영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

In a classic experiment inspired by Keynes's beauty contest analogy, participants choose a number between zero and one hundred, and the winner is whoever selects the number closest to two-thirds of the average of all guesses ①submitted. A perfectly rational player, ②assuming every other participant reasons with unlimited depth, would conclude the equilibrium number is zero, since reasoning about others' reasoning collapses the average toward that single point. In practice, however, actual guesses rarely converge on zero; most participants stop reasoning after a round or two of imagining what others might guess, ③producing average guesses that cluster between twenty and thirty-five. This gap between theoretical equilibrium and observed behavior reveals that human reasoning is bounded, ④capable of anticipating a few steps ahead but rarely capable of iterating the process indefinitely. Economists use this game as a diagnostic tool, since the number a person submits ⑤reveal how many levels of strategic thinking that person is willing to perform.

Many households save far less for retirement than conventional financial advice would recommend, not necessarily because they ①lacks the resources to do so, but because a combination of procrastination, present bias, and the discomfort of forgoing current consumption repeatedly delays the decision to begin saving. Recognizing this gap between intention and action, some economists have proposed a savings program in which employees commit today to ②allocating a portion of their future salary increases toward retirement savings, rather than being asked to reduce their current take-home pay immediately. Because the sacrifice applies only to income not yet received, the commitment ③feels far less painful than an equivalent reduction in present earnings would, making employees considerably more willing to enroll. Once enrolled, the contribution rate automatically rises with each subsequent raise, ④gradually increasing savings without requiring any further deliberate action from participants. Field trials of such programs have reported substantial increases in average savings rates over several years, alongside participant satisfaction that ⑤remains notably high.

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.

Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? This puzzle, which researchers named 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 assembled 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 poured into a task, _______________. This tendency helps explain why consumers often prefer products that demand some degree of personal assembly, even when a comparable finished item is available at a lower price and requires no time investment whatsoever.

The human gut hosts trillions of microorganisms whose combined genetic material outnumbers that of the human genome itself many times over. (A) A microbiome disrupted by antibiotics, poor diet, or chronic stress can leave the gut lining more permeable than it should be, allowing substances to leak into the bloodstream that would normally stay contained. (B) Once dismissed as passive hitchhikers, these bacteria are now understood to actively shape digestion, regulate immune responses, and even influence the production of chemicals that affect mood and behavior. (C) Researchers studying this connection have found that transplanting gut bacteria from a healthy donor into a patient can relieve symptoms of certain digestive disorders, though the microbiome varies enormously between individuals, so a treatment that helps one person's gut may do little for someone else's.

The influence of the status quo bias extends well beyond personal finance into the design of public policy itself. (A) Consequently, policymakers who wish to encourage socially beneficial behavior, such as organ donation or energy conservation, have increasingly turned to adjusting default settings rather than relying solely on persuasion or financial incentives. (B) Countries that changed their organ donation systems from opt-in to opt-out, for example, observed dramatic increases in the proportion of citizens registered as donors, without any change in the underlying laws governing consent. (C) This outcome demonstrates that the default option itself functions as an implicit recommendation, one that citizens are reluctant to override even when doing so would take only a moment.

Suppose you meet a quiet, gentle man who speaks softly, tends a small garden, and organizes his bookshelf with meticulous care. (A) This judgment, however, ignores a crucial fact: truck drivers vastly outnumber florists in almost every country, which means that, statistically, he is far more likely to belong to the larger group regardless of how well he fits the flower-shop image. (B) Relying on resemblance to a familiar category rather than on underlying numerical proportions, known among researchers as representativeness, leads people to overlook these base rates almost automatically. Even trained professionals, who should know better, often fall into the same trap when a vivid description feels more convincing than plain statistics. Consequently, teaching people to pause and ask how common something actually is, instead of merely how typical it appears, can meaningfully improve the accuracy of everyday predictions and reduce costly errors in judgment. (C) Asked whether he is more likely a florist or a truck driver, most people instinctively choose florist, since his personality matches the stereotype so neatly.

Social media platforms rarely show users a neutral stream of information. (A) Over time, users exposed to a steady diet of emotionally charged content may come to believe that extreme opinions are far more common than they actually are. (B) Instead, recommendation algorithms are optimized to maximize engagement, and content that provokes strong emotion tends to hold attention longer than balanced reporting ever could. (C) Researchers describe this as a distorted mirror: the platform reflects not society as it truly is, but a version shaped by whatever keeps people scrolling.

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.

주어진 문장: Those who had learned the words underwater, for example, performed best when tested underwater again, while those who had studied on land performed best on land. Students are frequently told that where they study makes little difference, provided that they put in enough hours. Cognitive research on memory retrieval, however, suggests that this advice oversimplifies an important process. ( ① ) According to the encoding specificity principle, information becomes intertwined with the context in which it was originally learned. Cues present during encoding therefore facilitate retrieval far more effectively than cues encountered elsewhere. ( ② ) A striking demonstration involved divers who memorized word lists either underwater or on dry land. When tested later, divers recalled substantially more words if the testing environment matched the original learning environment. ( ③ ) This held true regardless of which environment that happened to be. This finding implies that reviewing material exclusively in a quiet bedroom may not adequately prepare a student for the noisy atmosphere of an actual examination hall. ( ④ ) Rather than assuming that memorization is a context-free process, students ought to consider deliberately varying study locations and conditions. ( ⑤ ) Doing so would ensure that retrieval cues remain available regardless of how a future test is administered.