영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Prospect theory proposes that the subjective value of money is not a straight line but a curved function, ①differing sharply from the assumptions of classical economic models. In the domain of gains, the function bends downward as amounts ②increase, so the psychological difference between earning zero and one hundred dollars feels far greater than between earning one thousand and eleven hundred. A parallel pattern appears among losses, where the curve ③bend in the opposite direction, yet sensitivity still fades as the amount grows larger. This tendency, ④known as diminishing sensitivity, explains why a shopper barely notices a ten dollar increase on a two thousand dollar purchase. Researchers illustrate this curvature with graphs ⑤shaped like an S turned sideways, sloping gently near the center and flattening toward both extremes.

Modern consumer culture often assumes that expanding the range of available options ①will automatically makes people freer and happier, yet a growing body of research suggests the opposite may sometimes be true. When individuals select from an enormous set of alternatives, satisfaction with the final choice frequently declines rather than rises, even when the chosen item ②is objectively excellent. This decline stems not from the difficulty of deciding but from what happens afterward, once a decision ③has already been made. Having considered so many possibilities, a person naturally imagines the specific advantages that a different, unchosen option ④might have offered, and this imagined comparison quietly erodes contentment with what was actually selected. The paradox, therefore, is that abundance can free people from external constraint while simultaneously ⑤trapping them in a private cycle of comparison and regret.

The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively ①simple question. If every plank of a wooden ship is replaced one by one over many years, is the vessel that eventually results still the same ship it once was? Most people's first instinct is to answer yes, since each individual replacement seems too ②small to erase the ship's identity. The puzzle grows far ③duller, however, once a second twist is introduced. Suppose a careful collector gathered every discarded plank and reassembled them into a second vessel, built exactly as the original once stood. Two ships would then exist side by side, each with an equal claim to being the ④genuine one, and no obvious way to decide between them. Philosophers return to this old story again and again, not because they care about timber, but because it forces us to ask whether identity depends on continuous material, continuous form, or some deeper thread that neither one can fully ⑤explain.

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

Eyewitness testimony has long carried weight in courtrooms, yet decades of research reveal that memories of witnessed events are more ①malleable than most people assume. When individuals who observe an event are later exposed to ②misleading information about what they saw, whether through a leading question or a conversation with another witness, their recollections frequently incorporate details that never occurred, a phenomenon known as the misinformation effect. In one classic paradigm, participants who watched a video of a traffic accident and were then asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed into each other reported ③higher speed estimates and were more likely to falsely recall broken glass than participants asked the identical question using the milder verb hit. Crucially, these distorted memories often feel ④genuine to the person experiencing them, since the original memory trace becomes blended with the newly introduced information rather than existing as a separate, contradictory record. Such findings have prompted legal systems to adopt ⑤careless interviewing protocols designed to minimize suggestive questioning during investigations.

A cricket contains, gram for gram, roughly as much protein as beef, yet requires a small fraction of the land, water, and feed needed to raise cattle. This efficiency has drawn growing attention from researchers looking for ways to feed a global population that continues to climb while arable land remains essentially fixed. Insects also convert feed into body mass with remarkable efficiency, since they are cold-blooded and therefore spend far less energy regulating body temperature than a cow or pig must. _______________. Food companies have responded by grinding insects into a flour that disappears into protein bars, pasta, and baked goods, letting consumers benefit from the nutrition without ever having to look an insect in the eye.

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.

Long before cognitive scientists possessed the tools to observe the brain directly, Donald Broadbent proposed an influential model suggesting that the human capacity to process incoming sensory information is constrained by a structural bottleneck through which only a single stream of input can pass at any given instant. (A) This basic bottleneck principle continues to inform contemporary explanations of why multitasking so reliably degrades performance on demanding tasks. (B) According to this filter theory, multiple channels of stimulation, such as competing voices in a crowded room, are initially registered at a shallow, physical level, but only one channel is selected for further, meaning-based analysis while the rest are blocked from advancing beyond that early filter. (C) Although later researchers challenged the rigidity of this early selection mechanism, pointing to instances in which unattended information, such as one's own name, nevertheless breaks through and captures awareness, the core insight that attention imposes a genuine processing limit rather than a mere matter of willpower has remained remarkably durable.

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. (A) 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. (B) 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, opening a path for stem cell research that far more scientists and funding agencies are now willing to support. (C) Embryonic stem cells retain much of that original versatility, capable in principle of developing into almost any tissue, which is why researchers have long viewed them as a promising raw material for repairing damaged organs.

Something has clearly gone wrong along the way, since no reasonable person would call one grain of sand a heap. Consider a large heap containing ten thousand grains of sand. ( ① ) 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. ( ② ) Yet if this principle is applied repeatedly, grain by grain, the heap eventually shrinks to a single lonely grain, or even to no grains at all. ( ③ ) Logic alone seems to force us to accept that this final result still counts as a heap. ( ④ ) Pinpointing exactly which single removal transformed a heap into a non-heap seems impossible. ( ⑤ ) The puzzle exposes a deep discomfort with vague terms like "heap," "tall," or "bald," concepts that seem to admit no sharp boundary yet are used confidently in everyday language.