영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively simple question. If every plank of a wooden ship ①is 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 small to ②erasing the ship's identity. The puzzle grows far sharper, however, once a second twist is introduced. Suppose a careful collector gathered every discarded plank and reassembled them into a second vessel, ③built exactly as the original once stood. Two ships would then exist side by side, each with an equal claim ④to being the genuine 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.

Imagine watching a fair coin land on heads five times in a row and ①feeling an increasingly strong intuition that the next flip is somehow due to produce tails. This intuition, though psychologically compelling, rests on a basic misunderstanding of probability, since each flip of a fair coin ②remains entirely independent of every flip that came before it. The coin possesses no memory of its previous outcomes, and its probability of landing on tails on the sixth flip ③stays fixed at fifty percent regardless of how many heads preceded it. Casinos have long profited from this misconception, watching gamblers place larger bets after a losing streak simply because they mistakenly ④believing that a win has become statistically overdue. Economists have even documented the same error among trained professionals, including loan officers ⑤who grow more likely to approve a risky application simply because they recently rejected several applications in a row.

Philosophers sometimes ask their students to imagine a creature physically identical to an ordinary human being in every measurable respect, one that walks, talks, laughs, and even cries out in apparent pain when injured, yet that has no inner conscious experience whatsoever. This imagined being, commonly called a philosophical zombie, behaves ②completely differently from a conscious person, since every neuron fires in precisely the same pattern, but there is supposedly nothing it is like to be that creature from the inside. Defenders of the argument claim that because such a zombie is at least ①conceivable without any logical contradiction, consciousness itself cannot be fully explained by physical processes alone. Critics respond that mere conceivability ③proves very little about what is genuinely possible in the real world, and that our intuition about zombies may simply ④reflect the limits of imagination rather than a real gap in ⑤nature.

Picture a woman who receives a plain ceramic mug as a free gift at a conference and, later that afternoon, ①refuses to sell it for anything less than triple its price in the gift shop downstairs. Before she owned the mug, she would never have paid extra for it; once it became hers, however, its value in her mind ②declined sharply, simply because she now possessed it. Researchers have ③repeatedly observed this pattern across many everyday objects, from coffee mugs and concert tickets to office chairs and old furniture inherited from relatives. Owners ④consistently 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 ⑤collapse, since each side quietly attaches a different value to what it currently holds.

Anyone who has tried to name the ink color of a word like red printed in blue letters knows how surprisingly difficult the task can feel. This everyday struggle, known as the Stroop effect, deserves more attention than casual curiosity grants it, because it reveals something fundamental about how the mind allocates its limited resources. Reading a familiar word is an automatic process practiced so extensively since childhood that it proceeds almost involuntarily, whereas naming a color requires deliberate, controlled attention. When these two processes point toward conflicting answers, _______________. Educators should not dismiss this delay as a trivial curiosity confined to laboratories, since the same competition between habit and intention underlies far more consequential situations, such as a driver's struggle to resist checking a phone despite knowing the danger. Recognizing how automatic responses can hijack conscious intentions is essential for designing environments, from classrooms to highways, that support rather than undermine our efforts at self-control.

John Rawls proposed an unusual thought experiment to determine what principles of justice a society ought to adopt. Imagine a group of rational people gathered to design the basic rules of their future society, but placed behind what he called a veil of ignorance, a condition under which none of them knows their own race, gender, wealth, talents, or social position in advance. Since no one can predict whether they will be born into privilege or poverty, _______________. Rawls argued that rational people placed in this position would not gamble on inequality; instead, they would favor arrangements that guarantee basic liberties for everyone and permit unequal outcomes only when those outcomes actually benefit the least advantaged.

Overconfidence bias is not confined to amateur investors; even seasoned financial professionals display strikingly similar patterns. (A) Fund managers surveyed about the accuracy of their own market predictions, for example, consistently rate their forecasts as more reliable than an objective analysis of their historical track record would support. (B) This gap between perceived and actual accuracy suggests that professional training and experience do not automatically immunize individuals against overconfidence. (C) Some researchers argue instead that professionals may be especially susceptible, since repeated exposure to a domain can breed a false sense of mastery over outcomes that remain fundamentally unpredictable.

In the late nineteenth century, the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus undertook a rigorous investigation of forgetting by serving as his own experimental subject. He memorized thousands of meaningless three-letter syllables so that prior knowledge could not skew his results. (A) Ebbinghaus further found that distributing study sessions across several days produced better retention than cramming the same repetition into one sitting. This finding, now central to modern learning theory, implies that revisiting material shortly before it would otherwise be forgotten interrupts the decline of the forgetting curve. (B) After learning each list to perfection, he tested his retention at intervals ranging from twenty minutes to a month later. He recorded how many repetitions were required to relearn the material each time. (C) The resulting curve revealed a consistent pattern. Forgetting proceeds rapidly during the initial hours following learning, then gradually decelerates until the rate of loss becomes almost imperceptible. Roughly half of the acquired information vanished within the first hour alone. Yet whatever survived that initial plunge tended to persist for much longer periods.

Few of these later buyers, however, possess any independent basis for judging whether the asset's price still bears any relation to its underlying value. A speculative bubble typically begins with a genuine, defensible reason for optimism, such as a promising new technology or an unusually favorable economic environment. ( ① ) Early investors who recognize this genuine opportunity purchase the asset and, as expected, often see its price rise accordingly. ( ② ) As word of these early gains spreads, a second wave of investors enters the market, drawn less by independent analysis than by the simple observation that the price has already climbed. ( ③ ) They are, in effect, purchasing confidence rather than value, trusting that the crowd's continued enthusiasm will sustain or further elevate the price. ( ④ ) This reliance on collective momentum rather than fundamental analysis is precisely what transforms a reasonable initial rally into an unsustainable bubble. ( ⑤ ) When the momentum eventually falters, as it inevitably must, the absence of any solid fundamental foundation leaves the price with nothing to support it.

주어진 문장: The comparison, notably, is not with reality but with an imagined alternative that may never have been as good as it seems in retrospect. Modern consumer culture often assumes that expanding the range of available options will automatically make people freer and happier, yet a growing body of research suggests the opposite may sometimes be true. ( ① ) When individuals select from an enormous set of alternatives, satisfaction with the final choice frequently declines rather than rises, even when the chosen item is objectively excellent. ( ② ) This decline stems not from the difficulty of deciding but from what happens afterward, once a decision has already been made. ( ③ ) Having considered so many possibilities, a person naturally imagines the specific advantages that a different, unchosen option might have offered, and this imagined comparison quietly erodes contentment with what was actually selected. ( ④ ) By contrast, someone who chose from only two or three alternatives rarely constructs such an elaborate fantasy of missed advantages. ( ⑤ ) The paradox, therefore, is that abundance can free people from external constraint while simultaneously trapping them in a private cycle of comparison and regret.