영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly ①built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? This puzzle, which researchers ②named after a furniture retailer famous for selling items that require home assembly, challenges the standard economic assumption that value is determined solely by an object's inherent qualities. In a series of experiments, participants who ③assembled a plain storage box were willing to pay nearly as much for their own imperfect creation as they were for a professionally built version, despite being fully aware of its flaws. Labor, it seems, functions as a kind of psychological investment: once effort has been ④pour into a task, individuals become reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly ⑤wasted.

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.

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 ①familiar 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. This simplicity, however, is also the source of its most ②occasional criticism. Because the footprint aggregates dissimilar impacts, such as carbon emissions and water scarcity, into one composite figure, it can ③obscure 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, ④concealing damage that demands urgent attention. Furthermore, the method assumes that all bio-productive land is roughly ⑤interchangeable, treating a hectare of forest as equivalent to a hectare of farmland, even though the two provide markedly different ecological functions.

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.

When a resource is shared among many users, none of whom bears the full cost of its depletion, each individual is ①tempted to extract as much value as possible before others do the same. This dynamic, famously labeled the tragedy of the commons, describes how shared pastures and fisheries can be ②degraded even when every participant privately understands the danger of overuse. A single herder who adds one more animal to a communal pasture gains the ③entire benefit of that addition, whereas the resulting damage to the grass is shared among other herders who depend on the land. Because self-interest offers no incentive to restrain consumption unilaterally, the resource tends to be ④exhausted long before any user intends such an outcome. For decades, economists assumed that only two remedies existed: strict regulation or the conversion of shared resources into private property. Elinor Ostrom ⑤confirmed this assumption, however, by documenting communities that had sustainably managed fisheries and forests for generations through locally devised rules and mutual monitoring rather than external control.

Desalination, the process of removing dissolved salts from seawater to produce fresh water, has increasingly been adopted by coastal regions facing chronic water scarcity. Most modern facilities rely on reverse osmosis, a technique in which seawater is forced through membranes whose microscopic pores block salt while letting water molecules pass. Because this method consumes far less energy than the thermal distillation once dominant in the industry, it has become the preferred choice for large-scale plants. Nevertheless, _______________. For instance, the process generates a concentrated byproduct called brine, which, when discharged without adequate dilution, can raise local salinity to levels that harm marine life. Pumping seawater through membranes at high pressure also demands substantial electricity, so plants powered by fossil fuels can worsen the emissions that intensify drought. Therefore, engineers increasingly argue that desalination should be treated not as a stand-alone remedy but as one component of a broader conservation strategy.

The rejection of unfair offers in the ultimatum game raises an intriguing evolutionary question. (A) One explanation suggests that a willingness to punish unfairness, even at a personal cost, may have conferred long-term advantages within small communities where reputation and repeated interaction mattered greatly. (B) If punishing unfairness is costly in the short term, why would such a tendency have persisted across generations rather than being eliminated by more narrowly self-interested behavior? (C) An individual known to reject unfair offers discourages others from proposing unfair terms in future interactions, ultimately securing fairer treatment over the course of a lifetime.

주어진 문장: Each of these exchanges is deliberately planned so that a byproduct considered worthless by one company becomes a valuable resource for its neighbor. Conventional industrial zones typically operate as isolated facilities, each purchasing raw materials independently and disposing of waste without regard for neighboring plants, even when one factory's discarded byproduct could serve as valuable input for another. ① An eco-industrial park reorganizes this arrangement by clustering diverse companies within a single area and encouraging them to exchange materials, energy, and water through a practice known as industrial symbiosis. ② A power plant's surplus heat, for example, might be piped to a nearby greenhouse, while a food processing facility's organic waste could be converted into biogas that powers another factory's equipment. ③ Such exchanges require companies to coordinate schedules and share information they might otherwise regard as proprietary, a level of cooperation rarely achieved without deliberate institutional support. ④ Local governments therefore often play a coordinating role, mapping which industries could exchange resources and providing incentives for companies willing to participate. ⑤ Consequently, eco-industrial parks have come to be seen as a model capable of reducing both waste disposal costs and raw material expenses simultaneously. ① ② ③ ④ ⑤

주어진 문장: In simple terms, this process prevents carbon dioxide from ever reaching the atmosphere in the first place. As efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions intensify, industries unable to eliminate carbon dioxide from their processes have turned to a technology known as carbon capture and storage. ① This technology involves separating carbon dioxide from the exhaust of power plants before it is released into the atmosphere, then transporting the captured gas for underground injection. ② Once injected into porous rock formations, the gas is trapped beneath layers of impermeable rock that prevent it from escaping into the air. Proponents argue that carbon capture and storage functions as a bridge technology, allowing heavy industries to keep operating while more sustainable alternatives are developed. ③ For instance, cement and steel production, both of which release carbon dioxide as an unavoidable byproduct of chemical reactions, are considered prime candidates for this approach. ④ However, critics contend that the technology remains prohibitively expensive and that building pipelines requires investments few companies make voluntarily. ⑤ Despite such concerns, many governments continue funding pilot projects, convinced that this technology will play an indispensable role in reaching emission targets. ① ② ③ ④ ⑤

주어진 문장: This buying and selling of allowances effectively creates a market price for carbon, one that fluctuates according to how difficult reduction proves across different industries. 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. ① 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. ② 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. ③ 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. ④ 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. ⑤ 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. ① ② ③ ④ ⑤