영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

City governments increasingly market dense networks of surveillance cameras as a safety upgrade. Yet the same infrastructure that catches criminals also creates a permanent record of where ordinary citizens go about their daily lives. Once a camera network exists, its purpose can quietly expand, often without new public debate. Civil liberties groups argue that _______________.

Imagine watching a fair coin land on heads five times in a row and feeling an increasingly strong intuition that the next flip is somehow due to produce tails. This intuition rests on a basic misunderstanding of probability, since each flip of a fair coin remains entirely independent of every flip that came before it. Casinos have long profited from this misconception, watching gamblers place larger bets after a losing streak simply because they mistakenly believe that a win has become statistically overdue. Economists have even documented the same error among trained professionals, including loan officers who grow more likely to approve a risky application simply because _______________.

A small bakery once sold a basic loaf for three dollars and a premium loaf for six dollars, and most customers simply bought the cheaper one. The owner then introduced a third option: a slightly larger premium loaf priced at seven dollars, one that was clearly inferior to the six-dollar loaf in terms of value for money. Almost nobody chose the new seven-dollar loaf, yet sales of the six-dollar loaf rose sharply, because _______________. This pattern demonstrates that people rarely judge options in isolation; instead, they evaluate choices relative to whatever alternatives happen to be nearby.

Imagine two travelers preparing 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 driving 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 estimate how likely an event is based on _______________, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. News broadcasts that repeatedly feature rare disasters can leave viewers convinced 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 persuades audiences more effectively than pages of careful statistics ever manage to.

Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? (A) This puzzle, which researchers named 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. (B) In a series of experiments, participants who assembled 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. (C) Labor, it seems, functions as a kind of psychological investment: once effort has been poured into a task, individuals become reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly wasted. This tendency helps explain why consumers often prefer products that demand some degree of personal assembly, even when a comparable finished item is available at a lower price and requires no time investment whatsoever.

When people look back on a multi-day journey, they rarely recall every hour with equal clarity; instead, memory tends to compress the entire experience into just a few representative moments. Psychologists have found that two points carry disproportionate weight in this process: the single moment when emotion reached its highest intensity, and whatever happened right before the experience concluded. (A) Even though both hikers faced comparable hardship overall, the second is far more likely to remember the journey fondly, simply because the trip ended pleasantly. This pattern reveals that overall satisfaction is not calculated as an average of every experienced moment, but is shaped disproportionately by whichever moments felt most intense and by however the experience happened to end. (B) The first finishes with a grueling, rain-soaked final climb, while the second enjoys a calm, scenic descent on the last afternoon despite having endured an equally difficult ascent earlier in the trip. (C) Consider two hikers who complete an identical five-day trek.

Psychologists studying human judgment often describe the mind as operating through two distinct systems rather than a single unified process. (A) This efficiency comes at a cost, however, because System 1's shortcuts can produce systematic errors that an overburdened System 2 rarely catches. (B) Most daily decisions are therefore handled almost entirely by System 1, which allows people to function efficiently without exhausting their limited mental resources. (C) System 1 works quickly and automatically, generating impressions without any noticeable effort, while System 2 is slow and deliberate, engaged only when a problem requires careful reasoning.

주어진 문장: These two findings together suggested that the key to durable memory was not the sheer amount of repetition but the timing of that repetition. In the late nineteenth century, the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus undertook a rigorous investigation of forgetting by serving as his own experimental subject. He memorized thousands of meaningless three-letter syllables so that prior knowledge could not skew his results. ( ① ) After learning each list to perfection, he tested his retention at intervals ranging from twenty minutes to a month later. He recorded how many repetitions were required to relearn the material each time. ( ② ) The resulting curve revealed a consistent pattern. Forgetting proceeds rapidly during the initial hours following learning, then gradually decelerates until the rate of loss becomes almost imperceptible. ( ③ ) Roughly half of the acquired information vanished within the first hour alone. Yet whatever survived that initial plunge tended to persist for much longer periods. ( ④ ) Ebbinghaus further found that distributing study sessions across several days produced better retention than cramming the same repetition into one sitting. ( ⑤ ) This finding, now central to modern learning theory, implies that revisiting material shortly before it would otherwise be forgotten interrupts the decline of the forgetting curve.

주어진 문장: This principle applies just as powerfully outside the realm of personal finance. People often recognize, in calm reflection, that their future selves will be tempted to abandon a goal they currently value. ( ① ) Rather than relying solely on willpower at the critical moment, they may choose to restrict their own future options in advance, a strategy known as precommitment. ( ② ) By making certain choices costly, inconvenient, or impossible to reverse, individuals can protect a long-term goal from a short-term impulse that has not yet arisen. ( ③ ) A person hoping to save money might lock funds into an account that penalizes early withdrawal, removing the very temptation that would otherwise be difficult to resist. ( ④ ) Similarly, someone determined to finish a project might publicly announce a deadline, transforming private intentions into a commitment that carries social consequences if broken. ( ⑤ ) What unites these examples is a simple insight: because future desires cannot always be trusted, the wisest moment to act may be now, while judgment remains clear and temptation has not yet taken hold.

주어진 문장: Her plan, however sincere at the time, quietly dissolves the moment a more immediate temptation appears. Consider a student who genuinely intends to study for tomorrow's exam yet, when the evening actually arrives, chooses to watch another episode of a favorite show instead, promising herself she will surely study harder next week. ( ① ) This pattern, in which the pull of an immediate pleasure overwhelms the value of a distant benefit, appears again and again across ordinary life, from postponed exercise to delayed savings. ( ② ) People do not necessarily fail to understand that the future reward matters more; rather, whatever happens right now simply feels disproportionately more urgent and vivid than anything scheduled for later. ( ③ ) Behavioral economists note that this preference weakens considerably once both options are pushed into the future, which is why planning a diet starting next month feels effortless compared with skipping dessert tonight. ( ④ ) Such inconsistency helps explain why gym memberships go unused and retirement accounts remain underfunded, despite people's stated intentions. ( ⑤ ) Recognizing this pull toward the present, therefore, allows individuals and institutions to design commitments that quietly protect long-term goals from short-term temptation.