영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a now-famous thought experiment not to describe an actual laboratory procedure, but to ①conceal an absurdity hidden within a leading interpretation of quantum mechanics. Imagine a cat sealed inside a closed box together with a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and a vial of poison gas rigged to break open the instant the atom decays. Because the atom's decay is governed by genuine quantum randomness, standard quantum theory describes the atom, before anyone looks, as existing in a ②superposition of having decayed and not having decayed at the same time. If the theory is applied consistently to the entire box, the cat itself would have to be considered ③simultaneously alive and dead until an observer opens the lid and looks inside. Schrödinger intended this image to sound obviously ④ridiculous, using the cat's absurd fate to question whether the act of observation truly determines physical reality, or whether the mathematics is simply being pushed ⑤further than it was ever meant to go.

As cities have expanded across landscapes once covered with ①absorbent soil, impervious surfaces have turned stormwater from a resource that recharges groundwater into a hazard that floods streets and carries pollutants into waterways. Green infrastructure, which mimics the hydrological functions that natural landscapes once performed, offers planners a way to treat the city as a sponge rather than a ②rigid drainage pipe. Rain gardens, shallow depressions planted with deep-rooted vegetation, are designed to capture runoff from rooftops, allowing it to filter ③rapidly through soil before reaching underground aquifers. Permeable pavement, made of porous materials that let water pass directly through, serves a similar purpose along sidewalks, where asphalt would remain ④impenetrable. For example, cities that replaced pavement with permeable alternatives have reported ⑤notable reductions in flooding during storms that once overwhelmed sewers. However, engineers caution that green infrastructure cannot entirely replace conventional pipes in dense cores, where heavy runoff still requires structural reinforcement. Consequently, municipalities now regard green and gray infrastructure as complementary systems, each compensating for the other's limitations.

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. Sociologists distinguish intragenerational mobility, changes within a single person's lifetime, from intergenerational mobility, differences between the social position of parents and their children. A society is often judged by how much intergenerational mobility it ①permits, since high mobility suggests that outcomes depend more on effort and ability than on the ②accident of birth. 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. Research across many nations has found that education functions as the primary channel of upward mobility, yet access to quality education is itself ③evenly distributed, meaning the very mechanism meant to promote ④fairness can end up ⑤reproducing the inequality it was designed to overcome.

For much of its history, economic theory treated emotion as a distortion to be eliminated from otherwise rational calculation. More recent research, however, suggests that emotion functions not merely as noise but as an integral component of sound judgment. Financial regulators have begun incorporating this understanding into policy design, recognizing that decisions made under conditions of acute emotional arousal, such as panic during a market downturn, often depart substantially from the ___________ that individuals would exhibit under calmer circumstances.

Sociologist William Ogburn observed that when a society undergoes technological change, its material culture tends to advance faster than its nonmaterial culture, meaning norms, laws, and values. He termed the resulting gap cultural lag. The rise of the automobile, for instance, transformed daily mobility long before traffic laws, insurance systems, and urban planning fully adapted to the risks it introduced. A contemporary example can be found in genetic testing, which now allows individuals to learn detailed information about inherited disease risk well before _______________. Cultural lag theory reminds us that technological progress is not automatically matched by social progress.

For much of the twentieth century, memory researchers assumed that once a memory had been consolidated—transformed from a fragile, short-term trace into a stable, long-term representation—it remained essentially fixed, immune to further modification unless the underlying neural circuitry was physically damaged. This assumption, however, was overturned by a body of research demonstrating that _______________, rendering it temporarily susceptible to alteration before it is, in a sense, filed away again. During this narrow window, which typically lasts only a few hours, the memory can be strengthened, weakened, or even subtly distorted by new information encountered in the interim, after which it must undergo a second round of stabilization, a process now widely referred to as reconsolidation. Consequently, what we experience as a stable recollection may actually be a continuously revised construction, reshaped every time it is summoned into conscious awareness and returned to storage.

Social unrest does not always emerge from the poorest conditions; it frequently erupts when circumstances are improving but not quickly enough to satisfy rising expectations. This paradox lies at the heart of relative deprivation theory, which holds that discontent arises less from objective hardship than from a perceived gap between what people expect and what they actually receive. Political scientist Ted Gurr illustrated the pattern with what is often called the J-curve: revolutions tend to follow a period of sustained improvement that is then followed by a sudden reversal, leaving citizens feeling suddenly cheated of gains they had come to regard as their due. Because the theory centers on perception rather than raw statistics, it helps explain why _______________.

Extended producer responsibility, a policy requiring manufacturers to bear responsibility for their products even after use, has been adopted by governments seeking to reduce landfill waste. (A) Critics counter that the policy, whatever its theoretical merits, often fails to reduce waste meaningfully unless paired with rigorous enforcement and transparent reporting requirements. For instance, some manufacturers merely pass the added cost of compliance on to consumers, without making substantive changes to how products are designed. (B) Under such schemes, companies must finance the collection and recycling of goods once consumers discard them, rather than leaving municipalities to absorb the cost. Advocates maintain that shifting this burden onto producers creates a powerful incentive to design products that are more durable, easily disassembled, and readily recyclable from the outset. (C) In contrast, jurisdictions that combine producer responsibility with strict eco-design standards and independent audits tend to witness genuine improvements in recyclability. Therefore, policymakers hoping to harness this approach must resist treating it as self-executing and instead invest in oversight that determines whether producers actually change behavior.

주어진 문장: This question has motivated economists to search for empirical patterns linking national income levels to measurable indicators of environmental quality. Economists have long debated whether prosperity and environmental quality are fundamentally opposed, or whether the relationship between them changes shape as an economy matures. ① The Environmental Kuznets Curve, a hypothesis borrowed from earlier theories of income inequality, proposes that pollution initially rises alongside economic growth before eventually declining once a society crosses a certain threshold of wealth. ② In its early stages, industrializing nations prioritize output over conservation, treating clean air and water as expendable costs of development to be addressed later. ③ 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. ④ Some scholars regard this trajectory as a reassuring paradox, suggesting that the very growth blamed for ecological harm may eventually finance its own repair. ⑤ 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. ① ② ③ ④ ⑤

Sociologist Howard Becker argued that this label often becomes what he called a master status, a single identity that overshadows every other trait a person has and shapes how others treat them from that point onward. 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. ( ① ) According to this view, nearly everyone breaks minor rules at some point, yet only some individuals are singled out, caught, and formally branded as delinquents, criminals, or troublemakers. ( ② ) 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. ( ③ ) This process, sometimes called secondary deviance, illustrates how social reaction can produce the outcome it claims merely to describe. ( ④ ) Critics of harsh punitive policies frequently invoke labeling theory to argue that stigmatizing young offenders may entrench criminal identities rather than correct behavior. ( ⑤ )