영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Sociologist William Ogburn observed that when a society undergoes technological change, its material culture, meaning tools and inventions, tends ①to advance faster than its nonmaterial culture, meaning norms, laws, and values. He termed the resulting gap cultural lag, ②describing the friction that appears when institutions have not yet caught up with new technological realities. The rise of the automobile, for instance, ③transforming 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 ④allows individuals to learn detailed information about inherited disease risk. Cultural lag theory reminds us that technological progress is not automatically matched by social progress, and that the resulting gap can produce confusion until laws and customs eventually ⑤adjust to new material conditions.

Social unrest does not always emerge from the poorest conditions; it frequently erupts when circumstances ①are improving but not quickly enough to satisfy rising expectations. This paradox lies at the heart of relative deprivation theory, which ②holds that discontent arises less from objective hardship than from a perceived gap between what people expect and what they actually receive. 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, ③left citizens who had grown accustomed to progress feeling suddenly cheated of gains they had come to regard as their due. Because the theory centers on perception rather than raw statistics, it helps explain why relatively prosperous societies can experience intense protest while societies ④mired in long-standing poverty sometimes remain comparatively quiet, ⑤having adjusted their expectations to match a bleak and unchanging reality.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a now-famous thought experiment not to describe an actual laboratory procedure, but ①to 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 ②rigged 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, ③as 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 ④be 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 the act of observation truly determines physical reality, or whether the mathematics is simply being pushed further than it ⑤ever meaning to go.

German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies distinguished between two fundamentally different forms of social organization, which he termed Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft, often translated as community, describes relationships bound by close kinship, shared tradition, and face-to-face familiarity, ①typical of small villages where individuals know one another across an entire lifetime. Gesellschaft, often translated as society, describes relationships organized around ②impersonal contracts, self-interest, and formal law, typical of large cities where interactions occur between relative strangers who cooperate for specific, limited purposes. Tönnies did not regard one form as simply superior to the other; rather, he saw the shift from Gemeinschaft toward Gesellschaft as a defining feature of modernization, one that brought greater efficiency and individual freedom while ③strengthening the dense emotional bonds that once held communities together. Contemporary sociologists continue to debate whether digital networks represent a genuine ④revival of Gemeinschaft-style community or merely extend Gesellschaft's impersonal logic into new, more ⑤intimate-seeming spaces.

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.

Imagine rewriting a bacterium's code the way a programmer edits a line of software, and much of what synthetic biology ①promises begins to make sense. Researchers in this field assemble standardized genetic parts into circuits that can be inserted into a cell, instructing it to perform a task that no natural organism would ②carry out. Because these circuits are built from interchangeable parts rather than designed from scratch each time, a circuit tested in one lab can often be reused, with ③minor adjustments, in an entirely different application. Critics note that biological systems ④always behave as predictably as electronic circuits, since a gene inserted into a new cell can interact with existing pathways in unexpected ways, occasionally producing results no engineer intended. Even so, as the catalog of standardized parts keeps expanding, engineers are gaining ⑤confidence to design increasingly complex systems.

German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that the psychological experience of city life differs fundamentally from life in small towns, primarily because urban residents are bombarded with a much greater volume of stimuli than the human nervous system evolved to process. To cope with this constant sensory overload, Simmel proposed, city dwellers develop what he called a blasé attitude, a protective indifference in which individuals mentally blunt their emotional reaction to the surrounding crowd. This detachment, while sometimes criticized as cold or impersonal, also grants urban residents a distinctive freedom: because so few people know or judge them personally, _______________. Simmel therefore viewed anonymity as a double-edged feature of modern life.

Émile Durkheim insisted that sociology could become a genuine science only if it identified a distinct subject matter that could not be reduced to individual psychology. (A) Language, currency, legal codes, and religious ritual all qualify as social facts, since a person is born into these systems already fully formed and must conform to them regardless of personal preference. (B) He termed this subject matter social facts, defined as ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that exist outside any single individual yet exert a coercive influence over that individual's behavior. (C) Durkheim insisted that social facts should be studied as things, meaning they must be examined empirically through observable patterns such as statistics.

Symbolic interactionism approaches society not as a fixed structure imposed from above but as something continuously constructed through everyday face-to-face interaction, in which individuals interpret and respond to the symbolic meanings that objects, actions, and other people hold for them. (C) Erving Goffman extended this framework with his dramaturgical approach, comparing social life to a theatrical performance in which individuals manage impressions and present different faces in different settings. (B) Sociologist George Herbert Mead argued that the self itself emerges through this interactive process, as individuals learn to see themselves from the perspective of others. (A) Unlike structural theories that emphasize large institutions, symbolic interactionism focuses on the small, repeated exchanges through which shared meaning is negotiated.

Imagine a teleportation device that scans every atom in your body, transmits that information to a distant station, and reconstructs an exact physical duplicate there, while destroying the original body in the process. (A) Philosophers, however, are troubled by a version of the same device that malfunctions: instead of destroying the original, it leaves the original body intact while still creating a perfect duplicate elsewhere. (B) Now two people exist, each with identical memories and an equally strong claim to being the original traveler, and there is no principled way to decide which one is the real continuation of the person who entered the machine. (C) From the traveler's point of view, stepping into the machine and stepping out on the other side would feel utterly seamless, complete with continuous memories and a sense of having simply walked through a door.