영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that the psychological experience of city life ①differ 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 ②to 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, ③treating most encounters with calculated detachment rather than genuine engagement. This detachment, while sometimes criticized as cold or impersonal, also grants urban residents a distinctive freedom, since so few people know or judge them ④personally. Simmel therefore viewed anonymity as a double-edged feature of modern life, one that isolates individuals from deep communal bonds while simultaneously ⑤liberating them from the constant surveillance of small-town social life.

When a resource is shared among many users, none of ①whom bears the full cost of its depletion, each individual is tempted to extract as much value as possible before others do the same. This dynamic, famously ②labeled the tragedy of the commons, describes how shared pastures and fisheries can be degraded even when every participant privately understands the danger of overuse. A single herder who adds one more animal to a communal pasture gains the entire benefit of that addition, whereas the resulting damage to the grass ③is shared among other herders who depend on the land. Because self-interest offers no incentive to restrain consumption unilaterally, the resource tends ④to exhausted long before any user intends such an outcome. For decades, economists assumed that only two remedies existed: strict regulation or the conversion of shared resources into private property. Elinor Ostrom challenged this assumption, however, by ⑤documenting communities that had sustainably managed fisheries and forests for generations through locally devised rules and mutual monitoring rather than external control.

Conventional industrial zones typically operate as isolated facilities, each ①purchasing raw materials independently and disposing of waste without regard for neighboring plants, even when one factory's discarded byproduct could serve as valuable input for another. An eco-industrial park reorganizes this arrangement by ②clustering diverse companies within a single area and encouraging them to exchange materials, energy, and water through a practice known as industrial symbiosis. A power plant's surplus heat, for example, might be piped to a nearby greenhouse, while a food processing facility's organic waste could be ③converted into biogas that ④power another factory's equipment. Such exchanges require companies to coordinate schedules and share information they might otherwise regard as proprietary, a level of cooperation rarely achieved without deliberate institutional support. Local governments therefore often play a coordinating role, mapping which industries could exchange resources and providing incentives for companies ⑤willing to participate.

Sensors buried in the soil now report moisture levels in real time, drones survey entire fields for signs of disease within minutes, and automated systems adjust irrigation without a farmer ever walking the rows. For large operations with the capital to invest, these tools have ①measurably increased yields while ②reducing water waste, addressing two problems that traditional farming has struggled with for generations. Smaller family farms, however, often ③cannot afford the upfront cost of this equipment, and some worry that the gap between high-tech and traditional operations will only widen as the technology advances further. There is also a quieter cultural cost that rarely appears in productivity reports: generations of farming knowledge risk being ④preserved by dashboards and automated alerts that few young farmers are taught to question, a loss productivity reports rarely ⑤capture.

Time travel to the past has long fascinated physicists and philosophers alike, but it also generates a famously troubling ①contradiction. Suppose a traveler journeyed backward in time and, through some combination of accident and intention, prevented their own grandfather from ever meeting their grandmother. If the grandfather never had children, the traveler themselves would never have been born, which means the traveler could never have existed to make the trip in the first place. Yet if the traveler never made the trip, the grandfather would have ②survived to meet the grandmother after all, allowing the traveler to be born and eventually travel back in time. The story therefore ③loops endlessly, undermining itself at every turn rather than settling into any stable outcome. Some physicists resolve the paradox by arguing that any consistent timeline must ④permit such self-defeating actions to succeed freely, while others propose that a traveler who alters the past simply branches off into a separate, parallel timeline instead, an idea many find ⑤appealing precisely because it avoids the contradiction altogether.

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.

Conventional economic wisdom holds that more options are always preferable to fewer. Empirical research on consumer behavior, however, complicates this assumption considerably. When shoppers are presented with an extensive array of choices, they frequently experience heightened anxiety about making the wrong selection and, paradoxically, become less likely to make any purchase or decision at all. Businesses that recognize this dynamic have begun deliberately curating smaller, carefully selected assortments, betting that ___________ can sometimes generate more sales and greater customer satisfaction than abundance.

When engineers design the software that controls a self-driving car, they face a question philosophers have debated for decades: should a crashing vehicle protect its own passenger, or minimize total harm even at the passenger's expense? Surveys reveal an uncomfortable contradiction: most people say a car should be programmed to save the greater number of lives, yet the same people admit they would never buy a vehicle designed to sacrifice its own owner. This suggests that _______________. Manufacturers, regulators, and philosophers must instead agree on transparent rules before autonomous vehicles are allowed to make such decisions.

This prospect raises a philosophical question that medicine alone cannot answer. 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 or type a message using thought alone. ( ① ) As the technology improves, some developers envision a future in which brain-computer interfaces extend beyond restoring lost function toward enhancing healthy minds. ( ② ) They imagine offering faster memory or expanded attention to anyone willing to undergo the procedure. ( ③ ) If a device can alter memory, mood, or decision-making, at what point does the assistance stop being a tool and start reshaping the very identity of the person using it? ( ④ ) Neuroethicists argue that mental privacy may need to be recognized as a fundamental right before this technology becomes widespread. ( ⑤ )

At that distant point in time, the future increase feels almost costless, since no immediate sacrifice is required. One practical application of hyperbolic discounting involves a savings program that gradually raises an employee's contribution rate over several years. ( ① ) Employees are first asked to commit, well in advance, to increasing their savings rate at a specific future date, often timed to coincide with an expected salary raise. ( ② ) Because the commitment applies only to a point far in the future, the vast majority of employees readily agree to the plan. ( ③ ) When the scheduled date finally arrives, the increase takes effect automatically unless the employee actively opts out, and remarkably few do. ( ④ ) The program succeeds precisely because it separates the decision from the discomfort, asking employees to commit when the cost feels abstract rather than immediate. ( ⑤ ) In this way, a well-timed program can help individuals overcome the very bias that would otherwise prevent them from saving adequately for the future.