영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

People routinely seek out information that confirms what they already believe while overlooking or dismissing evidence that ①contradicts 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 taxing ②to 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 favorably, while investors who ③are skeptical of the same company interpret identical news unfavorably, even though both groups are examining the same underlying facts. Social media platforms can intensify this effect by algorithmically presenting users with content similar to what they have previously engaged with, thereby ④narrowing the range of perspectives an individual regularly encounters. Over time, such selective exposure can harden initial impressions into convictions that ⑤feels objectively verified, even though they rest on a systematically filtered sample of evidence.

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.

Economists have long debated whether prosperity and environmental quality are fundamentally opposed, or whether the relationship between them changes shape as an economy matures. The Environmental Kuznets Curve, a hypothesis borrowed from earlier theories of income inequality, proposes that _______________. In its early stages, industrializing nations prioritize output over conservation, treating clean air and water as expendable costs of development to be addressed later. Beyond a certain point, however, rising incomes generate both the technological capacity and the political will to demand stricter regulation, so degradation begins to reverse even as production keeps expanding. Some scholars regard this trajectory as a reassuring paradox, suggesting that the very growth blamed for ecological harm may eventually finance its own repair. Critics, by contrast, argue that the curve rests on a narrow selection of pollutants that happen to decline with wealth, while ignoring greenhouse gases and resource depletion, which show no comparable tendency to fall.

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 anchoring effect is not limited to shopping decisions; it also plays a subtle but powerful role in legal and financial judgments. (A) Similarly, jurors who are told that a plaintiff is seeking an unusually large sum in damages tend to award higher compensation than jurors who hear no specific figure at all, even when the evidence presented is identical. (B) This pattern suggests that anchors can distort judgments requiring careful, case-by-case reasoning, not merely quick, intuitive estimates of price. (C) For instance, experienced judges asked to set a sentence after being exposed to an arbitrary number, such as one generated by rolling dice, have been shown in experimental settings to hand down harsher sentences when the number was high.

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. (A) Researchers have found that people feel sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing. (B) Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than selling it, because selling would force them to confront the possibility of having made a clear mistake. (C) This helps explain why so many individuals default to inaction whenever a decision feels uncertain, even when remaining passive is not actually the safer choice.

Anyone who has ever promised to finish a project "by Friday," only to still be working on it weeks later, has experienced the planning fallacy firsthand. (A) One proposed remedy, known as reference class forecasting, requires planners to deliberately consult outcomes from comparable past projects rather than relying solely on their own optimistic intuition. Until such external correction becomes standard practice, ambitious deadlines will likely continue to be broken with remarkable consistency. (B) This term describes the persistent tendency of individuals and organizations to underestimate how long a task will take, how much it will cost, and how many complications will inevitably arise. (C) What makes this bias particularly stubborn is that awareness of past failures rarely leads to more accurate predictions; a construction firm that finished its last three projects late will often insist, with genuine confidence, that this next project will be different. Researchers argue that planners focus almost exclusively on the specific steps of the current task while ignoring the broader statistical record of similar projects that came before.

Cognitive load theory begins from the premise that working memory, the mental workspace in which incoming information is temporarily held and manipulated, can accommodate only a limited number of novel elements at any given moment, in stark contrast to the comparatively vast capacity of long-term memory. (A) Because much of this burden arises not from the intrinsic difficulty of the subject matter itself but from the manner in which information is presented, instructional designers can substantially reduce unnecessary strain by eliminating redundant explanations, aligning visual and verbal elements so that learners need not mentally integrate scattered sources, and gradually withdrawing guidance as competence develops. (B) When instructional materials introduce more interacting elements than this narrow workspace can simultaneously process, learners experience what theorists call cognitive overload, a condition under which comprehension deteriorates and errors multiply regardless of how motivated the learner might be. (C) Ignoring these principles, by contrast, risks overwhelming novices with demands that exceed their processing capacity, however well-organized the underlying content may be.

주어진 문장: This shows that expertise alone does not guarantee immunity from such intuitive shortcuts. Suppose you meet a quiet, gentle man who speaks softly, tends a small garden, and organizes his bookshelf with meticulous care. ( ① ) Asked whether he is more likely a florist or a truck driver, most people instinctively choose florist, since his personality matches the stereotype so neatly. ( ② ) This judgment, however, ignores a crucial fact: truck drivers vastly outnumber florists in almost every country, which means that, statistically, he is far more likely to belong to the larger group regardless of how well he fits the flower-shop image. ( ③ ) Relying on resemblance to a familiar category rather than on underlying numerical proportions, known among researchers as representativeness, leads people to overlook these base rates almost automatically. ( ④ ) Even trained professionals, who should know better, often fall into the same trap when a vivid description feels more convincing than plain statistics. ( ⑤ ) Consequently, teaching people to pause and ask how common something actually is, instead of merely how typical it appears, can meaningfully improve the accuracy of everyday predictions and reduce costly errors in judgment.

주어진 문장: This apparent immunity to forgetting seemed to set flashbulb memories apart from every other category of recollection. 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. ( ① ) 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. ( ② ) 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, ( ③ ) even though the individuals reporting them expressed unwavering confidence in their accuracy. ( ④ ) This persistent mismatch between subjective certainty and objective consistency implies that flashbulb memories, far from being flawless recordings, are reconstructed narratives shaped by rehearsal, media exposure, and the passage of time. ( ⑤ )