someone who chose from only two or three alternatives rarely constructs such an ④elaborate fantasy of missed advantages. The paradox, therefore, is that abundance can free people from external constraint while simultaneously ⑤trapping them in a private cycle of comparison and regret.

Blockchain technology was originally promoted as a way to remove the need for trusted middlemen, allowing strangers to exchange value directly and verify transactions through a shared, ①tamper-resistant ledger rather than through a bank or government agency. In theory, this design distributes 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 ②dominate many blockchain networks, controlling enough computing power or currency to influence outcomes that were supposed to be decided collectively. Critics note a further irony: when something goes wrong, such as a hacked exchange or a lost password, there is often ③ample institutional support to appeal to, since the entire system was designed precisely to eliminate that kind of central authority. Whether decentralization can ④survive this concentration of power remains one of the technology's most ⑤unresolved questions.

Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in ①isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. A struggling artist may judge success not against neighbors but against celebrated painters in art history, a comparison that can inspire ambition or, just as easily, ②breed persistent dissatisfaction. Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, which merely provide a ③benchmark for self-assessment. 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, because the latter could see colleagues advancing while they themselves ④surpassed them. This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are ⑤measured.

Few ideas in policy debate provoke as much philosophical unease as the notion that a government might ①deliberately steer citizens toward better choices while leaving every option technically available. Defenders insist that freedom is ②preserved as long as no option is banned and no penalty is attached, arguing that a citizen who is merely steered, rather than coerced, remains free to choose otherwise. Critics counter that this defense rests on an ③impoverished notion of liberty, one that ignores how engineered defaults and calculated framing can shape decisions just as powerfully as an outright prohibition would. If a policy is designed because officials expect it to bypass conscious deliberation, these critics ask, can the resulting choice still be called ④autonomous, even though no law was broken? The dispute ultimately turns on what freedom actually requires: the mere absence of coercion, or a decision-making process that remains ⑤opaque and undistorted.

Prospect theory proposes that the subjective value of money is not a straight line but a curved function. In the domain of gains, the function bends downward as amounts increase. A parallel pattern appears among losses, where the curve bends in the opposite direction, yet sensitivity still fades as the amount grows larger. This tendency, known as diminishing sensitivity, explains why _______________. Understanding this curvature allows economists to predict decisions that a simple, linear model of value could never anticipate.

Sociologist William Ogburn observed that when a society undergoes technological change, its material culture tends to advance faster than its nonmaterial culture, meaning norms, laws, and values. He termed the resulting gap cultural lag. The rise of the automobile, for instance, transformed daily mobility long before traffic laws, insurance systems, and urban planning fully adapted to the risks it introduced. A contemporary example can be found in genetic testing, which now allows individuals to learn detailed information about inherited disease risk well before _______________. Cultural lag theory reminds us that technological progress is not automatically matched by social progress.

Social unrest does not always emerge from the poorest conditions; it frequently erupts when circumstances are improving but not quickly enough to satisfy rising expectations. (A) Political scientist Ted Gurr illustrated the pattern with what is often called the J-curve: revolutions tend to follow a period of sustained improvement that is then followed by a sudden reversal. (B) This paradox lies at the heart of relative deprivation theory, which holds that discontent arises less from objective hardship than from a perceived gap between what people expect and what they actually receive. (C) Because the theory centers on perception rather than raw statistics, it helps explain why relatively prosperous societies can experience intense protest while long-impoverished societies sometimes remain comparatively quiet.

Suppose a traveler journeyed backward in time and, through some combination of accident and intention, prevented their own grandfather from ever meeting their grandmother. Time travel to the past has long fascinated physicists and philosophers alike, but it also generates a famously troubling contradiction. ( ① ) If the grandfather never had children, the traveler themselves would never have been born, which means the traveler could never have existed to make the trip in the first place. ( ② ) Yet if the traveler never made the trip, the grandfather would have survived to meet the grandmother after all, allowing the traveler to be born and eventually travel back in time. ( ③ ) The story therefore loops endlessly, undermining itself at every turn rather than settling into any stable outcome. ( ④ ) Some physicists resolve the paradox by arguing that any consistent timeline must forbid such self-defeating actions from ever succeeding. ( ⑤ ) Others propose that a traveler who alters the past simply branches off into a separate, parallel timeline instead.