영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Classical economic theory assumes that consumers evaluate every price change in the same ①rational way, weighing marginal benefit against marginal cost regardless of the absolute numbers involved. Behavioral economists, however, have discovered a ②striking 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 ③avoided the higher-quality option. Yet once the cheaper chocolate's price was lowered to zero, the majority ④abruptly switched their preference, even though the price gap between the two options had not actually changed. Researchers explain this reversal by noting that a free item carries no perceived risk of loss, which makes it feel disproportionately ⑤attractive compared with any option that still requires payment, however small.

A cluster of neurons smaller than a pea can now spontaneously organize itself into layered structures that ①mimic, in miniature, the architecture of a developing human brain. Grown from stem cells coaxed to follow the same developmental cues that guide an embryo, these brain organoids have begun firing electrical signals in patterns that ②sharply resemble the activity recorded in an infant's brain. For researchers studying disorders such as autism or schizophrenia, this offers something long unavailable: a living model of human brain development that can be observed and manipulated directly, without ever touching an actual patient. Because organoids lack sensory organs, a body, or any connection to the outside world, most neuroscientists argue that the structures ③cannot generate anything resembling subjective experience, however brain-like their electrical activity may appear. Even so, the pace at which these organoids are growing more ④complex has convinced some ethicists that the field would benefit from establishing clear ⑤boundaries now, before the science outruns the conversation about what it means.

Philosophers often pair the classic trolley problem with a companion case designed to test whether our moral intuitions are actually ①consistent. Imagine a brilliant surgeon who has five patients, each dying from the failure of a different organ, and one healthy visitor in the waiting room whose organs happen to be a perfect ②match for all five. If the surgeon secretly killed the healthy visitor and transplanted the organs, five lives would be saved at the cost of one, exactly the same arithmetic used to justify diverting a runaway trolley onto a track with a single worker. Yet almost everyone who accepts the trolley diversion ③recoils immediately at the idea of the surgeon cutting up an unwilling patient, even though the numbers are identical in both cases. Philosophers use this contrast to argue that outcomes alone can ④fully explain our moral judgments, since something about directly using a person's body as a mere means appears to matter deeply to most people's sense of ⑤right and wrong.

The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively ①simple question. If every plank of a wooden ship is replaced one by one over many years, is the vessel that eventually results still the same ship it once was? Most people's first instinct is to answer yes, since each individual replacement seems too ②small to erase the ship's identity. The puzzle grows far ③duller, however, once a second twist is introduced. Suppose a careful collector gathered every discarded plank and reassembled them into a second vessel, built exactly as the original once stood. Two ships would then exist side by side, each with an equal claim to being the ④genuine one, and no obvious way to decide between them. Philosophers return to this old story again and again, not because they care about timber, but because it forces us to ask whether identity depends on continuous material, continuous form, or some deeper thread that neither one can fully ⑤explain.

People routinely seek out information that confirms what they already believe while ①overlooking or dismissing evidence that contradicts those beliefs, a pattern known as confirmation bias. This tendency operates not because individuals are deliberately dishonest, but because the mind finds it cognitively less ②taxing to absorb information that fits an existing framework than to reconstruct that framework from scratch. Investors who believe a particular company will succeed, for instance, tend to interpret ambiguous news about that company ③unfavorably, while investors who are skeptical of the same company interpret identical news unfavorably, even though both groups are examining the same underlying facts. Social media platforms can ④intensify this effect by algorithmically presenting users with content similar to what they have previously engaged with. Over time, such selective exposure can harden initial impressions into convictions that feel objectively verified, even though they rest on a systematically ⑤filtered sample of evidence.

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.

Behavioral economists have long observed that people tend to feel the pain of losing something more intensely than the pleasure of gaining an equivalent amount, a tendency known as loss aversion. Consider an investor who refuses to sell a declining stock, clinging to the hope that its price will eventually recover, even when all available evidence indicates that selling and reinvesting elsewhere would be more rational. As a result, loss aversion frequently pushes individuals toward ___________ rather than toward the outcome that would maximize their overall welfare.

Individuals rarely evaluate their own lives in isolation; instead, they measure their achievements, possessions, and status against a reference group, a set of people they use as a standard for comparison. (C) Robert Merton showed that soldiers who compared their promotion chances to peers within their own slow-moving unit often felt more satisfied than soldiers in units with faster promotion rates. (A) Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, which merely provide a benchmark for self-assessment. (B) This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are measured.

The framing effect becomes especially consequential in public health communication, where the stakes of a misunderstood message can be severe. (A) Campaigns that frame vaccination as an opportunity to protect ninety-five percent of recipients from a disease tend to generate calm, sustained interest, since the message emphasizes what individuals stand to gain. (B) By contrast, campaigns that frame the same behavior negatively, warning that failure to act will result in a specific number of preventable illnesses, tend to provoke stronger short-term compliance, though sometimes at the cost of inducing anxiety rather than genuine understanding. (C) Public health officials must therefore weigh not only whether a message is factually accurate but also whether its emotional framing serves the audience's long-term well-being.

This malfunction, harmless as it sounds, reveals something troubling: memory and psychological continuity alone cannot fully settle what personal identity actually requires. Imagine a teleportation device that scans every atom in your body, transmits that information to a distant station, and reconstructs an exact physical duplicate there, while destroying the original body in the process. ( ① ) From the traveler's point of view, stepping into the machine and stepping out on the other side would feel utterly seamless, complete with continuous memories and a sense of having simply walked through a door. ( ② ) Philosophers, however, are troubled by a version of the same device that malfunctions. ( ③ ) Instead of destroying the original, it leaves the original body intact while still creating a perfect duplicate elsewhere. ( ④ ) Now two people exist, each with identical memories and an equally strong claim to being the original traveler, and there is no principled way to say which one is the real continuation of the person who entered the machine. ( ⑤ )