영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

When sociologist Émile Durkheim studied suicide rates across different societies, he noticed something ①puzzling: rates rose not only during economic depression but also during sudden prosperity. He concluded that both crises share a common feature, the collapse of shared norms that once told individuals what to expect and how ②to behave. Durkheim called this state of normlessness anomie, arguing that rapid social change can strip away the moral guidelines ③what regulate human desire, leaving individuals disoriented even when material conditions improve. Decades later, Robert Merton extended the concept to explain deviance within stable societies, ④proposing that anomie also arises when a culture insists that everyone pursue identical goals. Faced with this gap between aspiration and opportunity, some individuals conform, but others turn to innovation, ritual, retreat, ⑤or rebellion.

A few years ago, spotting a manipulated video required a trained eye and ①specialized software. Today, freely available applications allow almost anyone to swap a face or fabricate a voice ②convincingly enough to fool casual viewers within minutes. This shift has quietly ③reinforced one of the oldest assumptions in human communication: that seeing and hearing something is a reasonably reliable way to confirm it happened. Journalists now face the burden of verifying footage that once would have been accepted as ④self-evident proof. Perhaps more troubling than any single fake video is the broader effect on public trust, in which genuine footage can be ⑤dismissed as fabricated simply because deepfakes exist.

A striking proportion of individual investors believe their own stock-picking ability to be above average, a statistical impossibility given that only half of any population can genuinely outperform the rest. This tendency, known as overconfidence bias, leads investors to trade more frequently than a more cautious assessment of their own skill would justify. Paradoxically, then, the very confidence that motivates investors to act decisively often undermines the outcomes they are trying to achieve, since ___________ frequently produces worse results than a more modest, diversified strategy.

Social media platforms rarely show users a neutral stream of information. Instead, recommendation algorithms are optimized to maximize engagement, and content that provokes strong emotion tends to hold attention longer than balanced reporting ever could. Some platforms have experimented with reducing the visibility of outrage-driven content, only to see user engagement drop, which reveals _______________.

Consider a village green shared freely by every herder in the community, where each individual may graze as many animals as they wish without paying any fee. (A) The cost of the additional grazing, however, is spread thinly across every herder who uses the green, so no single individual bears more than a tiny fraction of the damage. (B) From the perspective of any single herder, adding one more animal to the shared pasture brings a clear personal benefit, since the extra income belongs entirely to that herder alone. (C) Because this calculation favors adding more animals for every rational herder, the shared pasture is gradually overgrazed until it can no longer support any animals at all.

Every time a smartphone connects to a cell tower or a Wi-Fi network, it quietly records a data point that can later be pieced together into a detailed map of where its owner has been. (A) Companies often argue that anonymized data cannot be traced back to individuals, yet researchers have repeatedly shown that a handful of location points is enough to identify a specific person. (B) Most users agree to this tracking without reading the fine print, assuming that a single company's database poses little threat. (C) The real danger, however, emerges when location data from multiple sources is combined, revealing a person's home, workplace, and daily route.

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.

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.

The discovery of CRISPR gene-editing technology gave scientists a tool precise enough to correct a single mistaken letter in the human genome, raising hope for curing inherited diseases. (A) Scientific organizations around the world have therefore drawn a careful line, permitting gene editing to treat disease in existing patients while banning any edit that would be inherited by their descendants. (B) Yet editing a gene in a sperm, egg, or early embryo does not simply change one patient; it alters the genetic code passed down to every future generation. (C) Critics worry, however, that as the technology becomes cheaper and more widely available, this line will become harder to enforce than it is to draw.

주어진 문장: Psychologists first documented this delay nearly a century ago, and it has since become one of the most frequently replicated findings in cognitive science. 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. ( ① ) 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. ( ② ) 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. ( ③ ) When these two processes point toward conflicting answers, the automatic pathway tends to intrude upon the controlled one, slowing responses and increasing errors. ( ④ ) 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. ( ⑤ ) 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.