영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Imagine two travelers ①preparing for the same trip: one refuses to fly after watching news coverage of a recent plane crash, while the other books a flight without hesitation. Statistically, air travel remains far safer than ②driving the same distance by car, yet vivid, emotionally charged images tend to dominate human judgment more powerfully than dry statistics ever could. This tendency, in which people ③estimate how likely an event is based on how easily examples come to mind rather than on actual data, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. News broadcasts that repeatedly feature rare disasters can leave viewers ④convinced that such events are common, even though official records clearly show the opposite. Advertisers and politicians alike exploit this pattern, knowing that a single striking anecdote often ⑤persuade audiences more effectively than pages of careful statistics ever manage to.

Millions of people now wear devices that continuously track their heart rate, sleep patterns, and daily activity, ①generating an intimate stream of health data that would have been unthinkable to collect just two decades ago. Users generally assume this information belongs to them, since it ②is drawn directly from their own bodies. In practice, however, the terms of service that few people read often ③grants the manufacturer broad rights to store, analyze, and even sell anonymized versions of that data to insurers or advertisers. This arrangement becomes especially troubling when health data influences decisions far beyond fitness, such as insurance premiums or employment screening. Advocates for reform argue that biological data deserves a category of protection ④stronger than ordinary consumer information, precisely because it can never truly ⑤be replaced or reset once it has been exposed.

When people encounter an individual who appears to memorize enormous quantities of specialized information ①effortlessly, they often assume that person possesses an innate gift. Cognitive psychologists, however, contend that such feats ②rarely stem from raw talent alone. Instead, such feats arise from a learned skill known as chunking, whereby scattered pieces of information are consolidated into larger, meaningful units. A landmark study of chess players demonstrated this principle. When shown a board arranged according to plausible game positions, grandmasters reproduced the layout perfectly. Yet when the same pieces were scattered randomly, their performance ③collapsed to the level of novices. This pattern reveals that expert memory is not larger in raw capacity but is instead organized around patterns accumulated through years of deliberate practice. If chunking, rather than innate aptitude, ④contradicts expert performance, then educators should stop treating talent as fixed and destiny-bound. Curricula ought to be redesigned to cultivate pattern recognition explicitly, since doing so would grant far more students access to expertise once ⑤presumed reserved for the naturally gifted.

Beyond restoring lost function, engineers are now exploring implants and prosthetics designed to give healthy people abilities beyond ordinary human limits, from night vision to reaction times faster than any athlete could achieve through training alone. Supporters frame this as simply the next step in a long history of human enhancement, ①no different in principle from eyeglasses or vaccines, only more direct. Critics counter that earlier enhancements were broadly available to anyone regardless of wealth, while cutting-edge neural and physical implants are likely to remain ②expensive for decades, potentially splitting society into those who can afford enhancement and those who cannot. If such a divide hardens, competitive advantages in school, sports, and the workplace could come to depend ③less on effort than on access to capital. What began as a medical tool for restoring what was lost, in other words, may end up ④preserving the baseline of what counts as an ordinary human being, keeping the definition of "normal" ⑤unchanged for future generations.

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 ①rarely do that under the right conditions. Unlike conventional plastic, derived almost entirely from petroleum, many bioplastics are synthesized from renewable feedstocks such as corn starch or sugarcane, sometimes with the help of bacteria engineered to produce plastic-like polymers as a ②byproduct of their metabolism. Not every bioplastic biodegrades quickly, however, and some marketed as eco-friendly break down only in industrial composting facilities that reach conditions ③rarely 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, complicating the assumption that a biological origin automatically makes a material more ④sustainable. Researchers are now exploring bioplastics made from agricultural waste and algae instead of dedicated crops, hoping to sidestep this competition for land while preserving the ⑤benefits that first made bioplastics appealing.

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.

Factories that once employed hundreds of workers on an assembly line now run with a fraction of that staff, as robotic arms handle tasks that used to require human hands. (A) However, critics point out that earlier transitions unfolded over generations, giving workers time to retrain, whereas today's robots are being deployed much faster. (B) Historical evidence offers some comfort: previous waves of automation eventually created new categories of work that no one had predicted. (C) A factory worker displaced this year, therefore, cannot simply wait for a new industry to emerge decades from now.

Anyone who has tried to name the ink color of a word like red printed in blue letters knows how surprisingly difficult the task can feel. This everyday struggle, known as the Stroop effect, deserves more attention than casual curiosity grants it, because it reveals something fundamental about how the mind allocates its limited resources. (A) Educators should not dismiss this delay as a trivial curiosity confined to laboratories, since the same competition between habit and intention underlies far more consequential situations, such as a driver's struggle to resist checking a phone despite knowing the danger. Recognizing how automatic responses can hijack conscious intentions is essential for designing environments, from classrooms to highways, that support rather than undermine our efforts at self-control. (B) When these two processes point toward conflicting answers, the automatic pathway tends to intrude upon the controlled one, slowing responses and increasing errors. (C) Reading a familiar word is an automatic process practiced so extensively since childhood that it proceeds almost involuntarily, whereas naming a color requires deliberate, controlled attention.

When people are asked to judge how risky or beneficial a particular technology is, they rarely conduct anything resembling a careful cost-benefit analysis. (A) This mental shortcut, known as the affect heuristic, produces a curious pattern that traditional risk theory struggles to explain: activities people like tend to be judged as both safer and more beneficial, while activities they dislike are judged as both riskier and less beneficial, even when no logical relationship between risk and benefit exists. (B) Instead, they consult a quick emotional impression, an instinctive sense of whether the technology feels good or feels bad, and let that impression guide their entire judgment. (C) For example, when researchers presented a fictional industrial chemical alongside a brief description emphasizing its convenience, participants rated it not only as more useful but also, illogically, as less dangerous. Because emotional impressions form so rapidly and feel so trustworthy, correcting for this heuristic requires deliberate effort; simply presenting more accurate statistics to already anxious or enthusiastic audiences rarely changes their underlying judgment.

Long before cognitive scientists possessed the tools to observe the brain directly, Donald Broadbent proposed an influential model suggesting that the human capacity to process incoming sensory information is constrained by a structural bottleneck through which only a single stream of input can pass at any given instant. (A) This basic bottleneck principle continues to inform contemporary explanations of why multitasking so reliably degrades performance on demanding tasks. (B) According to this filter theory, multiple channels of stimulation, such as competing voices in a crowded room, are initially registered at a shallow, physical level, but only one channel is selected for further, meaning-based analysis while the rest are blocked from advancing beyond that early filter. (C) Although later researchers challenged the rigidity of this early selection mechanism, pointing to instances in which unattended information, such as one's own name, nevertheless breaks through and captures awareness, the core insight that attention imposes a genuine processing limit rather than a mere matter of willpower has remained remarkably durable.