영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Classical economic theory long assumed that decision makers ①gather all relevant information, calculate every possible outcome, and select the single option that maximizes their benefit. Herbert Simon, however, questioned this assumption, ②arguing that human beings operate under real constraints of time, knowledge, and mental capacity that make such exhaustive calculation practically impossible. Instead of searching endlessly for the theoretically perfect choice, people typically stop once they find an option that seems good enough to meet their immediate needs, a strategy Simon ③termed satisficing. A shopper comparing refrigerators, for example, rarely examines every model available; she instead sets a few practical criteria, such as price and size, and selects the first appliance that satisfies them adequately. This approach is not a failure of reasoning but rather a sensible adaptation to a world where information is costly and time is genuinely limited. Consequently, models assuming unlimited rationality often fail to predict actual behavior, while frameworks ④acknowledge these cognitive boundaries offer a far more realistic account of how ordinary decisions are ⑤made.

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.

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 ①attributed to herd psychology. During such episodes, individual investors, observing that prices have already risen substantially, often conclude that continuing to buy is reasonable simply because so many others ②are doing the same, rather than because any independent evaluation supports the purchase. This dynamic can become self-perpetuating: rising prices attract new buyers, whose purchases push prices higher still, thereby ③attracting yet another wave of buyers convinced that the upward trend itself constitutes reliable evidence of underlying value. Historical episodes of speculative excess display a strikingly similar pattern, suggesting that the underlying psychological mechanism ④remain constant even as the specific assets involved change considerably across centuries. Eventually, however, some triggering event, however minor, prompts a portion of investors to reconsider their assumptions, and the resulting wave of selling can ⑤trigger a collapse every bit as rapid and self-reinforcing as the original ascent.

Metacognition, broadly defined as the capacity to monitor and evaluate one's own cognitive processes, is often treated as a ①reliable guide to what we actually know, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the correspondence between subjective confidence and objective accuracy is far weaker than intuition would suggest. Individuals routinely ②overestimate how thoroughly they have understood a passage of text immediately after reading it, a phenomenon partly attributable to the fluency with which the material was processed rather than to any genuine grasp of its underlying structure. Because rereading familiar material tends to feel ③effortless, learners frequently mistake that ease of processing for durable comprehension, a misattribution that can lead them to ④continue further study prematurely. This gap between perceived and actual mastery, sometimes labeled the illusion of knowing, has practical consequences for education, since students who trust their ⑤inflated self-assessments are less likely to seek out the more effortful, retrieval-based strategies that would otherwise consolidate their learning.

Consider a student who ①genuinely intends to study for tomorrow's exam yet, when the evening actually arrives, chooses to watch another episode of a favorite show instead, promising herself she will surely study harder next week. This pattern, in which the pull of an immediate pleasure ②overwhelms the value of a distant benefit, appears again and again across ordinary life, from postponed exercise to delayed savings. People do not necessarily fail to understand that the future reward matters more; rather, whatever happens right now simply feels disproportionately more urgent and vivid than anything scheduled for later. Behavioral economists note that this preference ③weakens considerably once both options are pushed into the future, which is why planning a diet starting next month feels ④impossible compared with skipping dessert tonight. Such inconsistency helps explain why gym memberships go unused and retirement accounts remain ⑤underfunded, despite people's stated intentions.

A small bakery once sold a basic loaf of bread for three dollars and a premium loaf for six dollars, and most customers, uncertain about the added value of the pricier option, simply bought the ①cheaper one. The owner then introduced a third option: a slightly larger premium loaf priced at seven dollars, one that was clearly ②inferior to the six-dollar loaf in terms of value for money. Almost nobody chose the new seven-dollar loaf, yet sales of the six-dollar loaf ③fell sharply, because it now appeared to be an obvious bargain when placed beside the inferior newcomer. This pattern, confirmed across countless pricing experiments in other markets, demonstrates that people ④rarely judge options in isolation; instead, they evaluate choices relative to whatever alternatives happen to be nearby. Businesses have since learned to design such decoys deliberately, not expecting them to be purchased at all, but hoping they will make a specific target option look far more ⑤attractive by comparison.

Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? (A) This puzzle, which researchers named after a furniture retailer famous for selling items that require home assembly, challenges the standard economic assumption that value is determined solely by an object's inherent qualities. (B) In a series of experiments, participants who assembled a plain storage box were willing to pay nearly as much for their own imperfect creation as they were for a professionally built version, despite being fully aware of its flaws. (C) Labor, it seems, functions as a kind of psychological investment: once effort has been poured into a task, individuals become reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly wasted. This tendency helps explain why consumers often prefer products that demand some degree of personal assembly, even when a comparable finished item is available at a lower price and requires no time investment whatsoever.

The influence of the status quo bias extends well beyond personal finance into the design of public policy itself. (A) Consequently, policymakers who wish to encourage socially beneficial behavior, such as organ donation or energy conservation, have increasingly turned to adjusting default settings rather than relying solely on persuasion or financial incentives. (B) Countries that changed their organ donation systems from opt-in to opt-out, for example, observed dramatic increases in the proportion of citizens registered as donors, without any change in the underlying laws governing consent. (C) This outcome demonstrates that the default option itself functions as an implicit recommendation, one that citizens are reluctant to override even when doing so would take only a moment.

Their actual forecasting accuracy, however, has repeatedly proven no better than that of far less experienced participants, and sometimes even worse. Overconfidence among financial professionals presents a puzzling contradiction. ( ① ) Fund managers and analysts typically possess years of specialized training, access to vast quantities of market data, and considerable professional experience. ( ② ) One might reasonably expect such expertise to translate into consistently superior predictions about future market movements. ( ③ ) Longitudinal studies tracking professional forecasts against actual outcomes reveal a persistent gap between confidence and accuracy. ( ④ ) This finding does not imply that expertise is worthless, but it does suggest that expertise can inflate confidence more readily than it improves genuine predictive accuracy. ( ⑤ ) Investors would therefore do well to treat confident predictions, however credentialed their source, with a healthy measure of skepticism.

주어진 문장: This is not because they expect the price to recover, but because selling would force them to confront the possibility of having made a clear mistake. When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh not only the expected outcome of each option but also how painful it would feel to discover later that a different choice had been better. ( ① ) This anticipation of future regret, rather than the size of the potential loss itself, frequently becomes the dominant factor shaping the final decision. ( ② ) Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than selling it. ( ③ ) Researchers have found that people feel sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing, which helps explain why so many individuals default to inaction whenever a decision feels uncertain. ( ④ ) 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. ( ⑤ )