영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

City governments increasingly market dense networks of surveillance cameras as a straightforward safety upgrade, ①promising faster emergency response and lower crime rates. In many cases, the technology delivers exactly what it promises, ②helping investigators identify suspects within hours rather than weeks. Yet the same infrastructure that catches criminals also creates a permanent record of where ordinary, law-abiding citizens ③go about their daily lives. Once a camera network exists, its purpose can quietly expand, often without new public debate or explicit approval. Civil liberties groups argue that a city should decide how much surveillance it wants before the cameras go up, not years afterward when the infrastructure ④is already impossible removing. Convenience installed today, in other words, can quietly ⑤become control tomorrow.

Why do people often ①overvalue objects they have partly built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively ②inferior to something they could have simply purchased? 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. In a series of experiments, participants who assembled a plain storage box were willing to pay nearly as much for their own ③imperfect 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 poured into a task, individuals become ④reluctant 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 ⑤higher price and requires no time investment whatsoever.

A rational approach to decision-making dictates that only future costs and benefits should influence a choice, since resources already spent cannot be ①recovered regardless of what is decided next. In practice, however, people routinely allow such irrecoverable expenditures, known as sunk costs, to shape their subsequent decisions, a pattern referred to as the sunk cost fallacy. A moviegoer who finds a film thoroughly ②disappointing after the first thirty minutes will often remain in the theater until the credits roll, reasoning that leaving early would somehow waste the money already spent on the ticket. Organizations exhibit the same fallacy on a larger scale: a company that has invested heavily in a failing project frequently ③abandons funding it, arguing that stopping the project now would render the prior investment meaningless. Yet continuing to invest in a venture destined to fail merely adds new losses to old ones, ④compounding the very waste the decision-makers hoped to avoid. Economists therefore urge decision-makers to evaluate each choice based solely on its prospective outcomes, treating past expenditures as ⑤irrelevant to the decision at hand.

For much of the twentieth century, memory researchers assumed that once a memory had been ①consolidated—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 ②overturned by a body of research demonstrating that the act of retrieval itself can ③stabilize a previously consolidated memory, 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 ④strengthened, 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 ⑤revised construction, reshaped every time it is summoned into conscious awareness and returned to storage.

As efforts to ①curb greenhouse gas emissions intensify, industries unable to eliminate carbon dioxide from their processes have turned to a technology known as carbon capture and storage. 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. 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 ②developed. For instance, cement and steel production, both of which release carbon dioxide as an ③unavoidable byproduct of chemical reactions, are considered prime candidates for this approach. However, critics contend that the technology remains prohibitively ④cheap and that building pipelines requires investments few companies make voluntarily. Despite such concerns, many governments continue funding pilot projects, convinced that this technology will play an ⑤indispensable role in reaching emission targets.

Millions of people now wear devices that continuously track their heart rate, sleep patterns, and daily activity, generating an ①intimate 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 is drawn directly from their own bodies. In practice, however, the terms of service that few people read often grant the manufacturer ②narrow 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 ③stronger than ordinary consumer information, precisely because it can never truly be ④replaced or reset once it has been ⑤exposed.

When people encounter an individual who appears to memorize enormous quantities of specialized information effortlessly, they often assume that person possesses an innate gift. Cognitive psychologists, however, contend that such feats rarely stem from raw talent alone. Instead, such feats arise from _______________. 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 collapsed 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, underlies 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 presumed reserved for the naturally gifted.

When anthropologists first began systematically studying societies far removed from their own, many unconsciously judged unfamiliar customs against the standards of their home culture, a tendency now known as ethnocentrism. Cultural relativism emerged as a corrective principle, holding that a society's practices should be understood within their own cultural context rather than measured against an outside standard presumed to be universal. Cultural relativism transformed fields ranging from anthropology to international development, encouraging researchers to suspend quick judgment and seek local meaning before drawing conclusions. Critics caution, however, that _______________.

Blockchain technology was originally promoted as a way to remove the need for trusted middlemen, allowing strangers to exchange value directly through a shared, tamper-resistant ledger. (A) In practice, however, a small number of large players have come to dominate many blockchain networks, controlling enough power to influence outcomes that were supposed to be decided collectively. (B) In theory, this design distributes power away from any single institution and toward the network as a whole. (C) Critics note a further irony: when something goes wrong, there is often no institution left to appeal to, since the system was designed to eliminate central authority.

As private companies develop the technology to mine asteroids for rare metals and water, a legal question once confined to science fiction has suddenly become urgent: who, if anyone, owns the resources of outer space? (A) Some governments have already passed domestic laws granting their own companies rights to material mined in space, a move other nations view as a unilateral attempt to settle a shared question. (B) Existing international treaties state that no nation may claim sovereignty over celestial bodies, but they say remarkably little about whether a private company may extract and sell what it finds there. (C) Supporters of space mining argue that new resources could ease shortages on Earth, while critics warn that treating space as an open frontier for extraction risks repeating past mistakes.