영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Philosopher Robert Nozick asked his readers ①to imagine a machine capable of producing any experience they desired, from writing a great novel to falling in love, all indistinguishable from reality once they were plugged in. Neuroscientists would simply stimulate the brain to generate a lifetime of perfectly satisfying experiences, and the person floating in the tank would have no memory of ever ②choose to enter it. If pleasure and the avoidance of pain were truly all that mattered, as classical hedonism claims, then everyone ③should rush to connect themselves permanently to such a machine. Yet when people actually consider the offer, most hesitate, and many refuse outright. Nozick took this reluctance as evidence ④that human beings care about more than the quality of their internal sensations. People also want to actually be a certain kind of person, and to ⑤maintain genuine contact with a reality beyond their own mind.

John Rawls proposed an unusual thought experiment ①to determine what principles of justice a society ought to adopt. Imagine a group of rational people gathered to design the basic rules of their future society, but ②placed behind what he called a veil of ignorance, a condition under which none of them knows their own race, gender, wealth, talents, or social position in advance. Since no one can predict whether they will be born into privilege or poverty, each person ③has a strong incentive to choose rules that protect the worst-off members of society. Rawls argued that rational people placed in this position would not gamble on inequality; instead, they would favor arrangements that guarantee basic liberties for everyone and ④permitting unequal outcomes only when those outcomes actually benefit the least advantaged. Justice, on this view, is what impartial reasoning ⑤produces once self-interest is stripped away.

Suppose a mysterious being with a near-perfect track record of predicting human choices presents a player with two boxes. Box A always contains a visible thousand dollars, while Box B contains either a million dollars or nothing at all, depending on a prediction the being made before the game even began. If the being predicted the player would take only Box B, it ①emptied the box entirely; if it predicted the player would take both boxes, it left Box B empty. The player may choose to take only Box B, or to take both boxes, and the prediction has already been made and cannot change. One line of reasoning says taking both boxes is ②strictly better, since whatever is already inside the boxes cannot be altered by the player's choice at this point. A second line of reasoning says taking only Box B is better, since the being's near-perfect ③accuracy means that choosing both boxes almost guarantees an empty Box B. This apparent ④conflict between two seemingly sound arguments has made the puzzle a lasting ⑤challenge for decision theory.

Time travel to the past has long fascinated physicists and philosophers alike, but it also generates a famously troubling ①contradiction. Suppose a traveler journeyed backward in time and, through some combination of accident and intention, prevented their own grandfather from ever meeting their grandmother. If the grandfather never had children, the traveler themselves would never have been born, which means the traveler could never have existed to make the trip in the first place. Yet if the traveler never made the trip, the grandfather would have ②survived to meet the grandmother after all, allowing the traveler to be born and eventually travel back in time. The story therefore ③loops endlessly, undermining itself at every turn rather than settling into any stable outcome. Some physicists resolve the paradox by arguing that any consistent timeline must ④permit such self-defeating actions to succeed freely, while others propose that a traveler who alters the past simply branches off into a separate, parallel timeline instead, an idea many find ⑤appealing precisely because it avoids the contradiction altogether.

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 do exactly 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 byproduct 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 rarely found in a backyard compost heap or the open ocean. _______________. 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 benefits that first made bioplastics appealing.

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. Some policymakers initially treated internet access as a convenience, comparable to cable television, rather than as infrastructure essential to modern life. That assumption is increasingly being reconsidered, particularly as _______________. Closing this divide will require more than simply distributing devices.

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.

Factories that once employed hundreds of workers on an assembly line now run with a fraction of that staff, as robotic arms handle tasks that used to require human hands. (A) However, critics point out that earlier transitions unfolded over generations, giving workers time to retrain, whereas today's robots are being deployed much faster. (B) Historical evidence offers some comfort: previous waves of automation eventually created new categories of work that no one had predicted. (C) A factory worker displaced this year, therefore, cannot simply wait for a new industry to emerge decades from now.

When engineers design the software that controls a self-driving car, they inevitably face a question that philosophers have debated for decades: who should the vehicle protect in an unavoidable crash? (A) This gap between the ideal and the personal choice suggests that ethical programming cannot be settled by public opinion alone. (B) Surveys reveal an uncomfortable contradiction: most people say a car should minimize total harm, yet the same people admit they would never buy a vehicle designed to sacrifice its own owner. (C) Manufacturers, regulators, and philosophers must instead agree on transparent rules before autonomous vehicles are allowed to make such decisions on the road.

No further reminders, willpower, or repeated decisions are required once the initial commitment has been made. The design of behavioral savings programs deliberately minimizes the number of decisions a participant must make over time. ( ① ) At the moment of hiring, an employee is asked only once whether to commit future salary increases to retirement savings. ( ② ) If the employee agrees, that single decision governs all future contribution increases automatically. ( ③ ) This stands in sharp contrast to conventional savings advice, which typically asks individuals to make a fresh decision to save more each time their income changes. ( ④ ) Because each additional decision creates another opportunity for procrastination or reconsideration, minimizing the number of required decisions substantially increases the likelihood that saving actually occurs. ( ⑤ ) The program's success, in this sense, stems less from persuading people to value saving more than from reducing the number of moments at which they could choose not to.