영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

문제 1

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt devised a scenario ①to challenge a long-held assumption about moral responsibility: that a person can be blamed for an action only if they could genuinely have done otherwise. Imagine a man named Black who secretly implants a device in another man's brain, ②ready to force a particular decision if the second man shows any sign of choosing differently. The second man, however, decides entirely on his own to perform the very action Black wanted, and the device never ③activating at all. Black's hidden mechanism made it impossible for the man ④to have chosen otherwise, yet most people still consider him fully responsible for what he freely decided to do. Frankfurt used this scenario to argue that moral responsibility depends on the actual reasoning behind a choice, not on some abstract guarantee that an alternative path ⑤remained available the entire time.

문제 2

The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively simple question. If every plank of a wooden ship ①is 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 small to ②erasing the ship's identity. The puzzle grows far sharper, however, once a second twist is introduced. Suppose a careful collector gathered every discarded plank and reassembled them into a second vessel, ③built exactly as the original once stood. Two ships would then exist side by side, each with an equal claim ④to being the genuine 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.

문제 3

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.

문제 4

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a now-famous thought experiment not to describe an actual laboratory procedure, but to ①conceal an absurdity hidden within a leading interpretation of quantum mechanics. Imagine a cat sealed inside a closed box together with a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and a vial of poison gas rigged to break open the instant the atom decays. Because the atom's decay is governed by genuine quantum randomness, standard quantum theory describes the atom, before anyone looks, as existing in a ②superposition of having decayed and not having decayed at the same time. If the theory is applied consistently to the entire box, the cat itself would have to be considered ③simultaneously alive and dead until an observer opens the lid and looks inside. Schrödinger intended this image to sound obviously ④ridiculous, using the cat's absurd fate to question whether the act of observation truly determines physical reality, or whether the mathematics is simply being pushed ⑤further than it was ever meant to go.

문제 5

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.

문제 6

A biosensor works by pairing a biological component, such as an enzyme or antibody, with an electronic device that converts a biological reaction into a signal a computer can ①read. When the target molecule, whether glucose in blood or a trace of a pathogen, binds to the biological component, it triggers a ②massive measurable change that the device translates into a readable number. This design has already transformed diabetes management, letting patients monitor blood sugar ③continuously through a small sensor worn under the skin rather than pricking a finger several times a day. Engineers are now racing to extend the same principle to detect subtler targets, from cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream to trace ④contaminants in drinking water. The central challenge is not detecting the target but doing so reliably outside a controlled laboratory, since a sensor that performs well on a clean lab bench can behave ⑤erratically once exposed to a real body or a real river.

문제 7

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.

문제 8

A hamburger patty need not come from a slaughtered animal at all if a small sample of muscle cells can be persuaded to multiply inside a steel tank. (A) Inside a bioreactor, the cells multiply across scaffolding designed to encourage them to align into fibers, gradually thickening into something that begins to resemble muscle tissue rather than a shapeless clump of cells. (B) Cultured meat begins with a biopsy of animal muscle tissue, from which scientists isolate cells capable of dividing repeatedly, then feed those cells a nutrient broth that supplies the sugars, proteins, and minerals an animal's bloodstream would normally provide. (C) Supporters argue that because the process never requires raising and slaughtering a whole animal, it could shrink the land, water, and greenhouse gas emissions associated with conventional meat production, though skeptics counter that producing the specialized broth at scale remains prohibitively expensive.

문제 9

Two drivers, equally distracted by their phones, run a red light in exactly the same careless manner. (A) Although both drivers behaved identically and made exactly the same reckless choice, society judges them very differently: one faces criminal charges and lifelong guilt, while the other receives, at most, a minor traffic ticket. (B) Philosophers call this troubling asymmetry moral luck, since factors entirely outside a person's control end up determining how severely we judge their moral character. (C) By pure chance, a child happens to be crossing the street in front of one driver but not the other, and the first driver kills the child while the second drives through safely.

문제 10

Ordinary evidence cannot help here, since any proof gathered through the senses would itself be generated by the same simulation being tested. Suppose a mad scientist removed a living brain from its body, placed it in a vat of nutrient fluid, and connected its neurons to a supercomputer capable of generating perfectly realistic sensations. ( ① ) The brain would experience a full and convincing world, complete with a sky, a body, and other people, without ever suspecting that none of it existed outside the simulation. ( ② ) This scenario, unsettling as it sounds, raises a genuinely difficult question for anyone confident in their own perception: how could a person ever prove that they are not that very brain right now? ( ③ ) Some philosophers conclude that absolute certainty about the external world is simply unattainable. ( ④ ) Others argue, however, that the mere possibility of deception, however vivid, is not sufficient reason to abandon our everyday trust in what we perceive. ( ⑤ ) Ordinary caution, after all, can never fully settle which side is correct.