영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Devices that translate brain activity directly into digital commands have moved from laboratory experiments to real medical use, ①allowing paralyzed patients to control a robotic arm or type a message using thought alone. As the technology improves, some developers envision a future in which brain-computer interfaces extend beyond restoring lost function ②toward enhancing healthy minds, offering faster memory or expanded attention to anyone ③willing to undergo the procedure. This prospect raises a philosophical question that medicine alone cannot answer: if a device can alter memory, mood, or decision-making, at what point does the assistance stop ④being a tool and start reshaping the very identity of the person using it. Neuroethicists argue that mental privacy, the ability to keep one's own thoughts free from external access or manipulation, may need ⑤recognizing as a fundamental right before this technology becomes widespread.

Two patients diagnosed with the same disease and prescribed the same medication can respond in strikingly different ways, one ①recovering 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 ②buried in each patient's genome, differences that determine how efficiently 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, ③replaced a strategy once described as one-size-fits-all with something closer to a tailored fit. This approach has proven especially valuable in cancer treatment, where tumors from two patients with the same diagnosis may carry entirely different genetic mutations ④that respond to entirely different drugs. Widespread adoption still faces real obstacles, since genetic sequencing remains expensive in many regions and few doctors have been trained ⑤to interpret the flood of genetic data such tests now produce.

When people estimate the value of an unfamiliar product, they rarely rely on objective calculation alone; instead, they anchor their judgment to whatever numerical reference ①happens to be presented first, however arbitrary that number may be. This phenomenon, ②known as the anchoring effect, exerts a disproportionate influence on price perception precisely because initial figures function as a kind of cognitive gravity that subsequent estimates struggle to escape. A shopper who ③first sees a jacket listed at $300 before it is marked down to $150 will likely judge the discounted price as an excellent bargain. Retailers, well aware of this bias, frequently display an inflated "original price" beside a discounted one, not because the higher figure is meaningful, but because it ④recalibrate customers' expectations. Even professionals are not immune: negotiators who open with an extreme initial offer often secure more favorable final terms than those ⑤who begin with a moderate one.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu introduced the concept of habitus to describe the deeply ingrained dispositions, tastes, and ways of perceiving the world ①that individuals absorb through years of socialization within a particular social class. Habitus operates below conscious awareness, ②shaping everything from posture and accent to preferences in food, art, and leisure, so that a person's habitus feels entirely natural even though it ③was produced by specific social conditions. Bourdieu argued that habitus allows privilege to reproduce itself across generations without any explicit coercion, since children raised in advantaged households absorb the tastes and manners that institutions such as elite schools implicitly ④reward, while children from other backgrounds may find the same institutions subtly unfamiliar. Because habitus feels like personal identity rather than social conditioning, individuals rarely recognize how thoroughly their preferences ⑤having been shaped by class position.

Blockchain technology was originally promoted as a way ①to remove the need for trusted middlemen, allowing strangers to exchange value directly and verify transactions through a shared, tamper-resistant ledger rather than through a bank or government agency. In theory, this design ②distributes power away from any single institution and toward the network as a whole. In practice, however, a small number of large players have come to dominate many blockchain networks, ③controlled enough computing power or currency to influence outcomes that were supposed to be decided collectively. Critics note a further irony: when something goes wrong, there is often no institution left ④to appeal to, since the entire system was designed precisely to eliminate that kind of central authority. Whether decentralization can survive this concentration of power ⑤remains one of the technology's most unresolved questions.

Change blindness refers to a striking limitation of human perception in which observers fail to notice substantial ① alterations to a visual scene, provided the change occurs during a brief disruption such as an eye movement or a momentary obstruction. In a now-famous demonstration, researchers showed participants two versions of a photograph in alternation ②, separated by a short blank screen, and asked them to identify what had changed. Even when an entire building disappeared or a person's clothing shifted color, many viewers stared at the picture without detecting anything unusual ③. This phenomenon occurs because visual attention, rather than passively recording every detail like a camera, actively selects only a narrow ④ subset of information for processing at any given moment. Whatever falls outside that narrow spotlight is represented only sparsely, if at all, leaving it vulnerable to being overwritten without notice. Consequently, change blindness demonstrates that our impression of a rich, complete visual world is, to a surprising extent, an illusion constructed by the mind, not an unreliable ⑤ record of external reality.

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.

A liver no longer has to sit inside a human body to be studied closely. (A) Unlike flat cultures grown on a plastic dish, which lose 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 realistic ways. (B) This fidelity has made organoids invaluable for testing how a drug affects human tissue before any patient is exposed, and some laboratories have even grown organoids from a single patient's own cells, raising the possibility of trialing a treatment on a miniature copy of that patient's organ. (C) By coaxing stem cells to organize themselves within a nutrient-rich gel, scientists can now grow miniature three-dimensional structures called organoids, which reproduce much of the architecture and function of a real organ.

Bacteria have been cutting up invading viral DNA for billions of years, long before any scientist thought to borrow the trick for use in a laboratory. (A) Once Cas9 arrives at the target site, it slices both strands of the DNA helix, and the cell's own repair machinery rushes in to mend the cut, often introducing a small change in the process. (B) By supplying the cell with a template during this repair step, scientists can direct that machinery to insert a specific new sequence, and what once required years of painstaking work to alter a single gene can now be accomplished within days. (C) The CRISPR-Cas9 system, as it is now known, relies on a short guide RNA that matches a specific DNA sequence, leading a scissor-like enzyme called Cas9 directly to that exact location in the genome.

Long before humans learned to drill for oil, microorganisms had already mastered the art of converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into stored chemical energy. (A) Modern biofuel research borrows this ability, cultivating algae or engineered bacteria in large tanks where they can be coaxed into producing oils and sugars that can be refined into fuel usable in existing engines. (B) Unlike crops grown for corn-based ethanol, which compete directly with food production for arable land, many algae strains can thrive in shallow ponds, wastewater, or even coastal seawater unsuitable for conventional agriculture. (C) Engineers have also learned to boost oil yield through genetic tinkering, yet producing biofuel at a cost competitive with fossil fuel remains difficult, since harvesting and processing the organisms consumes a substantial share of the energy the fuel itself will eventually provide.