영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

문제 1

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, yet a pattern that ①persists with remarkable consistency across surveys. This tendency, known as overconfidence bias, leads investors ②to trade more frequently than a more cautious assessment of their own skill would justify. Extensive research comparing the trading records of numerous individual accounts has demonstrated that investors who trade most frequently ③tends to earn substantially lower returns than those who trade rarely, largely because transaction costs accumulate and because frequent trading often reflects overconfident reactions to short-term noise rather than genuine insight. Overconfidence also manifests in the tendency to underestimate the range of possible outcomes, ④causing investors to concentrate their holdings in a small number of assets they feel certain about rather than diversifying across a broader portfolio. Paradoxically, then, the very confidence that motivates investors to act decisively often ⑤undermines the outcomes they are trying to achieve.

문제 2

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.

문제 3

When people recall precisely where they were and what they were doing at the moment they learned of some momentous public event, the resulting memory often feels extraordinarily ①vivid, as though it had been etched into the mind with photographic precision; researchers have termed such recollections flashbulb memories. Proponents of this concept once argued that the emotional intensity and surprise accompanying such events trigger a distinct neural mechanism that preserves details with unusual ②fidelity, effectively exempting them from the ③gradual decay that afflicts ordinary memories. Subsequent longitudinal studies, however, have complicated this picture considerably: when researchers compared accounts gathered within days of an event to accounts gathered years later, they discovered that details had frequently been altered, omitted, or even fabricated, even though the individuals reporting them expressed ④unwavering confidence in their accuracy. This persistent mismatch between subjective certainty and objective consistency implies that flashbulb memories, far from being flawless recordings, are ⑤accurate narratives shaped by rehearsal, media exposure, and the passage of time.

문제 4

Classical economic theory long assumed that decision makers gather all relevant information, calculate every possible outcome, and select the single option that maximizes their benefit. Herbert Simon, however, questioned this assumption, arguing that human beings operate under real constraints of time, knowledge, and mental capacity that make such ①exhaustive calculation practically impossible. Instead of searching ②endlessly for the theoretically perfect choice, people typically stop once they find an option that seems good enough to meet their immediate needs, a strategy Simon termed satisficing. A shopper comparing refrigerators, for example, rarely examines every model available; she instead sets a few practical criteria, such as price and size, and selects the first appliance that satisfies them ③adequately. This approach is not a failure of reasoning but rather a sensible adaptation to a world where information is ④costly and time is genuinely limited. Consequently, models assuming unlimited rationality often fail to predict actual behavior, while frameworks acknowledging these cognitive boundaries offer a far more ⑤unrealistic account of how ordinary decisions are actually made.

문제 5

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, though psychologically ①compelling, rests on a basic misunderstanding of probability, since each flip of a fair coin remains entirely ②independent of every flip that came before it. The coin possesses no memory of its previous outcomes, and its probability of landing on tails on the sixth flip stays ③fixed at fifty percent regardless of how many heads preceded it. Casinos have long profited from this misconception, watching gamblers place larger bets after a losing streak simply because they ④mistakenly 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 they recently rejected several applications ⑤sporadically.

문제 6

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. (A) 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. Such inconsistency helps explain why gym memberships go unused and retirement accounts remain underfunded, despite people's stated intentions. Recognizing this pull toward the present, therefore, allows individuals and institutions to design commitments that quietly protect long-term goals from short-term temptation. (B) 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. (C) 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.

문제 7

When engineers design the software that controls a self-driving car, they inevitably face a question that philosophers have debated for decades: who should the vehicle protect in an unavoidable crash? (A) This gap between the ideal and the personal choice suggests that ethical programming cannot be settled by public opinion alone. (B) Surveys reveal an uncomfortable contradiction: most people say a car should minimize total harm, yet the same people admit they would never buy a vehicle designed to sacrifice its own owner. (C) Manufacturers, regulators, and philosophers must instead agree on transparent rules before autonomous vehicles are allowed to make such decisions on the road.

문제 8

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.

문제 9

Devices that translate brain activity directly into digital commands have moved from laboratory experiments to real medical use, allowing paralyzed patients to control a robotic arm using thought alone. (A) This prospect raises a philosophical question that medicine alone cannot answer: at what point does the assistance stop being a tool and start reshaping the identity of the person using it? (B) As the technology improves, some developers envision a future in which these interfaces extend beyond restoring lost function toward enhancing healthy minds. (C) Neuroethicists argue that mental privacy may need to be recognized as a fundamental right before this technology becomes widespread.

문제 10

주어진 문장: Because controlled processing is so resource-intensive, repeated practice offers an efficient way to shift a skill from one category to the other. Cognitive psychologists distinguish between two modes by which the mind handles information, a distinction that helps explain why experienced drivers can hold conversations while navigating familiar roads without conscious effort. ( ① ) Automatic processing occurs rapidly, requires minimal attention, and typically operates outside conscious awareness, allowing multiple automatic tasks to proceed without interfering with one another. ( ② ) Controlled processing, by contrast, unfolds more slowly, demands deliberate attention, and can generally handle only one demanding task at a time, since it draws upon a limited pool of cognitive resources that becomes rapidly depleted under competing demands. ( ③ ) Skills that once required intense concentration, such as reading or typing, gradually become automatic through extensive practice, freeing attentional resources for other purposes. ( ④ ) This shift explains why novice drivers find it difficult to talk while merging onto a highway, whereas seasoned drivers manage the same maneuver with comparative ease. ( ⑤ ) However, automaticity carries hidden costs, since automatized responses can be triggered inappropriately by habitual cues even when circumstances have changed, occasionally producing errors that controlled deliberation would have prevented.