영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Biodegradable plastics have been promoted as a promising solution to plastic waste, since they ①are designed to decompose into natural substances rather than persist for centuries. Manufacturers derive these materials from renewable resources such as corn starch, blending them with additives that ②accelerates microbial breakdown once discarded. However, their environmental benefits are often exaggerated, largely because decomposition depends on specific conditions rarely ③found outside industrial composting facilities. For example, a bag labeled biodegradable may take years, not the weeks advertised, to break down in a landfill or ocean, where temperature and microbial activity remain low. In addition, when mixed with conventional plastics in recycling streams, they can contaminate the process, ④weakening the quality of materials produced afterward. Some engineers therefore compare biodegradable plastics to a bridge that leads nowhere unless paired with infrastructure that completes the journey. Ultimately, realizing their genuine potential requires not only technological refinement but also facilities capable of ⑤providing the precise conditions decomposition demands.

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.

As more schools shift toward digital textbooks and online assignments, a student without reliable internet access at home faces a disadvantage that has little to do with talent or effort. During recent years, this gap became impossible to ignore, as families in rural areas or low-income neighborhoods ①struggled to complete schoolwork that assumed a stable connection and a personal device. Some policymakers initially treated internet access as a convenience, comparable to cable television, rather than as infrastructure ②essential to modern life. That assumption is increasingly ③reconsidering, particularly as more essential services, from job applications to medical appointments, move online by default. Closing this divide will require more than simply distributing devices; it will demand sustained investment in the physical networks ④that carry information into every home, ⑤regardless of income or location.

Over the past two decades, insights drawn from behavioral economics have moved beyond academic journals and into the machinery of government itself, ①reshaping how numerous public programs are designed and implemented. Tax authorities in several countries, for example, discovered that simply informing citizens how many of their neighbors had already paid overdue taxes on time substantially ②increased subsequent compliance rates, outperforming letters that merely threatened legal penalties for continued nonpayment. Public health agencies have applied similar principles to encourage preventive care, finding that appointment reminders phrased to emphasize the personal cost of a missed visit ③proved more effective than neutral reminders listing only the date and time. Employment offices redesigned job-seeking assistance programs around specific, actionable steps rather than general encouragement, discovering that participants who were asked ④to write down a concrete plan for the following week were considerably more likely to follow through than those who received only general advice. What unites these disparate interventions ⑤are a shared recognition that small, carefully tested adjustments to how choices are presented can produce measurable improvements in outcomes.

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. 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. This phenomenon occurs because visual attention, rather than passively recording every detail like a camera, _______________. Whatever falls outside that narrow spotlight is represented only sparsely, if at all, leaving it vulnerable to being overwritten without notice. 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.

When sociologist Émile Durkheim studied suicide rates across different societies, he noticed something puzzling: rates rose not only during economic depression but also during sudden prosperity. He concluded that both crises share a common feature, the collapse of shared norms that once told individuals what to expect and how to behave. Decades later, Robert Merton extended the concept to explain deviance within stable societies, proposing that anomie also arises when a culture insists that everyone pursue identical goals, such as wealth, while denying many people the legitimate means to achieve them. Faced with this gap between aspiration and opportunity, _______________. Anomie theory therefore suggests that crime is less a product of individual failure than of structural imbalance within society itself.

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 known as loss aversion. Consider an investor who refuses to sell a declining stock, clinging to the hope that its price will eventually recover, even when all available evidence indicates that selling and reinvesting elsewhere would be more rational. As a result, loss aversion frequently pushes individuals toward ___________ rather than toward the outcome that would maximize their overall welfare.

Economists have long debated whether prosperity and environmental quality are fundamentally opposed, or whether the relationship between them changes shape as an economy matures. The Environmental Kuznets Curve, a hypothesis borrowed from earlier theories of income inequality, proposes that _______________. In its early stages, industrializing nations prioritize output over conservation, treating clean air and water as expendable costs of development to be addressed later. Beyond a certain point, however, rising incomes generate both the technological capacity and the political will to demand stricter regulation, so degradation begins to reverse even as production keeps expanding. Some scholars regard this trajectory as a reassuring paradox, suggesting that the very growth blamed for ecological harm may eventually finance its own repair. Critics, by contrast, argue that the curve rests on a narrow selection of pollutants that happen to decline with wealth, while ignoring greenhouse gases and resource depletion, which show no comparable tendency to fall.

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.

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 )