영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

When an oil tanker ruptures and crude spreads across open water, cleanup crews increasingly reach not only for skimmers and floating booms but also for something far smaller: bacteria that ①eat oil. Certain naturally occurring microbes possess enzymes capable of ②breaking hydrocarbon molecules apart, using the carbon as an energy source and gradually converting a toxic slick into carbon dioxide and harmless byproducts. Bioremediation, as this approach is called, works far more slowly than mechanical cleanup, often ③taking months rather than days, but it can reach contamination trapped in soil or sediment that skimmers and booms can never reach. Scientists have learned to accelerate the process by adding nutrients ④that help native microbial populations multiply faster, or in some cases by introducing engineered strains selected specifically for their appetite for a particular pollutant. Because the method relies on living organisms rather than heavy machinery, it also tends ⑤leave a far gentler footprint on the surrounding ecosystem than excavation or chemical treatment ever could.

Long before calculus existed, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of paradoxes designed to show that motion itself might be logically ①impossible. In one version, a swift runner named Achilles races a slow-moving tortoise that is given a modest head start. Common sense insists that Achilles will quickly ②overtake the tortoise, yet Zeno's argument suggests otherwise. By the time Achilles reaches the tortoise's starting point, the tortoise has crawled a little further ahead, and this process repeats endlessly, generating an infinite number of ③smaller and smaller gaps that Achilles must apparently cross one after another. Zeno concluded that Achilles could never actually catch the tortoise, a conclusion that plainly ④contradicts everyday experience. Modern mathematics eventually resolved the paradox by showing that an infinite series of shrinking distances can still sum to a finite total, ⑤preventing motion from ever being completed in a finite amount of time.

Philosopher Robert Nozick asked his readers to imagine a machine capable of producing any experience they ①desired, 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 choosing to enter it. If pleasure and the avoidance of pain were truly all that mattered, as classical hedonism claims, then everyone should ②rush to connect themselves permanently to such a machine. Yet when people actually consider the offer, most ③eagerly accept, and many refuse outright. Nozick took this reluctance as evidence that human beings care about more than the quality of their internal sensations; people also want to actually ④do certain things, to actually be a certain kind of person, and to maintain genuine ⑤contact with a reality beyond their own mind.

When a country physician named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had caught cowpox seemed immune to smallpox, he set in motion a medical revolution without fully ①understanding why it worked. For nearly two centuries afterward, vaccine development proceeded largely by trial and error, weakening or killing a pathogen and testing whether the resulting preparation could train the immune system without causing disease itself. This method produced ②genuine successes, eventually eliminating smallpox worldwide and reducing diseases such as polio and measles, but each new vaccine still required ③seconds of laboratory work with no guarantee of success. Advances in molecular biology eventually allowed researchers to isolate a single protein from a pathogen's surface rather than using the whole organism, producing vaccines with ④fewer side effects and a more predictable safety profile. The most recent shift, toward delivering genetic instructions rather than proteins themselves, represents the latest chapter in a story that began with an eighteenth-century doctor's curiosity about a ⑤puzzling immunity among dairy workers.

The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively ①simple question. If every plank of a wooden ship is replaced one by one over many years, is the vessel that eventually results still the same ship it once was? Most people's first instinct is to answer yes, since each individual replacement seems too ②small to erase the ship's identity. The puzzle grows far ③duller, however, once a second twist is introduced. Suppose a careful collector gathered every discarded plank and reassembled them into a second vessel, built exactly as the original once stood. Two ships would then exist side by side, each with an equal claim to being the ④genuine one, and no obvious way to decide between them. Philosophers return to this old story again and again, not because they care about timber, but because it forces us to ask whether identity depends on continuous material, continuous form, or some deeper thread that neither one can fully ⑤explain.

Philosophers often pair the classic trolley problem with a companion case designed to test whether our moral intuitions are actually consistent. Imagine a brilliant surgeon who has five patients, each dying from the failure of a different organ, and one healthy visitor in the waiting room whose organs happen to be a perfect match for all five. If the surgeon secretly killed the healthy visitor and transplanted the organs, five lives would be saved at the cost of one, exactly the same arithmetic used to justify diverting a runaway trolley onto a track with a single worker. Yet almost everyone who accepts the trolley diversion recoils immediately at the idea of the surgeon cutting up an unwilling patient, even though the numbers are identical in both cases. Philosophers use this contrast to argue that _______________.

As cities have expanded across landscapes once covered with absorbent soil, impervious surfaces have turned stormwater from a resource that recharges groundwater into a hazard that floods streets and carries pollutants into waterways. Green infrastructure, which mimics the hydrological functions that natural landscapes once performed, offers planners _______________. Rain gardens, shallow depressions planted with deep-rooted vegetation, are designed to capture runoff from rooftops, allowing it to filter slowly through soil before reaching underground aquifers. Permeable pavement, made of porous materials that let water pass directly through, serves a similar purpose along sidewalks, where asphalt would remain impenetrable. For example, cities that replaced pavement with permeable alternatives have reported notable reductions in flooding during storms that once overwhelmed sewers. However, engineers caution that green infrastructure cannot entirely replace conventional pipes in dense cores, where heavy runoff still requires structural reinforcement. Consequently, municipalities now regard green and gray infrastructure as complementary systems, each compensating for the other's limitations.

A single fertilized egg eventually gives rise to every cell type in the human body, from neurons to bone, a feat that has fascinated biologists for more than a century. (A) Because harvesting these cells traditionally required destroying a human embryo, the research provoked ethical objections fierce enough to slow funding and legislation in several countries for years. (B) A breakthrough arrived when scientists discovered that ordinary adult skin cells could be reprogrammed into a state resembling embryonic versatility without ever touching an embryo, opening a path for stem cell research that far more scientists and funding agencies are now willing to support. (C) Embryonic stem cells retain much of that original versatility, capable in principle of developing into almost any tissue, which is why researchers have long viewed them as a promising raw material for repairing damaged organs.

German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that the psychological experience of city life differs fundamentally from life in small towns, primarily because urban residents are bombarded with a much greater volume of stimuli than the human nervous system evolved to process. (B) This detachment, while sometimes criticized as cold or impersonal, also grants urban residents a distinctive freedom, since so few people know or judge them personally. (A) To cope with this constant sensory overload, Simmel proposed, city dwellers develop what he called a blasé attitude, treating most encounters with calculated detachment rather than genuine engagement. (C) Simmel therefore viewed anonymity as a double-edged feature of modern life, one that isolates individuals from deep communal bonds while liberating them from constant surveillance.

Erving Goffman extended this framework with his dramaturgical approach, comparing social life to a theatrical performance in which individuals manage impressions, present different faces in different settings, and carefully control what audiences see backstage versus onstage. Symbolic interactionism approaches society not as a fixed structure imposed from above but as something continuously constructed through everyday face-to-face interaction, in which individuals interpret and respond to the symbolic meanings that objects, actions, and other people hold for them. ( ① ) Sociologist George Herbert Mead argued that the self itself emerges through this interactive process, as individuals learn to see themselves from the perspective of others. ( ② ) He called this process the internalization of the generalized other, a composite sense of society's expectations. ( ③ ) Unlike structural theories that emphasize large institutions, symbolic interactionism focuses on the small, repeated exchanges through which shared meaning is negotiated. ( ④ ) Even stable social structures, in this view, ultimately depend on countless everyday interactions. ( ⑤ )