영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

When people are ①asked to judge how risky or beneficial a particular technology is, they rarely conduct anything ②resembling a careful cost-benefit analysis. Instead, they consult a quick emotional impression, an instinctive sense of whether the technology feels good or feels bad, and let that impression guide their entire judgment. This mental shortcut, ③known as the affect heuristic, produces a curious pattern that traditional risk theory struggles to explain: activities people like tend to be judged as both safer and more beneficial, while activities they dislike are judged as both riskier and less beneficial, even when no logical relationship between risk and benefit exists. For example, when researchers ④presented a fictional industrial chemical alongside a brief description emphasizing its convenience, participants rated it not only as more useful but also, illogically, as less dangerous. Because emotional impressions form so rapidly and feel so trustworthy, correcting for this heuristic requires deliberate effort; simply presenting more accurate statistics to already anxious or enthusiastic audiences rarely ⑤change their underlying judgment.

Extended producer responsibility, a policy ①requiring manufacturers to bear responsibility for their products even after use, has been adopted by governments seeking to reduce landfill waste. Under such schemes, companies must finance the collection and recycling of goods once consumers ②discard 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 ③disassembled, and readily recyclable from the outset. Critics counter that the policy, whatever its theoretical merits, often fails to reduce waste meaningfully unless ④paired 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. 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 ⑤determine whether producers actually change behavior.

Consider a large heap containing ten thousand grains of sand. Nearly everyone agrees that removing a single grain from such a heap leaves 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 ②grows to a single lonely grain, or even to no grains at all, and logic alone seems to force us to accept that this final result still counts as a heap. Something has clearly ①gone wrong along the way, since no reasonable person would call one grain of sand a heap, but pinpointing exactly which single removal transformed a heap into a non-heap seems ③impossible. The puzzle exposes a deep discomfort with vague terms like "heap," "tall," or "bald," concepts that seem to admit no sharp ④boundary yet are used confidently in everyday language. Some philosophers conclude that classical logic itself may need to be ⑤revised to accommodate the genuine vagueness built into ordinary human language.

A liver no longer has to sit inside a human body to be studied ①closely. By coaxing stem cells to organize themselves within a nutrient-rich gel, scientists can now grow ②miniature three-dimensional structures called organoids, which reproduce much of the architecture and function of a real organ despite being no larger than a grain of rice. Unlike flat cultures grown on a plastic dish, which ③preserve many of the cues that guide normal development, organoids let cells interact in three dimensions much as they would inside the body, yielding tissue that behaves in strikingly ④realistic ways. This fidelity has made organoids invaluable for testing how a drug affects human tissue before any patient is exposed, sparing researchers much of the ⑤burden of relying on animal models alone.

In the late nineteenth century, the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus undertook a rigorous investigation of forgetting by serving as his own experimental subject. He memorized thousands of ①meaningless three-letter syllables so that prior knowledge could not skew his results. After learning each list to perfection, he tested his retention at intervals ranging from twenty minutes to a month later. He ②ignored how many repetitions were required to relearn the material each time. The resulting curve revealed a consistent pattern. Forgetting proceeds rapidly during the initial hours following learning, then gradually decelerates until the rate of loss becomes almost imperceptible. Roughly half of the acquired information ③vanished within the first hour alone. Yet whatever survived that initial plunge tended to ④persist for much longer periods. Ebbinghaus further found that distributing study sessions across several days produced better retention than cramming the same repetition into one sitting. This finding, now central to modern learning theory, implies that revisiting material shortly before it would otherwise be forgotten ⑤interrupts the decline of the forgetting curve.

Conventional economic wisdom holds that more options are always preferable to fewer, since a larger set of alternatives ①increases the likelihood that any individual will find one that precisely matches their preferences. When shoppers are presented with an extensive array of choices, they frequently experience heightened anxiety about making the wrong selection and, paradoxically, become ②less likely to make any purchase or decision at all. Furthermore, individuals who do eventually choose from an overwhelming array often report ③higher satisfaction with their selection than those who chose from a modest handful of options, since the sheer number of unexplored alternatives ④fosters lingering doubt about whether a better choice was overlooked. Businesses that recognize this dynamic have begun deliberately ⑤curating smaller, carefully selected assortments, betting that a narrower range of options can sometimes generate more sales and greater customer satisfaction than abundance.

As private companies develop the technology to mine asteroids for rare metals and water, a legal question has become urgent: who owns the resources of outer space? Existing international treaties state that no nation may claim sovereignty over celestial bodies, but they say remarkably little about whether a private company may extract and sell what it finds there. Some governments have already passed domestic laws granting their own companies rights to material mined in space, a move that other nations view as _______________.

The ecological footprint, a widely cited measure of how much biologically productive land and water a population requires to sustain its consumption, has become one of the most familiar tools for communicating humanity's environmental impact. By converting diverse activities, from driving to eating meat, into a single unit of land area, the measure allows policymakers to grasp whether a lifestyle exceeds what the planet can regenerate. This simplicity, however, is also the source of its most persistent criticism. Because the footprint aggregates dissimilar impacts, such as carbon emissions and water scarcity, into one composite figure, _______________. A region might reduce its footprint by lowering carbon emissions while simultaneously depleting a local aquifer, yet the aggregate number could still appear to improve, concealing damage that demands urgent attention. Furthermore, the method assumes that all bio-productive land is roughly interchangeable, treating a hectare of forest as equivalent to a hectare of farmland, even though the two provide markedly different ecological functions.

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. (A) The water footprint, a concept that extends this narrow view, measures the total volume of freshwater used to produce the goods and services an individual or a nation consumes. 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. (B) 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. (C) 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.

Because the two sums occupy entirely separate mental categories, the household feels no contradiction in treating them so differently. Consider a household that maintains two separate financial habits that, from a purely economic standpoint, appear difficult to reconcile. ( ① ) On one hand, the household carefully sets aside a fixed percentage of its income each month into a long-term retirement account, resisting any temptation to withdraw from it early. ( ② ) On the other hand, the same household carries a persistent balance on a credit card, paying a substantial interest rate simply for the convenience of short-term borrowing. ( ③ ) A purely rational calculation would suggest withdrawing a small amount from savings to eliminate the higher-interest debt, since the interest earned on savings is far lower than the interest owed on the card. ( ④ ) Yet the household rarely considers this option, since retirement savings are mentally categorized as untouchable while credit card debt is treated as a separate, ongoing obligation. ( ⑤ ) This example illustrates how mental accounting can lead to financial choices that persist despite being demonstrably suboptimal.