영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

A plastic bag that fully decomposes within months rather than lingering for centuries sounds almost too convenient to be real, yet certain bioplastics on the market ①rarely do that under the right conditions. Unlike conventional plastic, derived almost entirely from petroleum, many bioplastics are synthesized from renewable feedstocks such as corn starch or sugarcane, sometimes with the help of bacteria engineered to produce plastic-like polymers as a ②byproduct of their metabolism. Not every bioplastic biodegrades quickly, however, and some marketed as eco-friendly break down only in industrial composting facilities that reach conditions ③rarely found in a backyard compost heap or the open ocean. Critics point out that growing crops for bioplastic production can compete with food crops for farmland and water, complicating the assumption that a biological origin automatically makes a material more ④sustainable. Researchers are now exploring bioplastics made from agricultural waste and algae instead of dedicated crops, hoping to sidestep this competition for land while preserving the ⑤benefits that first made bioplastics appealing.

Suppose a mad scientist removed a living brain from its body, placed it in a vat of nutrient fluid, and connected its neurons to a supercomputer capable of generating perfectly ①unrealistic sensations. The brain would experience a full and convincing world, complete with a sky, a body, and other people, without ever suspecting that none of it existed outside the simulation. This scenario, unsettling as it sounds, raises a genuinely difficult question for anyone confident in their own perception: how could a person ever ②prove that they are not that very brain right now? Ordinary evidence cannot help, since any proof gathered through the senses would itself be ③generated by the same simulation being tested. Some philosophers conclude that absolute certainty about the external world is simply ④unattainable, while others argue that the mere possibility of deception, however vivid, is not sufficient reason to ⑤abandon our everyday trust in what we perceive.

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt devised a scenario to challenge a long-held ①assumption about moral responsibility: that a person can be blamed for an action only if they could genuinely have done otherwise. Imagine a man named Black who secretly implants a device in another man's brain, ready to force a particular decision if the second man shows any sign of choosing differently. The second man, however, decides entirely on his ②own to perform the very action Black wanted, and the device never activates at all. Black's hidden mechanism made it impossible for the man to have chosen otherwise, yet most people still consider him ③fully responsible for what he freely decided to do. Frankfurt used this scenario to argue that moral responsibility depends on the ④irrelevant reasoning behind a choice, not on some abstract guarantee that an alternative path ⑤remained available the entire time.

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.

When people evaluate their personal contribution to water scarcity, they often consider only the water that flows directly from household taps, overlooking a far larger quantity consumed indirectly through the goods they purchase. The water footprint, a concept that extends this narrow view, _______________. Central to this concept is the notion of virtual water, the water embedded invisibly within a product, from irrigating cotton fields to livestock raised for meat. For instance, producing a kilogram of beef can require several thousand liters of water, whereas a kilogram of vegetables typically demands a fraction of that amount. Nations that import water-intensive goods rather than producing them domestically are importing virtual water from regions that may face severe shortages. Critics caution, however, that focusing exclusively on aggregate volume can mislead policymakers, since a liter of water drawn from a region suffering drought carries far greater consequences than one drawn from a water-abundant area.

A cluster of neurons smaller than a pea can now spontaneously organize itself into layered structures that mimic, in miniature, the architecture of a developing human brain. Grown from stem cells coaxed to follow the same developmental cues that guide an embryo, these brain organoids have begun firing electrical signals in patterns that faintly resemble the activity recorded in an infant's brain. For researchers studying disorders such as autism or schizophrenia, this offers something long unavailable: a living model of human brain development that can be observed and manipulated directly, without ever touching an actual patient. Because organoids lack sensory organs, a body, or any connection to the outside world, most neuroscientists argue that the structures cannot generate anything resembling subjective experience, however brain-like their electrical activity may appear. _______________.

When consumers compare two products and assume that the one labeled "eco-friendly" is automatically the more sustainable choice, they often overlook the complexity involved in verifying such a claim. Life cycle assessment, commonly abbreviated as LCA, _______________. This method examines raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, use, and disposal, compiling data on energy consumption and emissions generated at each stage. By tracing a product from its origin to its disposal, this approach reveals impacts that might otherwise remain hidden 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 substantial environmental costs elsewhere. Without accounting for these earlier stages, a superficial comparison could mistakenly present the vehicle as entirely emission-free. Therefore, researchers increasingly rely on life cycle assessment to make informed decisions rather than trusting labels alone.

Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. (C) 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. (A) Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, which merely provide a benchmark for self-assessment. (B) This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are measured.

Social mobility refers to the movement of individuals or families between different positions within a society's system of stratification, whether upward, downward, or sideways. (C) Structural mobility, caused by large-scale economic shifts such as the growth of new industries, must be distinguished from individual mobility, which results from a single person's particular choices. (A) Sociologists distinguish intragenerational mobility, changes within a single person's lifetime, from intergenerational mobility, differences between the social position of parents and their children. (B) Research across many nations has found that education functions as the primary channel of upward mobility, yet access to quality education is itself unevenly distributed.

That trajectory has continued to accelerate ever since, each new generation of vaccine technology arriving faster than the one before it. When a country physician named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had caught cowpox seemed immune to smallpox, he set in motion a medical revolution without fully understanding why it worked. ( ① ) For nearly two centuries afterward, vaccine development proceeded largely by trial and error, weakening or killing a pathogen and testing whether the resulting preparation could train the immune system without causing disease itself. ( ② ) This method produced genuine successes, eventually eliminating smallpox worldwide and reducing diseases such as polio and measles. ( ③ ) Each new vaccine, however, still required years of laboratory work with no guarantee of success. ( ④ ) Advances in molecular biology eventually allowed researchers to isolate a single protein from a pathogen's surface rather than using the whole organism, producing vaccines with fewer side effects and a more predictable safety profile. ( ⑤ ) The most recent shift, toward delivering genetic instructions rather than proteins themselves, represents the latest chapter in a story that began with an eighteenth-century doctor's curiosity about a puzzling immunity among dairy workers.