영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

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 ①known as loss aversion. This asymmetry, which ②was first documented through a series of carefully designed experiments, suggests that the psychological weight of a loss can be roughly twice that of a comparable gain. Consider an investor who refuses to sell a declining stock, ③clings to the hope that its price will eventually recover, even when all available evidence indicates that selling and reinvesting elsewhere would be more rational. Such behavior, though it ④appears irrational from a purely economic standpoint, becomes understandable once we recognize that the investor is trying to avoid the sharp discomfort associated with realizing a loss. Similarly, consumers often demand a much higher price to give up an item they already own than they would be ⑤willing to pay to acquire the same item in the first place.

Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly ①built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? This puzzle, which researchers ②named after a furniture retailer famous for selling items that require home assembly, challenges the standard economic assumption that value is determined solely by an object's inherent qualities. In a series of experiments, participants who ③assembled a plain storage box were willing to pay nearly as much for their own imperfect creation as they were for a professionally built version, despite being fully aware of its flaws. Labor, it seems, functions as a kind of psychological investment: once effort has been ④pour into a task, individuals become reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly ⑤wasted.

Even highly capable individuals can make disastrous collective decisions once they are absorbed into a tightly knit group, a phenomenon psychologist Irving Janis termed groupthink. Within cohesive committees, boards, and advisory councils, members often prioritize consensus and group harmony over a rigorous evaluation of alternatives, ①silencing doubts rather than risking the discomfort of dissent. Janis identified several warning signs, including an illusion of invulnerability that leads a group to ②underestimate risk, pressure on dissenters to fall in line, and self-appointed mindguards who ③shield the group from information that might disrupt its confidence. Sociologists extend this analysis beyond small committees, noting that entire organizations can develop cultures that ④punish conformity and reward employees who raise inconvenient questions. Historical inquiries into policy failures frequently reveal that critical information existed within the organization but never reached decision makers, because no one felt ⑤safe enough to voice it aloud.

Two patients diagnosed with the same disease and prescribed the same medication can respond in ①strikingly different ways, one recovering quickly while the other experiences little benefit or even harmful side effects. Precision medicine starts from the observation that this variation often traces back to differences buried in each patient's genome, differences that determine how ②efficiently a body absorbs, breaks down, or responds to a given drug. By sequencing a patient's DNA before treatment begins, doctors can increasingly predict which medication is likely to work best and at what dose, replacing a strategy once described as one-size-fits-all with something closer to a ③tailored fit. This approach has proven especially valuable in cancer treatment, where tumors from two patients with the same diagnosis may carry entirely ④identical genetic mutations that respond to entirely different drugs. Widespread adoption still faces real obstacles, since genetic sequencing remains ⑤expensive in many regions and few doctors have been trained to interpret the flood of genetic data such tests now produce.

Imagine rewriting a bacterium's code the way a programmer edits a line of software, and much of what synthetic biology ①promises begins to make sense. Researchers in this field assemble standardized genetic parts into circuits that can be inserted into a cell, instructing it to perform a task that no natural organism would ②carry out. Because these circuits are built from interchangeable parts rather than designed from scratch each time, a circuit tested in one lab can often be reused, with ③minor adjustments, in an entirely different application. Critics note that biological systems ④always behave as predictably as electronic circuits, since a gene inserted into a new cell can interact with existing pathways in unexpected ways, occasionally producing results no engineer intended. Even so, as the catalog of standardized parts keeps expanding, engineers are gaining ⑤confidence to design increasingly complex systems.

Many households save far less for retirement than conventional financial advice would recommend. Some economists have proposed a savings program in which employees commit today to allocating a portion of their future salary increases toward retirement savings, rather than being asked to reduce their current take-home pay immediately. Field trials of such programs have reported substantial increases in average savings rates. This approach demonstrates that savings policy grounded in realistic assumptions about human psychology can prove considerably more ___________ than policy grounded in the assumption that individuals will always act in strict accordance with their own long-term rational interests.

주어진 문장: The comparison, notably, is not with reality but with an imagined alternative that may never have been as good as it seems in retrospect. Modern consumer culture often assumes that expanding the range of available options will automatically make people freer and happier, yet a growing body of research suggests the opposite may sometimes be true. ( ① ) When individuals select from an enormous set of alternatives, satisfaction with the final choice frequently declines rather than rises, even when the chosen item is objectively excellent. ( ② ) This decline stems not from the difficulty of deciding but from what happens afterward, once a decision has already been made. ( ③ ) Having considered so many possibilities, a person naturally imagines the specific advantages that a different, unchosen option might have offered, and this imagined comparison quietly erodes contentment with what was actually selected. ( ④ ) By contrast, someone who chose from only two or three alternatives rarely constructs such an elaborate fantasy of missed advantages. ( ⑤ ) The paradox, therefore, is that abundance can free people from external constraint while simultaneously trapping them in a private cycle of comparison and regret.

The same technology, researchers realized, could be pushed even further, from generic drug screening toward medicine tailored to a single individual. A liver no longer has to sit inside a human body to be studied closely. ( ① ) By coaxing stem cells to organize themselves within a nutrient-rich gel, scientists can now grow miniature three-dimensional structures called organoids, which reproduce much of the architecture and function of a real organ despite being no larger than a grain of rice. ( ② ) Unlike flat cultures grown on a plastic dish, which lose many of the cues that guide normal development, organoids let cells interact in three dimensions much as they would inside the body. ( ③ ) This yields tissue that behaves in strikingly realistic ways. ( ④ ) This fidelity has made organoids invaluable for testing how a drug affects human tissue before any patient is exposed, sparing researchers much of the burden of relying on animal models alone. ( ⑤ ) Some laboratories have even grown organoids from a single patient's own cells, raising the possibility of trialing a treatment on a miniature copy of that patient's organ before committing to an actual course of therapy.

주어진 문장: Yet not everyone finds this reassurance convincing. Few ideas in policy debate provoke as much philosophical unease as the notion that a government might deliberately steer citizens toward better choices while leaving every option technically available. ( ① ) Defenders insist that freedom is preserved as long as no option is banned and no penalty is attached, arguing that a citizen who is merely steered, rather than coerced, remains free to choose otherwise. ( ② ) Critics counter that this defense rests on an impoverished notion of liberty, one that ignores how engineered defaults and calculated framing can shape decisions just as powerfully as an outright prohibition would. ( ③ ) If a policy is designed because officials expect it to bypass conscious deliberation, these critics ask, can the resulting choice still be called autonomous, even though no law was broken? ( ④ ) The dispute ultimately turns on what freedom actually requires: the mere absence of coercion, or a decision-making process that remains transparent and undistorted. ( ⑤ ) Until this question is settled, every new intervention promising to help citizens choose better will continue to invite suspicion of quiet manipulation.

Ironically, the more confident these investors become, the less likely they are to seek out disconfirming evidence at all. Confirmation bias exerts a particularly strong influence in financial markets, where uncertainty leaves considerable room for interpretation. ( ① ) An investor convinced that a certain stock is undervalued will often read every piece of ambiguous news as further proof of that belief. ( ② ) Positive earnings are taken as confirmation of the stock's hidden potential, while disappointing earnings are dismissed as a temporary anomaly rather than a genuine warning sign. ( ③ ) This selective interpretation allows the investor's initial conviction to grow stronger with each new piece of information, regardless of whether that information actually supports the belief. ( ④ ) Financial advisors therefore recommend that investors deliberately seek out opinions that challenge their existing positions before making major decisions. ( ⑤ ) Only by actively exposing oneself to disconfirming evidence can one guard against the self-reinforcing cycle that confirmation bias tends to produce.