영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Every time a smartphone connects to a cell tower or a Wi-Fi network, it quietly records a data point that can later ①be pieced together into a detailed map of where its owner has been. Most users agree to this tracking without ②reading the fine print, assuming that a single company's database poses little threat. The real danger, however, emerges when location data from multiple sources ③combining. A pattern that reveals a person's home, workplace, and daily route can expose far more than any single app ever intended to share. Companies often argue that anonymized data cannot be traced back to individuals, yet researchers have repeatedly ④shown that a handful of location points is enough to identify a specific person. As a result, privacy experts increasingly insist that location data ⑤deserves the same legal protection as medical records.

Economists traditionally measured a community's wealth in terms of factories, income, or infrastructure, yet sociologists increasingly point to a less visible resource: social capital, the networks of trust and reciprocity ①that allow people to cooperate for mutual benefit. Robert Putnam popularized the concept by ②documenting a decline in civic participation, noting that fewer Americans joined bowling leagues, parent associations, or local clubs even as bowling itself remained popular, a trend he ③captured in the phrase bowling alone. Communities rich in social capital tend to enjoy lower crime and more effective local government, because neighbors ④who know and trust one another can coordinate informally without relying entirely on formal institutions. However, social capital is not uniformly beneficial; tightly bonded networks can also exclude outsiders and ⑤reinforcing existing inequality.

Consider a village green shared freely by every herder in the community, where each individual may graze as many animals as they wish without ①paying any fee. From the perspective of any single herder, adding one more animal to the shared pasture ②brings a clear personal benefit, since the extra income belongs entirely to that herder alone. The cost of the additional grazing, however, is spread thinly across every herder who uses the green, so no single individual ③bears more than a tiny fraction of the damage. Because this calculation favors adding more animals for every rational herder, the shared pasture is gradually overgrazed until it can no longer ④support any animals at all, harming the very community whose rational members caused the collapse. Philosophers use this scenario to illustrate a troubling gap between what benefits an individual in the short term and what preserves a shared resource in the long term, a gap that voluntary self-restraint alone rarely ⑤closing.

Desalination, the process of ①removing dissolved salts from seawater to produce fresh water, has increasingly been adopted by coastal regions facing chronic water scarcity. Most modern facilities rely on reverse osmosis, a technique in which seawater is ②forced 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. 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 ③harms marine life. Pumping seawater through membranes at high pressure also ④demands substantial electricity, so plants powered by fossil fuels can worsen the emissions that intensify drought. Therefore, engineers increasingly argue that desalination should be ⑤treated not as a stand-alone remedy but as one component of a broader conservation strategy.

Factories that once employed hundreds of workers on an assembly line now run with a ①fraction of that staff, as robotic arms handle tasks that used to require human hands. Economists have long debated whether this shift destroys jobs or simply transforms them. Historical evidence offers some ②comfort: previous waves of automation eventually created new categories of work that no one had predicted. However, critics point out that earlier transitions unfolded over generations, giving workers ③ample time to retrain, whereas today's robots are being deployed at a pace that leaves little room for adjustment. A factory worker displaced this year cannot simply wait for a new industry to emerge decades from now. For this reason, many economists argue that the real ④challenge is not the robots themselves, but the ⑤sluggish speed at which society is expected to adapt to them.

When a resource is shared among many users, none of whom bears the full cost of its depletion, each individual is ①tempted to extract as much value as possible before others do the same. This dynamic, famously labeled the tragedy of the commons, describes how shared pastures and fisheries can be ②degraded even when every participant privately understands the danger of overuse. A single herder who adds one more animal to a communal pasture gains the ③entire benefit of that addition, whereas the resulting damage to the grass is shared among other herders who depend on the land. Because self-interest offers no incentive to restrain consumption unilaterally, the resource tends to be ④exhausted long before any user intends such an outcome. For decades, economists assumed that only two remedies existed: strict regulation or the conversion of shared resources into private property. Elinor Ostrom ⑤confirmed this assumption, however, by documenting communities that had sustainably managed fisheries and forests for generations through locally devised rules and mutual monitoring rather than external control.

Traditional industrial systems have relied on a linear model of production, in which raw materials are extracted, transformed into goods, and eventually discarded as waste. This approach treats natural resources as if ①unlimited and disposal as if costless. A circular economy proposes an alternative framework in which materials are kept in continuous use through reuse, repair, and recycling, thereby ②reducing the extraction of virgin resources. Central to this model is the notion that waste, rather than being an inevitable byproduct, can be redesigned as a resource for another process, much as fallen leaves nourish the trees that shed them. For example, manufacturers design products so that components can be disassembled and reused in new items once their original function ends. Some companies also lease equipment instead of selling it outright, retaining responsibility for refurbishment. Because such practices lessen dependence on finite raw materials, they ③increase the environmental damage caused by mining. Consequently, the circular economy is increasingly regarded as a ④viable economic strategy that ⑤conserves resources for future generations.

Among the many tools available to those who design choice environments, few are as quietly powerful as the default option, the alternative that takes effect automatically unless a person actively selects something else. Because changing a default requires deliberate effort, many individuals simply accept whatever arrangement has been preselected for them. Designers of public policy and digital platforms alike have consequently come to recognize that setting a thoughtful default can achieve outcomes that ___________ often struggle to accomplish through persuasion or financial incentive alone.

When people evaluate their personal contribution to water scarcity, they often consider only the water that flows directly from household taps, overlooking a far larger quantity consumed indirectly through the goods they purchase. (A) The water footprint, a concept that extends this narrow view, measures the total volume of freshwater used to produce the goods and services an individual or a nation consumes. Central to this concept is the notion of virtual water, the water embedded invisibly within a product, from irrigating cotton fields to livestock raised for meat. (B) Critics caution, however, that focusing exclusively on aggregate volume can mislead policymakers, since a liter of water drawn from a region suffering drought carries far greater consequences than one drawn from a water-abundant area. (C) For instance, producing a kilogram of beef can require several thousand liters of water, whereas a kilogram of vegetables typically demands a fraction of that amount. Nations that import water-intensive goods rather than producing them domestically are importing virtual water from regions that may face severe shortages.

Philosopher Robert Nozick devised a thought experiment to test a simple hedonist assumption: that pleasure and the avoidance of pain are all that ultimately matter to human beings. (A) If the hedonist assumption were correct, then everyone should rush to connect themselves permanently to such a machine, since it could deliver a lifetime of perfectly satisfying experiences. (B) Yet when people actually consider the offer, most hesitate and many refuse outright, a reluctance Nozick took as evidence that human beings care about more than the quality of their internal sensations. (C) He asked readers to imagine a machine capable of producing any experience they desired, from writing a great novel to falling in love, all indistinguishable from reality once they were plugged in.