영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Consider a large heap containing ten thousand grains of sand. Nearly everyone agrees that removing a single grain from such a heap ①leave another heap behind; surely one grain could never make the difference between a heap and a non-heap. Yet if this principle is applied repeatedly, grain by grain, the heap eventually shrinks to a single lonely grain, or even to no grains at all, and logic alone seems to ②force us to accept that this final result still counts as a heap. Something has clearly gone wrong along the way, since no reasonable person would ③call one grain of sand a heap, but pinpointing exactly which single removal transformed a heap into a non-heap seems ④impossible. The puzzle exposes a deep discomfort with vague terms like "heap," "tall," or "bald," concepts that seem to admit no sharp boundary yet are ⑤used confidently in everyday language.

Anyone designing a presentation, a curriculum, or a grocery list should attend to a well-documented pattern in human memory known as the serial position effect. When people ①are asking to recall items from a list right after studying it, they consistently remember the items presented at the beginning and end far better than those buried in the middle. The advantage for early items, called the primacy effect, ②arises because those items receive more rehearsal and are more likely to be transferred into long-term storage before subsequent items compete for attention. The advantage for final items, known as the recency effect, ③occurs because those items remain accessible in short-term memory at the moment of recall. Middle items suffer because they must compete for limited rehearsal opportunities while lacking the stability afforded by extended processing. Communicators who ④ignore this pattern risk burying their most important point where it will predictably be forgotten. A more effective strategy, therefore, ⑤places the crucial message at the beginning or end, precisely where memory proves most reliable.

Hospitals are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence tools that can scan medical images and flag potential tumors faster and, in some trials, more accurately than experienced radiologists. Patients understandably welcome any technology that catches disease earlier, yet the growing reliance on these tools raises an uncomfortable legal question that hospitals ①have only begun to address. When an AI system misses a diagnosis that a human doctor would likely ②have caught, responsibility becomes difficult to assign. The doctor may argue that they simply trusted a tool the hospital ③required them to use, the hospital may argue that the software company guaranteed its accuracy, and the software company may argue that no algorithm can ④expect to be perfect. Until legal systems clarify this chain of responsibility, patients harmed by an algorithmic error may find themselves with no clear party ⑤to hold accountable.

For much of the twentieth century, memory researchers assumed that once a memory ①had 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 the act of retrieval itself ②can destabilizing a previously consolidated memory, ③rendering it temporarily susceptible to alteration before it is, in a sense, filed away again. During this narrow window, ④which 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 ⑤is summoned into conscious awareness and returned to storage.

Picture a woman who receives a plain ceramic mug as a free gift at a conference and, later that afternoon, ①refuses to sell it for anything less than triple its price in the gift shop downstairs. Before she owned the mug, she would never have paid extra for it; once it became hers, however, its value in her mind ②declined sharply, simply because she now possessed it. Researchers have ③repeatedly observed this pattern across many everyday objects, from coffee mugs and concert tickets to office chairs and old furniture inherited from relatives. Owners ④consistently demand more money to give something up than buyers are willing to offer for that very same item, revealing a curious asymmetry rooted purely in possession itself. Some economists argue that this effect explains why negotiations over inherited property so often ⑤collapse, since each side quietly attaches a different value to what it currently holds.

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.

When people recall precisely where they were and what they were doing at the moment they learned of some momentous public event, the resulting memory often feels extraordinarily vivid, as though it had been etched into the mind with photographic precision; researchers have termed such recollections flashbulb memories. Proponents of this concept once argued that the emotional intensity and surprise accompanying such events trigger a distinct neural mechanism that preserves details with unusual fidelity, effectively exempting them from the gradual decay that afflicts ordinary memories. Subsequent longitudinal studies, however, have complicated this picture considerably: when researchers compared accounts gathered within days of an event to accounts gathered years later, they discovered that details had frequently been altered, omitted, or even fabricated, even though the individuals reporting them expressed unwavering confidence in their accuracy. This persistent mismatch between subjective certainty and objective consistency implies that _______________.

For decades, memory researchers assumed that repetition alone determined how well information would be retained, an assumption that an influential theory proposed by Craik and Lockhart eventually overturned. (A) Shallow processing, which involves attending merely to superficial features such as the shape of letters or the sound of a word, produces memory traces that fade quickly and remain vulnerable to interference. Elaborative processing, by contrast, requires connecting new information to existing knowledge, generating meaningful associations, and analyzing semantic content, thereby producing traces that are considerably more durable. (B) Consequently, a student who merely repeats a definition aloud without considering its implications is less likely to retain it than one who relates the concept to a personal example. This distinction reshaped educational practice, encouraging teachers to design tasks that demand comprehension rather than mechanical repetition, since durable memory depends on the depth, not the frequency, of cognitive engagement. (C) According to their framework, what matters most is not how many times a person rehearses material but how deeply that material is processed during encoding.

Imagine two travelers preparing for the same trip: one refuses to fly after watching news coverage of a recent plane crash, while the other books a flight without hesitation. (A) This tendency, in which people estimate how likely an event is based on how easily examples come to mind rather than on actual data, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. (B) Statistically, air travel remains far safer than driving the same distance by car, yet vivid, emotionally charged images tend to dominate human judgment more powerfully than dry statistics ever could. (C) News broadcasts that repeatedly feature rare disasters can leave viewers convinced that such events are common, even though official records clearly show the opposite. Advertisers and politicians alike exploit this pattern, knowing that a single striking anecdote often persuades audiences more effectively than pages of careful statistics ever manage to. Recognizing why memorable examples overshadow objective probability therefore matters, both for making sound personal choices and for noticing when public fear has drifted far from measurable reality.

Convenience installed today, in other words, can quietly become control tomorrow. City governments increasingly market dense networks of surveillance cameras as a straightforward safety upgrade, promising faster emergency response and lower crime rates. ( ① ) In many cases, the technology delivers exactly what it promises, helping investigators identify suspects within hours rather than weeks. ( ② ) Yet the same infrastructure that catches criminals also creates a permanent record of where ordinary, law-abiding citizens go about their daily lives. ( ③ ) Once a camera network exists, its purpose can quietly expand, often without new public debate or explicit approval. ( ④ ) Civil liberties groups argue that a city should decide how much surveillance it wants before the cameras go up, not years afterward when the infrastructure is already impossible to remove. ( ⑤ )