영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Imagine two travelers ①preparing for the same trip: one refuses to fly after watching news coverage of a recent plane crash, while the other books a flight without hesitation. Statistically, air travel remains far safer than ②driving the same distance by car, yet vivid, emotionally charged images tend to dominate human judgment more powerfully than dry statistics ever could. This tendency, in which people ③estimate how likely an event is based on how easily examples come to mind rather than on actual data, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. News broadcasts that repeatedly feature rare disasters can leave viewers ④convinced that such events are common, even though official records clearly show the opposite. Advertisers and politicians alike exploit this pattern, knowing that a single striking anecdote often ⑤persuade audiences more effectively than pages of careful statistics ever manage to.

Psychologists studying human judgment often describe the mind as operating through two distinct systems rather than a single unified process. System 1 works ①quickly and automatically, generating impressions and snap judgments without any noticeable sense of effort. System 2, by contrast, is slow, ②deliberate, and demanding, engaged only when a problem requires careful calculation or conscious reasoning. Most daily decisions are handled almost entirely by System 1, which allows people to function ③efficiently without exhausting their limited mental resources. This efficiency comes at a cost, however, because System 1 relies on simple shortcuts that can produce systematic errors, and System 2 is frequently too ④diligent or too occupied to double-check them. As a result, a judgment often feels most confident precisely at the moment when it has skipped the careful scrutiny that could have caught its own mistake, leaving the thinker ⑤unaware of how easily the impression was formed.

In the late nineteenth century, the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus undertook a rigorous investigation of forgetting by serving as his own experimental subject. He memorized thousands of meaningless three-letter syllables so that prior knowledge could not skew his results. After learning each list to perfection, he tested his retention at intervals ranging from twenty minutes to a month later. He recorded how many repetitions were required to relearn the material each time. The resulting curve revealed a consistent pattern: _______________. Roughly half of the acquired information vanished within the first hour alone. Yet whatever survived that initial plunge tended to persist for much longer periods. Ebbinghaus further found that distributing study sessions across several days produced better retention than cramming the same repetition into one sitting. This finding, now central to modern learning theory, implies that revisiting material shortly before it would otherwise be forgotten interrupts the decline of the forgetting curve.

Financial markets occasionally experience episodes in which asset prices rise far beyond any level that careful analysis of underlying fundamentals could justify, a phenomenon commonly attributed to herd psychology. During such episodes, individual investors often conclude that continuing to buy is reasonable simply because so many others are doing the same, rather than because any independent evaluation supports the purchase. Understanding market bubbles thus requires looking beyond conventional economic fundamentals toward the ___________ that binds individual investors into a single, momentum-driven crowd.

Standard economic theory assumes that money is fungible, meaning that a dollar earned as salary is functionally identical to a dollar received as a tax refund or won in a lottery. In practice, however, people routinely sort their finances into separate mental accounts, treating money differently depending on its source or intended purpose, a process economists call mental accounting. The practice thus reveals that financial behavior is guided less by pure arithmetic than by ___________ that money's origin and purpose.

The sunk cost fallacy also complicates decisions in personal relationships and long-term commitments. (A) A person who has invested years in a career path that no longer brings satisfaction may nonetheless continue along that path, reluctant to treat those years as time that cannot be reclaimed regardless of future choices. (B) This reluctance often stems less from genuine hope for improvement than from an unwillingness to admit that the time and effort already invested failed to produce the desired outcome. (C) Recognizing this pattern requires distinguishing between a decision genuinely worth continuing and one being sustained merely to justify past commitment, a distinction that is often uncomfortable to draw honestly.

Prospect theory proposes that the subjective value of money is not a straight line but a curved function, differing sharply from the assumptions of classical economic models. (A) Understanding this curvature allows economists to predict decisions that a simple, linear model of value could never anticipate. (B) This tendency, known as diminishing sensitivity, explains why a shopper barely notices a ten dollar increase on a two thousand dollar purchase, though the same ten dollars would matter enormously as the price of a meal. (C) In the domain of gains, the function bends downward as amounts increase, and a parallel pattern appears among losses, where the curve bends in the opposite direction, yet sensitivity still fades as the amount grows larger.

Even highly capable individuals can make disastrous collective decisions once they are absorbed into a tightly knit group, a phenomenon psychologist Irving Janis termed groupthink. (C) Sociologists extend this analysis beyond small committees, noting that entire organizations can develop cultures that reward conformity and punish employees who raise inconvenient questions. (B) Within cohesive committees, boards, and advisory councils, members often prioritize consensus and group harmony over a rigorous evaluation of alternatives, silencing doubts rather than risking the discomfort of dissent. (A) Historical inquiries into policy failures and corporate disasters frequently reveal that critical information existed within the organization but never reached decision makers, because no one felt safe enough to voice it aloud.

Imagine a man locked inside a room who does not understand a single word of Chinese, yet who possesses a giant rulebook written entirely in English, and who uses it to answer notes slipped in through a slot. (A) This scenario was designed to challenge the assumption that a computer running a sophisticated program truly understands language simply because it produces convincing output. (B) Yet the man inside understands nothing at all; he is merely manipulating shapes according to formal rules, without grasping their meaning. (C) From the perspective of a native speaker reading the responses, the room seems to understand Chinese perfectly.

Critics note a further irony: when something goes wrong, such as a hacked exchange or a lost password, there is often no institution left to appeal to. Blockchain technology was originally promoted as a way to remove the need for trusted middlemen, allowing strangers to exchange value directly and verify transactions through a shared, tamper-resistant ledger. ( ① ) In theory, this design distributes power away from any single institution and toward the network as a whole. ( ② ) In practice, however, a small number of large players have come to dominate many blockchain networks. ( ③ ) They control enough computing power or currency to influence outcomes that were supposed to be decided collectively. ( ④ ) Whether decentralization can survive this concentration of power remains one of the technology's most unresolved questions. ( ⑤ )