영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Suppose a mad scientist removed a living brain from its body, ①placed it in a vat of nutrient fluid, and connected its neurons to a supercomputer capable of generating perfectly realistic sensations. The brain would experience a full and convincing world, complete with a sky, a body, and other people, without ever ②suspecting that none of it existed outside the simulation. This scenario, unsettling as it sounds, raises a genuinely difficult question for anyone ③confident in their own perception: how could a person ever prove that they are not that very brain right now? Ordinary evidence cannot help, since any proof gathered through the senses would itself ④be generated by the same simulation being tested. Some philosophers conclude that absolute certainty about the external world is simply unattainable, while others argue that the mere possibility of deception, however vivid, ⑤are not sufficient reason to abandon our everyday trust in what we perceive.

Social unrest does not always emerge from the poorest conditions; it frequently erupts when circumstances ①are improving but not quickly enough to satisfy rising expectations. This paradox lies at the heart of relative deprivation theory, which ②holds that discontent arises less from objective hardship than from a perceived gap between what people expect and what they actually receive. Political scientist Ted Gurr illustrated the pattern with what is often called the J-curve: revolutions tend to follow a period of sustained improvement that is then followed by a sudden reversal, ③left citizens who had grown accustomed to progress feeling suddenly cheated of gains they had come to regard as their due. Because the theory centers on perception rather than raw statistics, it helps explain why relatively prosperous societies can experience intense protest while societies ④mired in long-standing poverty sometimes remain comparatively quiet, ⑤having adjusted their expectations to match a bleak and unchanging reality.

Many households save far less for retirement than conventional financial advice would recommend. Some economists have proposed a savings program in which employees commit today to allocating a portion of their future salary increases toward retirement savings, rather than being asked to reduce their current take-home pay immediately. Field trials of such programs have reported substantial increases in average savings rates. This approach demonstrates that savings policy grounded in realistic assumptions about human psychology can prove considerably more ___________ than policy grounded in the assumption that individuals will always act in strict accordance with their own long-term rational interests.

For much of the twentieth century, memory researchers assumed that once a memory had been consolidated—transformed from a fragile, short-term trace into a stable, long-term representation—it remained essentially fixed, immune to further modification unless the underlying neural circuitry was physically damaged. This assumption, however, was overturned by a body of research demonstrating that _______________, rendering it temporarily susceptible to alteration before it is, in a sense, filed away again. During this narrow window, which typically lasts only a few hours, the memory can be strengthened, weakened, or even subtly distorted by new information encountered in the interim, after which it must undergo a second round of stabilization, a process now widely referred to as reconsolidation. Consequently, what we experience as a stable recollection may actually be a continuously revised construction, reshaped every time it is summoned into conscious awareness and returned to storage.

Classical economic theory assumes that consumers evaluate every price change in the same rational way, weighing marginal benefit against marginal cost regardless of the absolute numbers involved. Behavioral economists, however, have discovered a striking exception: the moment a price drops to exactly zero, people's judgment shifts in a way that ordinary discounting cannot explain. In a well-known laboratory experiment, participants chose between two chocolates, one of higher quality priced at a small fee and one of lower quality offered for free. When both prices were merely reduced by the same amount, most participants still preferred the higher-quality option. Yet once the cheaper chocolate's price was lowered to zero, the majority abruptly switched their preference, even though the price gap between the two options had not actually changed. Researchers explain this reversal by noting that _______________.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed the panopticon, a prison structure in which a central watchtower allows a single guard to observe every cell, while inmates can never determine whether they are actually being watched at any given moment. French theorist Michel Foucault later transformed this architectural idea into a broader theory of power, arguing that the mere possibility of being observed is often sufficient to produce obedient behavior, since _______________. Foucault extended this logic beyond prisons to schools, hospitals, and workplaces, suggesting that modern institutions increasingly rely on continuous, often invisible observation rather than physical force to maintain order.

Extended producer responsibility, a policy requiring 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 discard them, rather than leaving municipalities to absorb the cost. Advocates maintain that _______________. Critics counter that the policy, whatever its theoretical merits, often fails to reduce waste meaningfully unless paired 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 determines whether producers actually change behavior.

For decades, memory researchers assumed that repetition alone determined how well information would be retained, an assumption that an influential theory proposed by Craik and Lockhart eventually overturned. According to their framework, what matters most is _______________. Shallow processing, which involves attending merely to superficial features such as the shape of letters or the sound of a word, produces memory traces that fade quickly and remain vulnerable to interference. Elaborative processing, by contrast, requires connecting new information to existing knowledge, generating meaningful associations, and analyzing semantic content, thereby producing traces that are considerably more durable. Consequently, a student who merely repeats a definition aloud without considering its implications is less likely to retain it than one who relates the concept to a personal example. This distinction reshaped educational practice, encouraging teachers to design tasks that demand comprehension rather than mechanical repetition, since durable memory depends on the depth, not the frequency, of cognitive engagement.

Economists traditionally measured a community's wealth in terms of factories, income, or infrastructure, yet sociologists increasingly point to a less visible resource: social capital, the networks of trust and reciprocity that allow people to cooperate for mutual benefit. (C) However, social capital is not uniformly beneficial; tightly bonded networks can also exclude outsiders and reinforce existing inequality. (B) Communities rich in social capital tend to enjoy lower crime and more effective local government, because neighbors who trust one another can coordinate informally. (A) For this reason, researchers increasingly distinguish between bonding capital, which strengthens ties within a single group, and bridging capital, which connects otherwise separate communities.

주어진 문장: Such consistency across repeated trials suggests that the pattern is a genuine feature of human cognition, not random noise. 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. ( ① ) A perfectly rational player, assuming every other participant reasons with unlimited depth, would conclude the equilibrium number is zero, since reasoning about others' reasoning collapses the average toward that single point. ( ② ) 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 average guesses that cluster between twenty and thirty-five. ( ③ ) This gap between theoretical equilibrium and observed behavior reveals that human reasoning is bounded, capable of anticipating a few steps ahead but rarely capable of iterating the process indefinitely. ( ④ ) Economists use this game as a diagnostic tool, since the number a person submits reveals how many levels of strategic thinking that person is willing to perform. ( ⑤ ) This is a measure that idealized rational agents could never provide.