영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

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.

Facing a shortage of caregivers and a rapidly aging population, several countries have begun ①deploying robots designed to remind elderly residents to take medication, monitor for falls, and even offer simple conversation throughout the day. Early trials show that many residents report ②reduced loneliness, particularly when a robot's presence allows an overworked human staff member to spend a few extra minutes with each patient rather than ③rushing between rooms. Critics, however, worry that this framing quietly shifts the goal of care: instead of asking how technology can support human connection, institutions may come to treat a robot's companionship as an acceptable substitute for it, especially in facilities already ④struggle with tight budgets. Advocates for the elderly argue that robots should be evaluated strictly as tools that free up human time for human contact, never as a lower-cost replacement for the contact itself, which ⑤remains irreplaceable.

Consider a student who genuinely 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 overwhelms 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, _______________. Behavioral economists note that this preference weakens considerably once both options are pushed into the future, which is why planning a diet starting next month feels effortless compared with skipping dessert tonight.

People often recognize, in calm reflection, that their future selves will be tempted to abandon a goal they currently value. Rather than relying solely on willpower at the critical moment, they may choose to _______________, a strategy known as precommitment. By making certain choices costly, inconvenient, or impossible to reverse, individuals can protect a long-term goal from a short-term impulse that has not yet arisen. Similarly, someone determined to finish a project might publicly announce a deadline, transforming private intentions into a commitment that carries social consequences if broken. What unites these examples is a simple insight: because future desires cannot always be trusted, the wisest moment to act may be now.

Traditional economic models predict that a rational individual offered any positive sum of money, however small, should accept it without hesitation. A simple experimental exercise known as the ultimatum game consistently contradicts this prediction: when the proposer offers a division perceived as unfair, the second participant frequently rejects the offer entirely, leaving both parties with nothing. Such evidence challenges the assumption that economic actors pursue only their own material self-interest, demonstrating instead that considerations of ___________ can override the straightforward pursuit of maximum individual gain.

For much of the twentieth century, memory researchers assumed that once a memory had been consolidated—transformed from a fragile, short-term trace into a stable, long-term representation—it remained essentially fixed, immune to further modification unless the underlying neural circuitry was physically damaged. (A) During this narrow window, which typically lasts only a few hours, the memory can be strengthened, weakened, or even subtly distorted by new information encountered in the interim, after which it must undergo a second round of stabilization, a process now widely referred to as reconsolidation. (B) Consequently, what we experience as a stable recollection may actually be a continuously revised construction, reshaped every time it is summoned into conscious awareness and returned to storage. (C) This assumption, however, was overturned by a body of research demonstrating that the act of retrieval itself can destabilize a previously consolidated memory, rendering it temporarily susceptible to alteration before it is, in a sense, filed away again.

Classical economic theory assumes that consumers evaluate every price change in the same rational way, weighing marginal benefit against marginal cost regardless of the absolute numbers involved. (A) 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 preferred the higher-quality option. Yet once the cheaper chocolate's price was lowered to zero, the majority abruptly switched their preference, even though the price gap between the two options had not actually changed. (B) Researchers explain this reversal by noting that a free item carries no perceived risk of loss, which makes it feel disproportionately attractive compared with any option that still requires payment, however small. (C) Behavioral economists, however, have discovered a striking exception: the moment a price drops to exactly zero, people's judgment shifts in a way that ordinary discounting cannot explain.

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.

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. (A) In fact, 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. (B) 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. (C) 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. 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. Understanding this bias, therefore, helps explain why simply owning something, even briefly, can distort how fairly people judge its true worth.

주어진 문장: Such consistency across repeated trials suggests that the pattern is a genuine feature of human cognition, not random noise. In a classic experiment inspired by Keynes's beauty contest analogy, participants choose a number between zero and one hundred, and the winner is whoever selects the number closest to two-thirds of the average of all guesses submitted. ( ① ) A perfectly rational player, assuming every other participant reasons with unlimited depth, would conclude the equilibrium number is zero, since reasoning about others' reasoning collapses the average toward that single point. ( ② ) In practice, however, actual guesses rarely converge on zero; most participants stop reasoning after a round or two of imagining what others might guess, producing average guesses that cluster between twenty and thirty-five. ( ③ ) This gap between theoretical equilibrium and observed behavior reveals that human reasoning is bounded, capable of anticipating a few steps ahead but rarely capable of iterating the process indefinitely. ( ④ ) Economists use this game as a diagnostic tool, since the number a person submits reveals how many levels of strategic thinking that person is willing to perform. ( ⑤ ) This is a measure that idealized rational agents could never provide.