영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

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. This group ①need not be one to which a person actually belongs. A struggling artist may judge success not against neighbors but against celebrated painters in art history, a comparison ②that can inspire ambition or, just as easily, breed persistent dissatisfaction. Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, ③which merely provide a benchmark for self-assessment. 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, because the latter could see colleagues ④advance while they themselves ⑤lagging behind.

Policymakers seeking to improve public welfare without restricting individual freedom have increasingly embraced an approach ①known as nudging, which alters the environment in which choices are made rather than mandating particular outcomes. A nudge preserves every option that ②was previously available; it simply arranges those options so that the choice deemed most beneficial becomes easier or more visible than the alternatives. Placing fruit at eye level in a school cafeteria while keeping dessert accessible but less prominent, for instance, ③do not forbid any student from choosing dessert, yet it measurably shifts consumption patterns toward healthier food. Advocates argue that such interventions ④respect autonomy precisely because no option is removed and no penalty is imposed for choosing differently. Critics, however, contend that even subtle architectural choices exploit predictable cognitive shortcuts, ⑤raising questions about whether influencing behavior through psychological means is meaningfully different from more coercive forms of persuasion.

Consider a large heap containing ten thousand grains of sand. Nearly everyone agrees that removing a single grain from such a heap leaves another heap behind; surely one grain could never make the difference between a heap and a non-heap. Yet if this principle is applied repeatedly, grain by grain, the heap eventually ②grows to a single lonely grain, or even to no grains at all, and logic alone seems to force us to accept that this final result still counts as a heap. Something has clearly ①gone wrong along the way, since no reasonable person would call one grain of sand a heap, but pinpointing exactly which single removal transformed a heap into a non-heap seems ③impossible. The puzzle exposes a deep discomfort with vague terms like "heap," "tall," or "bald," concepts that seem to admit no sharp ④boundary yet are used confidently in everyday language. Some philosophers conclude that classical logic itself may need to be ⑤revised to accommodate the genuine vagueness built into ordinary human language.

As efforts to ①curb greenhouse gas emissions intensify, industries unable to eliminate carbon dioxide from their processes have turned to a technology known as carbon capture and storage. This technology involves separating carbon dioxide from the exhaust of power plants before it is released into the atmosphere, then transporting the captured gas for underground injection. Once injected into porous rock formations, the gas is trapped beneath layers of impermeable rock that prevent it from escaping into the air. Proponents argue that carbon capture and storage functions as a bridge technology, allowing heavy industries to keep operating while more sustainable alternatives are ②developed. For instance, cement and steel production, both of which release carbon dioxide as an ③unavoidable byproduct of chemical reactions, are considered prime candidates for this approach. However, critics contend that the technology remains prohibitively ④cheap and that building pipelines requires investments few companies make voluntarily. Despite such concerns, many governments continue funding pilot projects, convinced that this technology will play an ⑤indispensable role in reaching emission targets.

Identical information can provoke strikingly different reactions depending on how it is worded, a phenomenon economists call the framing effect. Patients told that a surgical procedure carries a ninety percent survival rate tend to ①consent to it far more readily than patients told that the same procedure carries a ten percent mortality rate. This discrepancy arises because language does more than transmit facts; it also supplies an ②emotional lens through which those facts are interpreted. Positive framing, which emphasizes what will be ③preserved or gained, tends to encourage risk-averse choices, whereas negative framing, which emphasizes what might be lost, often pushes people toward ④safer alternatives in an attempt to avoid the loss altogether. Marketers, healthcare providers, and policymakers alike ⑤exploit this asymmetry, sometimes to help audiences make sounder decisions and sometimes merely to steer them toward a predetermined conclusion.

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.

When sociologist Émile Durkheim studied suicide rates across different societies, he noticed something puzzling: rates rose not only during economic depression but also during sudden prosperity. (B) Decades later, Robert Merton extended the concept to explain deviance within stable societies, proposing that anomie also arises when a culture insists that everyone pursue identical goals while denying many people the legitimate means to achieve them. (A) He concluded that both crises share a common feature, the collapse of shared norms, a state Durkheim called anomie, arguing that rapid social change can strip away the moral guidelines that regulate human desire. (C) Faced with this gap between aspiration and opportunity, some individuals conform, but others turn to innovation, ritual, retreat, or rebellion.

Imagine two travelers preparing 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. (A) This tendency, in which people estimate how likely an event is based on how easily examples come to mind rather than on actual data, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. (B) Statistically, air travel remains far safer than driving the same distance by car, yet vivid, emotionally charged images tend to dominate human judgment more powerfully than dry statistics ever could. (C) News broadcasts that repeatedly feature rare disasters can leave viewers convinced 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 persuades audiences more effectively than pages of careful statistics ever manage to. Recognizing why memorable examples overshadow objective probability therefore matters, both for making sound personal choices and for noticing when public fear has drifted far from measurable reality.

Their actual forecasting accuracy, however, has repeatedly proven no better than that of far less experienced participants, and sometimes even worse. Overconfidence among financial professionals presents a puzzling contradiction. ( ① ) Fund managers and analysts typically possess years of specialized training, access to vast quantities of market data, and considerable professional experience. ( ② ) One might reasonably expect such expertise to translate into consistently superior predictions about future market movements. ( ③ ) Longitudinal studies tracking professional forecasts against actual outcomes reveal a persistent gap between confidence and accuracy. ( ④ ) This finding does not imply that expertise is worthless, but it does suggest that expertise can inflate confidence more readily than it improves genuine predictive accuracy. ( ⑤ ) Investors would therefore do well to treat confident predictions, however credentialed their source, with a healthy measure of skepticism.

주어진 문장: A clear example of this mismatch can be found in the way students evaluate their own reading comprehension. Metacognition, broadly defined as the capacity to monitor and evaluate one's own cognitive processes, is often treated as a reliable guide to what we actually know, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the correspondence between subjective confidence and objective accuracy is far weaker than intuition would suggest. ( ① ) Individuals routinely overestimate how thoroughly they have understood a passage of text immediately after reading it, a phenomenon partly attributable to the fluency with which the material was processed rather than to any genuine grasp of its underlying structure. ( ② ) Because rereading familiar material tends to feel effortless, learners frequently mistake that ease of processing for durable comprehension, a misattribution that can lead them to abandon further study prematurely. ( ③ ) This gap between perceived and actual mastery, sometimes labeled the illusion of knowing, has practical consequences for education, ( ④ ) since students who trust their inflated self-assessments are less likely to seek out the more effortful, retrieval-based strategies that would otherwise consolidate their learning. ( ⑤ )