영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

When individuals face uncertainty about how to behave, they frequently look to the actions of others for guidance, ①assuming that a behavior adopted by many people is more likely to be correct or appropriate than one adopted by few, a tendency known as social proof. This reliance on collective behavior can be remarkably efficient, since it allows individuals ②to benefit from the accumulated judgment of a crowd without having to gather and evaluate every relevant fact themselves. However, social proof can also lead entire groups astray when the initial signal that ③trigger imitation is itself unreliable or coincidental. A restaurant that happens to attract a long line early in the evening may continue attracting customers throughout the night simply because passersby ④interpret the queue as evidence of superior quality. Financial markets exhibit an analogous pattern: investors who observe others buying a particular asset often join the buying themselves, ⑤reasoning that so many participants cannot all be mistaken.

When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh not only the expected outcome of each option but also how painful it would feel ①to discover later that a different choice had been better. This anticipation of future regret, rather than the size of the potential loss itself, frequently becomes the dominant factor ②shaping the final decision. Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than ③selling it, not because they expect the price to recover, but because selling would force them to confront the possibility ④of having made a clear mistake. Researchers have found that people feel sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing, which ⑤help explain why so many individuals default to inaction whenever a decision feels uncertain.

When consumers compare two products and assume that the one labeled "eco-friendly" is automatically the more ①sustainable choice, they often overlook the complexity involved in verifying such a claim. Life cycle assessment, commonly abbreviated as LCA, is a systematic method developed to evaluate the environmental impact of a product across every stage of its existence. By tracing a product from its origin to its disposal, this approach reveals impacts that might otherwise remain ②hidden from consumers who see only the finished item on a shelf. For example, an electric vehicle may produce no emissions while being driven, yet the mining of metals for its battery can generate ③substantial environmental costs elsewhere. Without accounting for these earlier stages, a ④superficial comparison could mistakenly present the vehicle as entirely emission-free. Therefore, researchers increasingly rely on life cycle assessment to make ⑤uninformed decisions rather than trusting labels alone.

Classical economic theory assumes that consumers evaluate every price change in the same ①rational way, weighing marginal benefit against marginal cost regardless of the absolute numbers involved. Behavioral economists, however, have discovered a ②striking exception: the moment a price drops to exactly zero, people's judgment shifts in a way that ordinary discounting cannot explain. In a well-known laboratory experiment, participants chose between two chocolates, one of higher quality priced at a small fee and one of lower quality offered for free. When both prices were merely reduced by the same amount, most participants still ③avoided the higher-quality option. Yet once the cheaper chocolate's price was lowered to zero, the majority ④abruptly switched their preference, even though the price gap between the two options had not actually changed. Researchers explain this reversal by noting that a free item carries no perceived risk of loss, which makes it feel disproportionately ⑤attractive compared with any option that still requires payment, however small.

As private companies develop the technology to mine asteroids for rare metals and water, a legal question has become urgent: who owns the resources of outer space? 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. Some governments have already passed domestic laws granting their own companies rights to material mined in space, a move that other nations view as _______________.

Social media platforms rarely show users a neutral stream of information. Instead, recommendation algorithms are optimized to maximize engagement, and content that provokes strong emotion tends to hold attention longer than balanced reporting ever could. Some platforms have experimented with reducing the visibility of outrage-driven content, only to see user engagement drop, which reveals _______________.

Mental accounting also shapes how consumers respond to windfalls of different sizes and origins. (A) A modest windfall, such as a small cash-back reward, tends to be absorbed into everyday spending and disappears almost unnoticed within a household's general budget. (B) A substantial windfall, by contrast, such as an inheritance or a large bonus, is more likely to be mentally assigned to a separate category, sometimes labeled as "extra" money reserved for investment or a significant purchase. (C) This difference in treatment suggests that the perceived significance of a sum, rather than its objective purchasing power, determines the mental account into which it is placed.

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. (A) Herbert Simon, however, questioned this assumption, arguing that human beings operate under real constraints of time, knowledge, and mental capacity that make such exhaustive calculation practically impossible. (B) Instead of searching endlessly 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. (C) 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 adequately. This approach is not a failure of reasoning but rather a sensible adaptation to a world where information is costly 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 realistic account of how ordinary decisions are actually made.

Facing a shortage of caregivers and a rapidly aging population, several countries have begun deploying robots designed to remind elderly residents to take medication and offer simple conversation. (A) Critics, however, worry that this framing quietly shifts the goal of care, so that a robot's companionship comes to be treated as an acceptable substitute for human connection. (B) Early trials show that many residents report reduced loneliness, particularly when a robot's presence allows a human staff member to spend more time with each patient. (C) Advocates for the elderly argue that robots should be evaluated strictly as tools that free up human time for human contact, never as a replacement for it.

This finding is particularly striking given that the two groups of employees faced no difference whatsoever in the financial terms of the plan itself. Employers have long experimented with how retirement savings plans are presented to new hires. ( ① ) In one common arrangement, employees receive a form and must actively check a box to begin contributing a portion of their salary to a savings account. ( ② ) Under this opt-in arrangement, a substantial share of eligible employees never get around to enrolling, often citing simple procrastination rather than genuine disinterest in saving. ( ③ ) When employers instead enroll employees automatically and require them to check a box only if they wish to withdraw, participation rates climb to well over ninety percent. ( ④ ) Only the framing of the choice, not its economic substance, appears to determine whether employees end up saving for retirement. ( ⑤ ) This gap between the two arrangements reveals just how powerfully a default setting can shape decisions that people generally regard as carefully considered.