영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Time travel to the past has long fascinated physicists and philosophers alike, but it also ①generates a famously troubling contradiction. Suppose a traveler journeyed backward in time and, through some combination of accident and intention, ②prevented their own grandfather from ever meeting their grandmother. If the grandfather never had children, the traveler themselves would never have been born, which means the traveler could never ③existed to make the trip in the first place. Yet if the traveler never made the trip, the grandfather would have survived to meet the grandmother after all, ④allowing the traveler to be born and eventually travel back in time. The story therefore loops endlessly, undermining itself at every turn rather than ⑤settling into any stable outcome.

The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively simple question. If every plank of a wooden ship ①is 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 small to ②erasing the ship's identity. The puzzle grows far sharper, however, once a second twist is introduced. Suppose a careful collector gathered every discarded plank and reassembled them into a second vessel, ③built exactly as the original once stood. Two ships would then exist side by side, each with an equal claim ④to being the genuine 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.

Long before humans learned to drill for oil, microorganisms had already mastered the art of ①converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into stored chemical energy. Modern biofuel research borrows this ability, cultivating algae or engineered bacteria in large tanks where they can be ②coaxed into producing oils and sugars that can be refined into fuel usable in existing engines. Unlike crops grown for corn-based ethanol, which compete directly with food production for arable land, many algae strains can ③thrive in shallow ponds, wastewater, or even coastal seawater unsuitable for conventional agriculture. Engineers have also learned to tinker with the metabolic pathways of these organisms, ④boosted oil yield far beyond what any wild strain would naturally produce on its own. Despite this progress, producing biofuel at a cost competitive with fossil fuel remains difficult, since harvesting and processing the organisms consumes a substantial share of the energy the fuel itself will eventually ⑤provide.

Bacteria have been cutting up invading viral DNA for billions of years, long before any scientist thought to borrow the trick for use in a ①laboratory. The CRISPR-Cas9 system, as it is now known, relies on a short guide RNA that ②matches a specific DNA sequence, leading a scissor-like enzyme called Cas9 directly to that exact location in the genome. Once Cas9 arrives at the target site, it ③repairs both strands of the DNA helix, and the cell's own repair machinery rushes in to mend the cut, often introducing a small change in the process. By supplying the cell with a template during this repair step, scientists can direct that machinery to ④insert a specific new sequence rather than merely disabling the original gene. What once required years of painstaking work to alter a single gene can now be accomplished within days, a shift in ⑤speed that has reshaped nearly every corner of biological research.

For decades, most vaccines worked by injecting a weakened or inactivated version of a pathogen, coaxing the immune system into recognizing an enemy it had never fought. mRNA vaccines take a different route, delivering a short genetic instruction wrapped in a protective lipid capsule, one that tells the body's own cells how to manufacture a harmless piece of a virus's outer surface protein. Once those cells display the fragment, the immune system learns to recognize it as foreign and builds a defense, without ever having encountered the actual pathogen. Because the vaccine contains no live virus and cannot alter a cell's own DNA, _______________. This speed, first proven on a global scale during a recent pandemic, has convinced many researchers that the same platform could eventually be adapted to fight diseases far beyond infectious illness.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a now-famous thought experiment not to describe an actual laboratory procedure, but to expose an absurdity hidden within a leading interpretation of quantum mechanics. Imagine a cat sealed inside a closed box together with a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and a vial of poison gas rigged to break open the instant the atom decays. Because the atom's decay is governed by genuine quantum randomness, standard quantum theory describes the atom, before anyone looks, as existing in a superposition of having decayed and not having decayed at the same time. If the theory is applied consistently to the entire box, the cat itself would have to be considered simultaneously alive and dead until an observer opens the lid and looks inside. Schrödinger intended this image to sound obviously ridiculous, using the cat's absurd fate to question whether _______________.

A liver no longer has to sit inside a human body to be studied closely. 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. Unlike flat cultures grown on a plastic dish, organoids let cells interact in three dimensions much as they would inside the body, yielding tissue that behaves in strikingly realistic ways. This fidelity has made organoids invaluable for testing how a drug affects human tissue before any patient is exposed, _______________. 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.

Suppose a mysterious being with a near-perfect track record of predicting human choices presents a player with two boxes. (A) The player may choose to take only Box B, or to take both boxes, and the prediction has already been made and cannot change. (B) Box A always contains a visible thousand dollars, while Box B contains either a million dollars or nothing at all, depending on a prediction the being made before the game even began. (C) One line of reasoning says taking both boxes is strictly better, since whatever is already inside the boxes cannot be altered by the player's choice at this point, while a second line of reasoning says taking only Box B is better, given the being's near-perfect accuracy.

John Rawls proposed an unusual thought experiment to determine what principles of justice a society ought to adopt. (A) Imagine a group of rational people gathered to design the basic rules of their future society, but placed behind what he called a veil of ignorance, unaware of their own race, gender, wealth, or social position. (B) Since no one can predict whether they will be born into privilege or poverty, each person has a strong incentive to choose rules that protect the worst-off members of society. (C) Rawls argued that rational people placed in this position would favor arrangements that guarantee basic liberties for everyone and permit unequal outcomes only when they benefit the least advantaged.

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. (A) 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, though the central challenge remains doing so reliably outside a controlled laboratory. (B) 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. (C) 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.