영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Time travel to the past has long fascinated physicists and philosophers alike, but it also ①generates a famously troubling contradiction. Suppose a traveler journeyed backward in time and, through some combination of accident and intention, ②prevented 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 ③existed to make the trip in the first place. Yet if the traveler never made the trip, the grandfather would have survived to meet the grandmother after all, ④allowing the traveler to be born and eventually travel back in time. The story therefore loops endlessly, undermining itself at every turn rather than ⑤settling into any stable outcome.

Conventional economic wisdom holds that more options are always preferable to fewer, since a larger set of alternatives increases the likelihood that any individual will find one that precisely ①matches their preferences. Empirical research on consumer behavior, however, complicates this assumption considerably. When shoppers are presented with an extensive array of choices, they frequently experience heightened anxiety about making the wrong selection and, paradoxically, ②become less likely to make any purchase or decision at all. This phenomenon, commonly ③called choice overload, arises because evaluating numerous alternatives demands considerable cognitive effort, and the fear of forgoing a superior but unexamined option can overwhelm the pleasure of selecting from a limited set. Furthermore, individuals who do eventually choose from an overwhelming array often ④reports lower satisfaction with their selection than those who chose from a modest handful of options. Businesses that recognize this dynamic have begun deliberately ⑤curating smaller, carefully selected assortments.

Metacognition, broadly ①defined as the capacity to monitor and evaluate one's own cognitive processes, is often ②treated as a reliable guide to what we actually know, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the correspondence between subjective confidence and objective accuracy is far weaker than intuition would suggest. Individuals routinely overestimate how thoroughly they have understood a passage of text immediately after reading it, a phenomenon partly attributable to the fluency with which the material ③were processed rather than to any genuine grasp of its underlying structure. Because rereading familiar material ④tends to feel effortless, learners frequently mistake that ease of processing for durable comprehension, a misattribution that can lead them to abandon further study prematurely. This gap between perceived and actual mastery, sometimes labeled the illusion of knowing, has practical consequences for education, since students who trust their inflated self-assessments are less likely to seek out the more effortful, retrieval-based strategies that ⑤would otherwise consolidate their learning.

Sociologist Karl Mannheim argued that individuals who come of age during the same historical period tend to share a ①distinctive outlook shaped by the events, technologies, and crises that defined their formative years, a phenomenon he called a generational unit. Because each generation absorbs its foundational assumptions during adolescence and early adulthood, later generations raised amid different circumstances often develop noticeably ②identical values regarding work, authority, and communication, even within the same family. This divergence ③produces what is commonly called a generational gap, most visible when older members of a household interpret a younger relative's habits as a rejection of tradition. Mannheim cautioned against viewing either generation as simply right or wrong, insisting instead that each generation's worldview reflects a ④coherent response to the particular historical conditions it encountered, conditions that inevitably ⑤differ from those faced by earlier and later generations.

Devices that translate brain activity directly into digital commands have moved from laboratory experiments to real medical use, allowing paralyzed patients to control a robotic arm or type a message using thought alone. As the technology ①improves, some developers envision a future in which brain-computer interfaces extend beyond restoring lost function toward enhancing healthy minds. 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 being a tool and start ②reshaping the very identity of the person using it. Neuroethicists argue that mental privacy, the ability to keep one's own thoughts ③exposed to external access or manipulation, may need to be recognized as a fundamental right before this technology becomes ④widespread. This concern is likely to grow ⑤more urgent as the devices become more powerful.

In a classic experiment inspired by Keynes's beauty contest analogy, participants choose a number between zero and one hundred, and the winner is whoever selects the number closest to two-thirds of the average of all guesses submitted. A perfectly rational player, assuming every other participant reasons with unlimited depth, would conclude the equilibrium number is zero. In practice, however, actual guesses rarely converge on zero; most participants stop reasoning after a round or two of imagining what others might guess, producing _______________. This gap between theoretical equilibrium and observed behavior reveals that human reasoning is bounded.

When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh not only the expected outcome of each option but also how painful it would feel to discover later that a different choice had been better. (A) Researchers have found that people feel sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing. (B) Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than selling it, because selling would force them to confront the possibility of having made a clear mistake. (C) This helps explain why so many individuals default to inaction whenever a decision feels uncertain, even when remaining passive is not actually the safer choice.

Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. (C) Robert Merton showed that soldiers who compared their promotion chances to peers within their own slow-moving unit often felt more satisfied than soldiers in units with faster promotion rates. (A) Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, which merely provide a benchmark for self-assessment. (B) This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are measured.

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. (A) 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. (B) 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. (C) Critics point out that growing crops for bioplastic production can compete with food crops for farmland and water, which is why researchers are now exploring bioplastics made from agricultural waste and algae instead of dedicated crops.

This finding is particularly striking given that the two groups of employees faced no difference whatsoever in the financial terms of the plan itself. Employers have long experimented with how retirement savings plans are presented to new hires. ( ① ) In one common arrangement, employees receive a form and must actively check a box to begin contributing a portion of their salary to a savings account. ( ② ) Under this opt-in arrangement, a substantial share of eligible employees never get around to enrolling, often citing simple procrastination rather than genuine disinterest in saving. ( ③ ) When employers instead enroll employees automatically and require them to check a box only if they wish to withdraw, participation rates climb to well over ninety percent. ( ④ ) Only the framing of the choice, not its economic substance, appears to determine whether employees end up saving for retirement. ( ⑤ ) This gap between the two arrangements reveals just how powerfully a default setting can shape decisions that people generally regard as carefully considered.