영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Why do people often ①overvalue objects they have partly built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively ②inferior to something they could have simply purchased? This puzzle, which researchers named after a furniture retailer famous for selling items that require home assembly, challenges the standard economic assumption that value is determined solely by an object's inherent qualities. In a series of experiments, participants who assembled a plain storage box were willing to pay nearly as much for their own ③imperfect creation as they were for a professionally built version, despite being fully aware of its flaws. Labor, it seems, functions as a kind of psychological investment: once effort has been poured into a task, individuals become ④reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly wasted. This tendency helps explain why consumers often prefer products that demand some degree of personal assembly, even when a comparable finished item is available at a ⑤higher price and requires no time investment whatsoever.

When a country physician named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had caught cowpox seemed immune to smallpox, he set in motion a medical revolution without fully ①understanding why it worked. For nearly two centuries afterward, vaccine development proceeded largely by trial and error, weakening or killing a pathogen and testing whether the resulting preparation could train the immune system without causing disease itself. This method produced ②genuine successes, eventually eliminating smallpox worldwide and reducing diseases such as polio and measles, but each new vaccine still required ③seconds of laboratory work with no guarantee of success. Advances in molecular biology eventually allowed researchers to isolate a single protein from a pathogen's surface rather than using the whole organism, producing vaccines with ④fewer side effects and a more predictable safety profile. The most recent shift, toward delivering genetic instructions rather than proteins themselves, represents the latest chapter in a story that began with an eighteenth-century doctor's curiosity about a ⑤puzzling immunity among dairy workers.

Classical economic theory long assumed that decision makers gather all relevant information, calculate every possible outcome, and select the single option that maximizes their benefit. Herbert Simon, however, questioned this assumption, arguing that human beings operate under real constraints of time, knowledge, and mental capacity that make such ①exhaustive calculation practically impossible. Instead of searching ②endlessly for the theoretically perfect choice, people typically stop once they find an option that seems good enough to meet their immediate needs, a strategy Simon termed satisficing. A shopper comparing refrigerators, for example, rarely examines every model available; she instead sets a few practical criteria, such as price and size, and selects the first appliance that satisfies them ③adequately. This approach is not a failure of reasoning but rather a sensible adaptation to a world where information is ④costly and time is genuinely limited. Consequently, models assuming unlimited rationality often fail to predict actual behavior, while frameworks acknowledging these cognitive boundaries offer a far more ⑤unrealistic account of how ordinary decisions are actually made.

A single fertilized egg eventually gives rise to every cell type in the human body, from neurons to bone, a feat that has fascinated biologists for more than a century. Embryonic stem cells retain much of that original versatility, capable in principle of developing into almost any tissue, _______________. Because harvesting these cells traditionally required destroying a human embryo, the research provoked ethical objections fierce enough to slow funding and legislation in several countries for years. A breakthrough arrived when scientists discovered that ordinary adult skin cells could be reprogrammed into a state resembling embryonic versatility without ever touching an embryo. These induced pluripotent cells have not entirely erased the ethical debate, but they have opened a path for stem cell research that far more scientists and funding agencies are willing to support.

When people look back on a multi-day journey, they rarely recall every hour with equal clarity; instead, memory tends to compress the entire experience into just a few representative moments. Psychologists have found that two points carry disproportionate weight in this process: the single moment when emotion reached its highest intensity, and whatever happened right before the experience concluded. Consider two hikers who complete an identical five-day trek. The first finishes with a grueling, rain-soaked final climb, while the second enjoys a calm, scenic descent on the last afternoon despite having endured an equally difficult ascent earlier in the trip. Even though both hikers faced comparable hardship overall, the second is far more likely to remember the journey fondly, simply because the trip ended pleasantly. This pattern reveals that _______________.

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.

Military researchers have developed weapons systems capable of identifying and engaging targets without a human pressing the final button. Advocates argue that autonomous systems can react faster than any human operator. Human rights organizations counter that removing a person from the final decision strips away moral responsibility, since _______________. Diplomatic negotiations toward an international treaty have repeatedly stalled, partly because military powers disagree on how to define autonomy precisely enough to regulate it.

Desalination, the process of removing dissolved salts from seawater to produce fresh water, has increasingly been adopted by coastal regions facing chronic water scarcity. (A) Pumping seawater through membranes at high pressure also demands substantial electricity, so plants powered by fossil fuels can worsen the emissions that intensify drought. Therefore, engineers increasingly argue that desalination should be treated not as a stand-alone remedy but as one component of a broader conservation strategy. (B) Nevertheless, desalination remains an inherently costly and environmentally burdensome solution, a fact often overlooked amid enthusiasm for ending water shortages. For instance, the process generates a concentrated byproduct called brine, which, when discharged without adequate dilution, can raise local salinity to levels that harm marine life. (C) Most modern facilities rely on reverse osmosis, a technique in which seawater is forced through membranes whose microscopic pores block salt while letting water molecules pass. Because this method consumes far less energy than the thermal distillation once dominant in the industry, it has become the preferred choice for large-scale plants.

As cities have expanded across landscapes once covered with absorbent soil, impervious surfaces have turned stormwater from a resource that recharges groundwater into a hazard that floods streets and carries pollutants into waterways. (A) For example, cities that replaced pavement with permeable alternatives have reported notable reductions in flooding during storms that once overwhelmed sewers. However, engineers caution that green infrastructure cannot entirely replace conventional pipes in dense cores, where heavy runoff still requires structural reinforcement. Consequently, municipalities now regard green and gray infrastructure as complementary systems, each compensating for the other's limitations. (B) Green infrastructure, which mimics the hydrological functions that natural landscapes once performed, offers planners a way to treat the city as a sponge rather than a rigid drainage pipe. (C) Rain gardens, shallow depressions planted with deep-rooted vegetation, are designed to capture runoff from rooftops, allowing it to filter slowly through soil before reaching underground aquifers. Permeable pavement, made of porous materials that let water pass directly through, serves a similar purpose along sidewalks, where asphalt would remain impenetrable.

Imagine a man locked inside a room who does not understand a single word of Chinese, yet who possesses a giant rulebook written entirely in English, and who uses it to answer notes slipped in through a slot. (A) This scenario was designed to challenge the assumption that a computer running a sophisticated program truly understands language simply because it produces convincing output. (B) Yet the man inside understands nothing at all; he is merely manipulating shapes according to formal rules, without grasping their meaning. (C) From the perspective of a native speaker reading the responses, the room seems to understand Chinese perfectly.