영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in ①isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. A struggling artist may judge success not against neighbors but against celebrated painters in art history, a comparison that can inspire ambition or, just as easily, ②breed persistent dissatisfaction. Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, which merely provide a ③benchmark 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 advancing while they themselves ④surpassed them. This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are ⑤measured.

When people estimate the value of an unfamiliar product, they rarely rely on objective calculation alone; instead, they anchor their judgment to whatever numerical reference happens to be presented first, however ①arbitrary that number may be. This phenomenon exerts a ②disproportionate influence on price perception precisely because initial figures function as a kind of cognitive gravity that subsequent estimates struggle to escape. A shopper who first sees a jacket listed at $300 before it is marked down to $150 will likely judge the discounted price as an excellent ③bargain, regardless of whether $150 actually reflects the jacket's true worth. Retailers, well aware of this bias, frequently display a ④deflated "original price" beside a discounted one, not because the higher figure is meaningful, but because it recalibrates customers' expectations. Even professionals are not immune: negotiators who open with an extreme initial offer often secure more ⑤favorable final terms than those who begin with a moderate one.

Working memory refers to the mental workspace in which information is temporarily held and manipulated while a person performs a cognitive task. Such tasks include solving an arithmetic problem, following a rapid conversation, or holding a phone number in mind before dialing it. In the mid-twentieth century, the psychologist George Miller proposed that this workspace could accommodate roughly seven discrete items. His claim proved so influential that it became widely known as the magic number seven. Subsequent research, however, revealed that Miller's estimate was somewhat generous, since it failed to account for the complexity of the material being remembered. Nelson Cowan later argued that when rehearsal strategies are prevented and attention is tightly controlled, _______________. This discrepancy suggests that what earlier studies had measured was not raw storage capacity itself but a hybrid quantity inflated by clever strategies. Contemporary psychologists therefore distinguish between the fixed limit of working memory and the flexible techniques that allow individuals to transcend that limit.

Traditional economic models predict that a rational individual offered any positive sum of money, however small, should accept it without hesitation. A simple experimental exercise known as the ultimatum game consistently contradicts this prediction: when the proposer offers a division perceived as unfair, the second participant frequently rejects the offer entirely, leaving both parties with nothing. Such evidence challenges the assumption that economic actors pursue only their own material self-interest, demonstrating instead that considerations of ___________ can override the straightforward pursuit of maximum individual gain.

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.

Change blindness refers to a striking limitation of human perception in which observers fail to notice substantial alterations to a visual scene, provided the change occurs during a brief disruption such as an eye movement or a momentary obstruction. (A) In a now-famous demonstration, researchers showed participants two versions of a photograph in alternation, separated by a short blank screen, and asked them to identify what had changed. Even when an entire building disappeared or a person's clothing shifted color, many viewers stared at the picture without detecting anything unusual. (B) Consequently, change blindness demonstrates that our impression of a rich, complete visual world is, to a surprising extent, an illusion constructed by the mind, not a faithful record of external reality. (C) This phenomenon occurs because visual attention, rather than passively recording every detail like a camera, actively selects only a narrow subset of information for processing at any given moment. Whatever falls outside that narrow spotlight is represented only sparsely, if at all, leaving it vulnerable to being overwritten without notice.

The framing effect becomes especially consequential in public health communication, where the stakes of a misunderstood message can be severe. (A) Campaigns that frame vaccination as an opportunity to protect ninety-five percent of recipients from a disease tend to generate calm, sustained interest, since the message emphasizes what individuals stand to gain. (B) By contrast, campaigns that frame the same behavior negatively, warning that failure to act will result in a specific number of preventable illnesses, tend to provoke stronger short-term compliance, though sometimes at the cost of inducing anxiety rather than genuine understanding. (C) Public health officials must therefore weigh not only whether a message is factually accurate but also whether its emotional framing serves the audience's long-term well-being.

Labeling theory approaches deviance not as a fixed property of certain acts, but as a social process created when powerful groups attach a negative label to a person's behavior. (A) Once labeled, an individual may find legitimate opportunities closing off, pushing them toward the very community of offenders that the label predicted they would join. (B) According to this view, nearly everyone breaks minor rules at some point, yet only some individuals are singled out and formally branded as delinquents or criminals. (C) This process, sometimes called secondary deviance, illustrates how social reaction can produce the outcome it claims merely to describe.

This evidentiary standard, ironically, has made behavioral interventions more rigorously tested than many of the traditional programs they were designed to complement. Government adoption of behavioral insights has generally been governed by a strict evidentiary standard: officials demand proof that a proposed intervention works before authorizing its use. ( ① ) This demand led to the routine use of randomized controlled trials, in which a proposed change is tested on a small population before being rolled out more broadly. ( ② ) Such trials allow policymakers to determine with reasonable confidence whether an intervention produces the intended effect before committing significant public resources to it. ( ③ ) Many long-standing government programs, by contrast, were implemented decades ago without ever being subjected to comparably rigorous evaluation. ( ④ ) Behavioral units within government have, as a result, gradually earned a reputation for evidence-based rigor that extends well beyond their original, narrow mandate. ( ⑤ ) That reputation has, in turn, given behavioral approaches an outsized voice in policy discussions relative to their still-modest budgets.

This admission, however, is precisely what the sunk cost fallacy makes so difficult to accept. Consider a construction firm that has spent several years and a substantial budget building a bridge, only to discover partway through that a cheaper and safer alternative route has since become available. ( ① ) A purely forward-looking analysis would compare the remaining cost of finishing the original bridge against the total cost of switching to the new route, ignoring whatever has already been spent. ( ② ) If the new route is genuinely cheaper going forward, the rational choice is to abandon the original project regardless of how much money it has already consumed. ( ③ ) Abandoning the project, however, requires the firm's leadership to publicly acknowledge that a significant portion of the original investment produced no lasting value. ( ④ ) As a result, firms often continue projects long after the numbers clearly favor stopping, simply to avoid confronting this uncomfortable truth. ( ⑤ ) The bridge, in such cases, becomes less a matter of engineering than a monument to the difficulty of admitting a costly mistake.