영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Long before calculus existed, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of paradoxes ①designed to show that motion itself might be logically impossible. In one version, a swift runner named Achilles races a slow-moving tortoise that ②is given a modest head start. Common sense insists that Achilles will quickly overtake the tortoise, yet Zeno's argument ③suggests otherwise. By the time Achilles reaches the tortoise's starting point, the tortoise has crawled a little further ahead, and this process ④repeating endlessly, generating an infinite number of smaller and smaller gaps that Achilles must apparently cross one after another. Modern mathematics eventually resolved the paradox by showing that an infinite series of shrinking distances can still sum to a finite total, ⑤allowing motion to be completed in a finite amount of time after all.

Sociologist Mark Granovetter challenged a common assumption when he found that job seekers were more likely ①to hear about new opportunities from casual acquaintances than from close friends and family. This finding, ②published as the strength of weak ties, rests on a structural insight: close friends tend to belong to the same tight social circle and therefore already share most of the same information, whereas casual acquaintances typically move in different circles and can act as bridges to information a person would otherwise never ③encounter. Weak ties, precisely because they connect otherwise separate networks, ④transmitting novel information more efficiently than the redundant, overlapping ties within a tightly bonded group. Granovetter's insight has since been applied well beyond job searches, ⑤informing research on how innovations spread and how epidemics travel through a population.

When anthropologists first began systematically studying societies far removed from their own, many unconsciously judged unfamiliar customs against the standards of their home culture, a tendency now ①known as ethnocentrism. Cultural relativism emerged as a corrective principle, ②holding that a society's practices should be understood within their own cultural context rather than measured against an outside standard presumed to be universal. Anthropologist Franz Boas argued that no culture possesses an inherently superior set of values, and that apparent oddities, once ③examined closely, typically serve coherent functions within their own social systems. Cultural relativism transformed fields ranging from anthropology to international development, ④encouraged researchers to suspend quick judgment and seek local meaning before drawing conclusions. Critics caution, however, that taken to an extreme, the principle risks ⑤excusing practices that cause genuine harm.

Consider a student who genuinely intends to study for tomorrow's exam yet, when the evening actually arrives, chooses to ①watch another episode of a favorite show instead, ②promising herself she will surely study harder next week. This pattern, in which the pull of an immediate pleasure overwhelms the value of a distant benefit, ③appear again and again across ordinary life, from postponed exercise to delayed savings. People do not necessarily fail to understand that the future reward matters more; rather, whatever happens right now simply feels disproportionately more urgent and vivid than anything scheduled for later. Behavioral economists note that this preference weakens considerably once both options are ④pushed into the future, which is why planning a diet starting next month feels effortless compared with skipping dessert tonight. Such inconsistency helps explain why gym memberships go ⑤unused and retirement accounts remain underfunded, despite people's stated intentions.

Even highly capable individuals can make disastrous collective decisions once they are absorbed into a tightly knit group, a phenomenon psychologist Irving Janis termed groupthink. Within cohesive committees, boards, and advisory councils, members often prioritize consensus and group harmony over a rigorous evaluation of alternatives, ①silencing doubts rather than risking the discomfort of dissent. Janis identified several warning signs, including an illusion of invulnerability that leads a group to ②underestimate risk, pressure on dissenters to fall in line, and self-appointed mindguards who ③shield the group from information that might disrupt its confidence. Sociologists extend this analysis beyond small committees, noting that entire organizations can develop cultures that ④punish conformity and reward employees who raise inconvenient questions. Historical inquiries into policy failures frequently reveal that critical information existed within the organization but never reached decision makers, because no one felt ⑤safe enough to voice it aloud.

Socialization is the lifelong process through which individuals absorb the norms, values, and roles that allow them to function within a society, beginning in the family and continuing through schools, peer groups, and workplaces. Most of this process unfolds ①gradually and is barely noticed by the people experiencing it. Resocialization, by contrast, refers to a ②deliberate and often abrupt process in which an individual is stripped of a previous identity and trained to adopt a new set of norms, typically within what sociologist Erving Goffman called a total institution. These institutions frequently begin the process with what Goffman termed a mortification of self, ③preserving personal possessions and erasing markers of prior status so that recruits can be rebuilt according to institutional expectations. While resocialization can help individuals ④adapt to demanding new roles, critics note that total institutions can also produce lasting psychological strain by ⑤severing the very social ties that once anchored a person's sense of self.

Imagine rewriting a bacterium's code the way a programmer edits a line of software, and much of what synthetic biology ①promises begins to make sense. Researchers in this field assemble standardized genetic parts into circuits that can be inserted into a cell, instructing it to perform a task that no natural organism would ②carry out. Because these circuits are built from interchangeable parts rather than designed from scratch each time, a circuit tested in one lab can often be reused, with ③minor adjustments, in an entirely different application. Critics note that biological systems ④always behave as predictably as electronic circuits, since a gene inserted into a new cell can interact with existing pathways in unexpected ways, occasionally producing results no engineer intended. Even so, as the catalog of standardized parts keeps expanding, engineers are gaining ⑤confidence to design increasingly complex systems.

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. 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. ①Shallow 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 ②vulnerable 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 ③fragile. 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 ④comprehension rather than ⑤mechanical repetition, since durable memory depends on the depth, not the frequency, of cognitive engagement.

Imagine watching a fair coin land on heads five times in a row and feeling an increasingly strong intuition that the next flip is somehow due to produce tails. This intuition rests on a basic misunderstanding of probability, since each flip of a fair coin remains entirely independent of every flip that came before it. Casinos have long profited from this misconception, watching gamblers place larger bets after a losing streak simply because they mistakenly believe that a win has become statistically overdue. Economists have even documented the same error among trained professionals, including loan officers who grow more likely to approve a risky application simply because _______________.

Consider a village green shared freely by every herder in the community, where each individual may graze as many animals as they wish without paying any fee. From the perspective of any single herder, adding one more animal to the shared pasture brings 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 bears 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 support any animals at all, harming the very community whose rational members caused the collapse. Philosophers use this scenario to illustrate _______________.