영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

As solar and wind power expand ①rapidly across national grids, engineers face a challenge that receives far less public attention than the construction of the generating facilities themselves. Unlike conventional power plants, which can adjust their output to match demand at almost any moment, solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity only when sunlight or wind is available, producing supply that fluctuates ②rarely. One proposed solution involves large-scale battery storage systems, which absorb ③surplus electricity generated during periods of high output and release it later when generation declines. Another approach relies on expanding transmission networks across wider regions, so that electricity generated in a sunny area can be redirected to places experiencing a ④shortfall. Without such investment, integrating renewable energy could ⑤paradoxically undermine the very reliability that modern electricity grids are expected to provide.

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.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a now-famous thought experiment not to describe an actual laboratory procedure, but to expose 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 superposition 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 simultaneously alive and dead until an observer opens the lid and looks inside. Schrödinger intended this image to sound obviously ridiculous, using the cat's absurd fate to question whether _______________.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu introduced the concept of habitus to describe the deeply ingrained dispositions, tastes, and ways of perceiving the world that individuals absorb through years of socialization within a particular social class. Habitus operates below conscious awareness, so that a person's habitus feels entirely natural even though it was produced by specific social conditions. Bourdieu argued that habitus allows privilege to reproduce itself across generations without any explicit coercion, since children raised in advantaged households absorb the tastes and manners that institutions such as elite schools implicitly reward, while children from other backgrounds may find the same institutions subtly unfamiliar. Because habitus feels like personal identity rather than social conditioning, individuals rarely recognize how thoroughly their preferences have been shaped by class position, which helps explain why _______________.

When people recall precisely where they were and what they were doing at the moment they learned of some momentous public event, the resulting memory often feels extraordinarily vivid, as though it had been etched into the mind with photographic precision; researchers have termed such recollections flashbulb memories. Proponents of this concept once argued that the emotional intensity and surprise accompanying such events trigger a distinct neural mechanism that preserves details with unusual fidelity, effectively exempting them from the gradual decay that afflicts ordinary memories. Subsequent longitudinal studies, however, have complicated this picture considerably: when researchers compared accounts gathered within days of an event to accounts gathered years later, they discovered that details had frequently been altered, omitted, or even fabricated, even though the individuals reporting them expressed unwavering confidence in their accuracy. This persistent mismatch between subjective certainty and objective consistency implies that _______________.

A rational approach to decision-making dictates that only future costs and benefits should influence a choice, since resources already spent cannot be recovered regardless of what is decided next. In practice, however, people routinely allow such irrecoverable expenditures, known as sunk costs, to shape their subsequent decisions, a pattern referred to as the sunk cost fallacy. Economists therefore urge decision-makers to evaluate each choice based solely on its prospective outcomes, treating past expenditures as ___________ to the decision at hand.

The discovery of CRISPR gene-editing technology gave scientists a tool precise enough to correct a single mistaken letter in the human genome. Yet editing a gene in a sperm, egg, or early embryo does not simply change one patient; it alters the genetic code passed down to every future generation. Scientific organizations around the world have therefore drawn a careful line, permitting gene editing to treat disease in existing patients while banning any edit that would be inherited by their descendants. Critics worry, however, that _______________.

Emissions trading, a market-based mechanism for curbing greenhouse gases, allows governments to set an overall limit on carbon output while letting firms trade permits within that limit. (A) Under this system, known as cap-and-trade, companies that cut emissions more cheaply than required can sell surplus allowances to firms facing higher reduction costs. Proponents argue that this flexibility lets society reach a given environmental target at the lowest overall cost, since abatement shifts toward whoever can achieve it most economically. (B) Consequently, many economists now advocate combining trading with a price floor, a minimum permit price that keeps the market from collapsing during weak demand, thereby preserving the cost-effectiveness for which trading is valued. (C) Critics, however, contend that trading schemes frequently allocate too many permits, a flaw that has historically depressed carbon prices and blunted incentives to invest in cleaner technology. For example, early phases of several regional markets granted allowances so generously that permit prices collapsed, leaving polluters with little pressure to change their practices.

Cultural relativism transformed fields ranging from anthropology to international development, encouraging researchers to suspend quick judgment and seek local meaning before drawing conclusions. When anthropologists first began systematically studying societies far removed from their own, many unconsciously judged unfamiliar customs against the standards of their home culture, a tendency now known as ethnocentrism. ( ① ) Cultural relativism emerged as a corrective principle, holding that a society's practices should be understood within their own cultural context rather than measured against an outside standard presumed to be universal. ( ② ) Anthropologist Franz Boas argued that no culture possesses an inherently superior set of values, and that apparent oddities, once examined closely, typically serve coherent functions within their own social systems. ( ③ ) Critics caution, however, that taken to an extreme, the principle risks excusing practices that cause genuine harm. ( ④ ) Refusing to judge any custom by outside standards, they note, can make it difficult to criticize injustice wherever it occurs. ( ⑤ )

Weak ties, precisely because they connect otherwise separate networks, transmit novel information more efficiently than the redundant, overlapping ties within a tightly bonded group. Sociologist Mark Granovetter challenged a common assumption when he found that job seekers were more likely to hear about new opportunities from casual acquaintances than from close friends and family. ( ① ) This finding, published as the strength of weak ties, rests on a structural insight. ( ② ) Close friends tend to belong to the same tight social circle and therefore already share most of the same information. ( ③ ) Casual acquaintances, by contrast, typically move in different circles and can act as bridges to information a person would otherwise never encounter. ( ④ ) Granovetter's insight has since been applied well beyond job searches, informing research on how innovations spread and how epidemics travel through a population. ( ⑤ )