영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

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 ①consumed indirectly through the goods they purchase. 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 ②embedded invisibly within a product, from irrigating cotton fields to livestock ③raised for meat. 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 ④producing them domestically are importing virtual water from regions that may face severe shortages. Critics caution, however, that focusing exclusively on aggregate volume can mislead policymakers, since a liter of water drawn from a region suffering drought ⑤carry far greater consequences than one drawn from a water-abundant area.

When workers receive a five percent raise in a year when prices have ①climbed five percent as well, their real purchasing power has not changed at all, yet many still report feeling noticeably better off. This tendency to judge economic well-being by nominal figures ②printing on a paycheck, rather than by what that money can actually purchase, is known among economists as money illusion. Employers exploit this pattern by ③favoring modest nominal raises over deeper structural adjustments, since a visible increase on a payslip satisfies employees more effectively than an explanation about inflation could. The illusion persists even among people who claim to understand inflation well, which suggests that the bias ④operates at an intuitive level that formal knowledge does not easily override. Some economists ⑤argue that policymakers should exploit this illusion strategically, since workers resist nominal wage cuts far more fiercely than they resist the equivalent erosion of real wages.

The human gut hosts trillions of microorganisms whose combined genetic material ①trails that of the human genome itself many times over. Once dismissed as ②passive hitchhikers, these bacteria are now understood to actively shape digestion, regulate immune responses, and even influence the production of chemicals that affect mood and behavior. A microbiome disrupted by antibiotics, poor diet, or chronic stress can leave the gut lining more ③permeable than it should be, allowing substances to leak into the bloodstream that would normally stay contained. Researchers studying this connection have found that transplanting gut bacteria from a healthy donor into a patient can, in some cases, ④relieve symptoms of certain digestive disorders that conventional medication had failed to treat. Still, scientists caution that the microbiome varies enormously between individuals, which means a treatment that restores balance in one person's gut may do ⑤little for someone else's.

Scientists have long searched for a way to describe, in a single coherent framework, the outer limits within which human activity can safely continue without ①stabilizing the planet's fundamental systems. The concept of planetary boundaries, introduced by earth-system researchers, identifies nine interconnected processes, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and nitrogen pollution, each possessing a threshold beyond which abrupt and ②irreversible change becomes likely. Unlike conventional environmental limits, often defined locally, these boundaries are framed at a planetary scale, reflecting the idea that the Earth functions as a single ③interdependent system rather than a collection of isolated regions. Crossing one boundary, proponents argue, does not merely damage the system involved but can also ④destabilize others, since climate, oceans, and land are bound together by feedback loops that transmit disturbance across the system. Some philosophers have likened this framework to a ship's safe operating margin, within which passengers may move freely without risking the vessel's stability. Critics, however, contend that the boundaries are drawn with more ⑤confidence than the data can support.

Psychologists studying human judgment often describe the mind as operating through two distinct systems rather than a single unified process. System 1 works quickly and automatically, generating impressions without any noticeable sense of effort. System 2, by contrast, is slow, deliberate, and demanding, engaged only when a problem requires careful calculation or conscious reasoning. Most daily decisions are handled almost entirely by System 1, which allows people to function efficiently without exhausting their limited mental resources. This efficiency comes at a cost, however, because _______________. As a result, a judgment often feels most confident precisely at the moment when it has skipped the careful scrutiny that could have caught its own mistake.

When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh how painful it would feel to discover later that a different choice had been better. This anticipation of future regret frequently becomes the dominant factor shaping the final decision. Researchers have found that people feel sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing, _______________. Ironically, this strategy of avoiding regret can itself produce outcomes that are later regretted even more deeply than the ones it was originally designed to prevent.

For decades, memory researchers assumed that repetition alone determined how well information would be retained, an assumption that an influential theory proposed by Craik and Lockhart eventually overturned. (A) Shallow processing, which involves attending merely to superficial features such as the shape of letters or the sound of a word, produces memory traces that fade quickly and remain vulnerable to interference. Elaborative processing, by contrast, requires connecting new information to existing knowledge, generating meaningful associations, and analyzing semantic content, thereby producing traces that are considerably more durable. (B) Consequently, a student who merely repeats a definition aloud without considering its implications is less likely to retain it than one who relates the concept to a personal example. This distinction reshaped educational practice, encouraging teachers to design tasks that demand comprehension rather than mechanical repetition, since durable memory depends on the depth, not the frequency, of cognitive engagement. (C) According to their framework, what matters most is not how many times a person rehearses material but how deeply that material is processed during encoding.

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. (C) 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. (A) Sociologists distinguish between normative reference groups, which shape a person's values and behavior, and comparative reference groups, which merely provide a benchmark for self-assessment. (B) This counterintuitive finding demonstrates that satisfaction depends less on objective circumstances than on the group against which those circumstances are measured.

By the time Achilles reaches the point where the tortoise started, the tortoise has already crawled a little further ahead. Long before calculus existed, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of paradoxes designed to show that motion itself might be logically impossible. ( ① ) In one version, a swift runner named Achilles races a slow-moving tortoise that is given a modest head start, and common sense insists that Achilles will quickly overtake it. ( ② ) This process repeats endlessly, generating an infinite number of smaller and smaller gaps that Achilles must apparently cross one after another. ( ③ ) Zeno concluded that Achilles could never actually catch the tortoise, a conclusion that plainly contradicts everyday experience. ( ④ ) Modern mathematics eventually resolved the paradox by showing that an infinite series of shrinking distances can still sum to a finite total. ( ⑤ ) Motion, as a result, can still be completed in a finite amount of time after all.

None of them knows in advance their own race, gender, wealth, talents, or position in the society they are designing. John Rawls proposed an unusual thought experiment to determine what principles of justice a society ought to adopt. ( ① ) Imagine a group of rational people gathered behind what he called a veil of ignorance to design the basic rules of their future society. ( ② ) Since no one can predict whether they will be born into privilege or poverty, each person has a strong incentive to choose rules that protect the worst-off members of society. ( ③ ) Rawls argued that rational people placed in this position would not gamble on inequality. ( ④ ) Instead, they would favor arrangements that guarantee basic liberties for everyone and permit unequal outcomes only when those outcomes actually benefit the least advantaged. ( ⑤ ) Justice, on this view, is what impartial reasoning produces once self-interest is stripped away.