영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

When individuals face uncertainty about how to behave, they frequently look to the actions of others for guidance, ①assuming that a behavior adopted by many people is more likely to be correct or appropriate than one adopted by few, a tendency known as social proof. This reliance on collective behavior can be remarkably efficient, since it allows individuals ②to benefit from the accumulated judgment of a crowd without having to gather and evaluate every relevant fact themselves. However, social proof can also lead entire groups astray when the initial signal that ③trigger imitation is itself unreliable or coincidental. A restaurant that happens to attract a long line early in the evening may continue attracting customers throughout the night simply because passersby ④interpret the queue as evidence of superior quality. Financial markets exhibit an analogous pattern: investors who observe others buying a particular asset often join the buying themselves, ⑤reasoning that so many participants cannot all be mistaken.

Individuals confronted with a set of options frequently ①default to whichever alternative requires no active decision at all, a tendency scholars term the status quo bias. Rather than weighing the merits of each available choice afresh, decision-makers often treat the current arrangement as a reasonable baseline simply because it already exists, even when ②switching would plainly serve their interests better. This pattern becomes especially apparent in contexts where enrollment in a program ③depend on a default setting. When employees must actively opt into a retirement savings plan, participation rates remain stubbornly low; yet when the same plan is presented as automatic unless an employee opts out, participation rises dramatically, despite the fact that the underlying financial terms ④are identical in both cases. Two forces appear to drive this asymmetry: first, the cognitive effort required to evaluate alternatives, and second, an aversion to the potential regret that ⑤might follow an active decision that turns out poorly.

Anyone who has ever promised to finish a project "by Friday," only ①to still being working on it weeks later, has experienced the planning fallacy firsthand. This term describes the persistent tendency of individuals and organizations ②to underestimate how long a task will take, how much it will cost, and how many complications will inevitably arise. What makes this bias particularly stubborn is that awareness of past failures rarely leads to more accurate predictions; a construction firm that ③finished its last three projects late will often insist, with genuine confidence, that this next project will be different. Researchers argue that planners focus almost exclusively on the specific steps of the current task while ④ignoring the broader statistical record of similar projects that came before. Until such external correction becomes standard practice, ambitious deadlines will likely continue to be ⑤broken with remarkable consistency.

When people are ①asked to judge how risky or beneficial a particular technology is, they rarely conduct anything ②resembling a careful cost-benefit analysis. Instead, they consult a quick emotional impression, an instinctive sense of whether the technology feels good or feels bad, and let that impression guide their entire judgment. This mental shortcut, ③known as the affect heuristic, produces a curious pattern that traditional risk theory struggles to explain: activities people like tend to be judged as both safer and more beneficial, while activities they dislike are judged as both riskier and less beneficial, even when no logical relationship between risk and benefit exists. For example, when researchers ④presented a fictional industrial chemical alongside a brief description emphasizing its convenience, participants rated it not only as more useful but also, illogically, as less dangerous. Because emotional impressions form so rapidly and feel so trustworthy, correcting for this heuristic requires deliberate effort; simply presenting more accurate statistics to already anxious or enthusiastic audiences rarely ⑤change their underlying judgment.

Identical information can provoke strikingly different reactions depending on how it is worded, a phenomenon economists call the framing effect. Patients told that a surgical procedure carries a ninety percent survival rate tend to ①consent to it far more readily than patients told that the same procedure carries a ten percent mortality rate. This discrepancy arises because language does more than transmit facts; it also supplies an ②emotional lens through which those facts are interpreted. Positive framing, which emphasizes what will be ③preserved or gained, tends to encourage risk-averse choices, whereas negative framing, which emphasizes what might be lost, often pushes people toward ④safer alternatives in an attempt to avoid the loss altogether. Marketers, healthcare providers, and policymakers alike ⑤exploit this asymmetry, sometimes to help audiences make sounder decisions and sometimes merely to steer them toward a predetermined conclusion.

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 happens to be presented first, however ①arbitrary that number may be. This phenomenon exerts a ②disproportionate influence on price perception precisely because initial figures function as a kind of cognitive gravity that subsequent estimates struggle to escape. A shopper who first sees a jacket listed at $300 before it is marked down to $150 will likely judge the discounted price as an excellent ③bargain, regardless of whether $150 actually reflects the jacket's true worth. Retailers, well aware of this bias, frequently display a ④deflated "original price" beside a discounted one, not because the higher figure is meaningful, but because it recalibrates customers' expectations. Even professionals are not immune: negotiators who open with an extreme initial offer often secure more ⑤favorable final terms than those who begin with a moderate one.

Classical economic models typically assume that people discount future rewards at a constant rate, valuing a reward received later somewhat less than an identical reward received now, but doing so ①consistently across all time horizons. Empirical observation, however, reveals a different pattern: people apply a much ②steeper discount to the immediate future than to the distant future. When the reward or cost in question lies safely in the future, its emotional weight remains ③vivid, allowing rational long-term goals to dominate one's stated intentions. Once that same reward or cost draws near, however, its immediacy triggers a disproportionately strong emotional pull, frequently ④overriding the very plans made earlier with such apparent confidence. This dynamic helps explain chronic procrastination, since tasks that carry long-term benefits are perpetually ⑤deferred in favor of activities offering more immediate satisfaction.

When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh how painful it would feel to discover later that a different choice had been better. This anticipation of future regret frequently becomes the dominant factor shaping the final decision. Researchers have found that people feel sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing, _______________. Ironically, this strategy of avoiding regret can itself produce outcomes that are later regretted even more deeply than the ones it was originally designed to prevent.

It would be comforting to believe that anything sufficiently large or obvious appearing within our field of vision will automatically capture our attention, yet decades of research into inattentional blindness suggest otherwise. (A) This failure does not stem from a defect in the eyes, which register the stimulus perfectly well, but from the fact that conscious perception depends heavily on where attention has been directed. (B) When people are absorbed in a demanding task, such as counting how many times a ball is passed between players, they frequently fail to notice an unexpected and conspicuous event unfolding in plain sight, even something as unlikely as a person in a costume walking through the scene. (C) Policymakers ought to take this finding more seriously than they currently do, because it implies that simply placing a warning sign within someone's visual range offers no guarantee that it will be consciously registered. Designing safer environments, therefore, requires accounting for the limits of attention itself, not merely assuming that visibility alone ensures awareness.

주어진 문장: This asymmetry alone can be enough to prevent an otherwise reasonable deal from ever being reached. Picture a woman who receives a plain ceramic mug as a free gift at a conference and, later that afternoon, refuses to sell it for anything less than triple its price in the gift shop downstairs. ( ① ) Before she owned the mug, she would never have paid extra for it; once it became hers, however, its value in her mind rose sharply, simply because she now possessed it. ( ② ) Researchers have repeatedly observed this pattern across many everyday objects, from coffee mugs and concert tickets to office chairs and old furniture inherited from relatives. ( ③ ) Owners consistently demand more money to give something up than buyers are willing to offer for that very same item, revealing a curious asymmetry rooted purely in possession itself. ( ④ ) Some economists argue that this effect explains why negotiations over inherited property so often collapse, since each side quietly attaches a different value to what it currently holds. ( ⑤ ) Understanding this bias, therefore, helps explain why simply owning something, even briefly, can distort how fairly people judge its true worth.