영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. This group ①need not be one to which a person actually belongs. A struggling artist may judge success not against neighbors but against celebrated painters in art history, a comparison ②that can inspire ambition or, just as easily, breed persistent dissatisfaction. Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, ③which merely provide a benchmark 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 ④advance while they themselves ⑤lagging behind.

Standard economic theory assumes that money is fungible, meaning that a dollar earned as salary is functionally identical to a dollar received as a tax refund or won in a lottery. In practice, however, people routinely sort their finances into separate mental accounts, ①treating money differently depending on its source or intended purpose, a process economists call mental accounting. A household that would never dip into its retirement savings to pay for a vacation might nonetheless spend an unexpected bonus on that very trip without hesitation, even though both sums ②are, in strictly financial terms, equally available for either purpose. This compartmentalization can produce decisions that appear inconsistent when viewed through a purely rational lens: the same individual who diligently saves a portion of every paycheck may simultaneously ③carrying high-interest credit card debt, effectively paying more to borrow than they earn on their savings. Mental accounting is not always harmful, however; by assigning specific categories to specific funds, individuals can also impose useful discipline on their spending, ④preventing money earmarked for essential needs from being diverted toward impulsive purchases. The practice thus reveals that financial behavior is guided less by pure arithmetic than by psychological categories that individuals ⑤impose on money's origin and purpose.

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 ①disruptive 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. Anthropologist Franz Boas argued that no culture possesses an inherently ②superior set of values, and that apparent oddities, once examined closely, typically serve ③coherent functions within their own social systems. Cultural relativism transformed fields ranging from anthropology to international development, encouraging researchers to ④suspend quick judgment and seek local meaning before drawing conclusions. Critics caution, however, that taken to an extreme, the principle risks excusing practices that cause ⑤genuine harm.

For decades, most vaccines worked by injecting a ①weakened or inactivated version of a pathogen, coaxing the immune system into recognizing an enemy it had never truly fought. mRNA vaccines take a fundamentally ②different route, delivering only a short genetic instruction wrapped in a protective lipid capsule, one that tells the body's own cells how to manufacture a single harmless piece of a virus's outer surface protein. Once those cells display the fragment, the immune system learns to recognize it as ③foreign and builds a defense, without ever having encountered the actual pathogen. Because the vaccine contains no live virus and cannot alter a cell's own DNA, developers can ④redesign the genetic instructions within weeks whenever a pathogen mutates, rather than starting the years-long process required for traditional vaccines. This speed has convinced many researchers that the same platform could eventually be adapted to fight diseases far beyond infectious illness, ⑤excluding certain cancers.

People often recognize, in ①calm reflection, that their future selves will be tempted to abandon a goal they currently value. 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. By making certain choices ②affordable, inconvenient, or impossible to reverse, individuals can protect a long-term goal from a short-term impulse that has not yet arisen. A person hoping to save money might lock funds into an account that ③penalizes early withdrawal, removing the very temptation that would otherwise be difficult to resist. Similarly, someone determined to finish a project might ④publicly announce a deadline, transforming private intentions into a commitment that carries social consequences if broken. What unites these examples is a simple insight: because future desires cannot always be ⑤trusted, the wisest moment to act may be now.

Behavioral economists have long observed that people tend to feel the pain of losing something more intensely than the pleasure of gaining an equivalent amount, a tendency known as loss aversion. Consider an investor who refuses to sell a declining stock, clinging to the hope that its price will eventually recover, even when all available evidence indicates that selling and reinvesting elsewhere would be more rational. As a result, loss aversion frequently pushes individuals toward ___________ rather than toward the outcome that would maximize their overall welfare.

It is often assumed that memory operates independently of bodily context, yet research suggests that this assumption deserves reconsideration. When information is learned under a particular physiological or emotional condition, _______________, a phenomenon researchers call state-dependent memory. Individuals who study while mildly anxious, for instance, often recall material more accurately when tested under similarly anxious conditions than when tested while calm, even though calmness is typically considered more conducive to concentration. This finding should prompt educators to reconsider the assumption that a single optimal testing environment exists for every learner, since matching internal states across encoding and retrieval provides retrieval cues that a mismatched state cannot supply. Critics might argue that such effects are minor and inconsistent, yet accumulated evidence across pharmacological and emotional studies is difficult to dismiss. Policymakers designing assessments should therefore weigh not only content difficulty but also the physiological continuity between preparation and examination, since ignoring this dimension risks underestimating certain students' actual knowledge.

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.

This reduction in cognitive burden, rather than a reduction in variety itself, appears to be the decisive factor in easing customers' decisions. An online retailer once tested how the size of a product display affected customer behavior. ( ① ) In one setting, customers encountered a table displaying twenty-four varieties of a specialty product, while in another setting they encountered a table displaying only six varieties. ( ② ) A larger proportion of customers stopped to sample items at the larger display, suggesting that abundance initially attracts attention and curiosity. ( ③ ) When it came to actual purchases, however, customers exposed to the smaller display were significantly more likely to buy something than those exposed to the larger one. ( ④ ) Follow-up interviews revealed that customers at the larger display often felt overwhelmed and uncertain about which option truly suited their preferences. ( ⑤ ) The retailer concluded that presenting a carefully limited selection, rather than an exhaustive one, could improve both sales and customer confidence.

주어진 문장: This buying and selling of allowances effectively creates a market price for carbon, one that fluctuates according to how difficult reduction proves across different industries. Emissions trading, a market-based mechanism for curbing greenhouse gases, allows governments to set an overall limit on carbon output while letting firms trade permits within that limit. ① Under this system, known as cap-and-trade, companies that cut emissions more cheaply than required can sell surplus allowances to firms facing higher reduction costs. ② Proponents argue that this flexibility lets society reach a given environmental target at the lowest overall cost, since abatement shifts toward whoever can achieve it most economically. ③ Critics, however, contend that trading schemes frequently allocate too many permits, a flaw that has historically depressed carbon prices and blunted incentives to invest in cleaner technology. ④ For example, early phases of several regional markets granted allowances so generously that permit prices collapsed, leaving polluters with little pressure to change their practices. ⑤ Consequently, many economists now advocate combining trading with a price floor, a minimum permit price that keeps the market from collapsing during weak demand, thereby preserving the cost-effectiveness for which trading is valued. ① ② ③ ④ ⑤