영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively simple question. If every plank of a wooden ship ①is 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 small to ②erasing the ship's identity. The puzzle grows far sharper, however, once a second twist is introduced. Suppose a careful collector gathered every discarded plank and reassembled them into a second vessel, ③built exactly as the original once stood. Two ships would then exist side by side, each with an equal claim ④to being the genuine 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 humans learned to drill for oil, microorganisms had already mastered the art of ①converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into stored chemical energy. Modern biofuel research borrows this ability, cultivating algae or engineered bacteria in large tanks where they can be ②coaxed into producing oils and sugars that can be refined into fuel usable in existing engines. Unlike crops grown for corn-based ethanol, which compete directly with food production for arable land, many algae strains can ③thrive in shallow ponds, wastewater, or even coastal seawater unsuitable for conventional agriculture. Engineers have also learned to tinker with the metabolic pathways of these organisms, ④boosted oil yield far beyond what any wild strain would naturally produce on its own. Despite this progress, producing biofuel at a cost competitive with fossil fuel remains difficult, since harvesting and processing the organisms consumes a substantial share of the energy the fuel itself will eventually ⑤provide.

Suppose you meet a quiet, ①gentle man who speaks softly, tends a small garden, and organizes his bookshelf with meticulous care. Asked whether he is more likely a florist or a truck driver, most people ②instinctively choose florist, since his personality matches the stereotype so neatly. This judgment, however, ignores a crucial fact: truck drivers vastly ③trail florists in almost every country, which means that, statistically, he is far more likely to belong to the larger group regardless of how well he fits the flower-shop image. Relying on resemblance to a familiar category rather than on underlying numerical proportions, known among researchers as representativeness, leads people to overlook these base rates almost ④automatically. Even trained professionals, who should know better, often fall into the same trap when a vivid description feels more ⑤convincing than plain statistics.

For patients born with a single faulty gene, the disease has traditionally been treated ①indirectly, managing symptoms for a lifetime rather than addressing the genetic error itself. Gene therapy attempts something more ambitious: delivering a corrected copy of the gene directly into a patient's cells, often using a ②reinforced virus stripped of its ability to cause illness as a delivery vehicle. Once inside the nucleus, the corrected gene can begin producing the protein the patient's body had always lacked, in some cases ③reversing symptoms that medication alone had never been able to touch. Early trials were haunted by serious ④setbacks, including cases in which the delivery virus triggered a dangerous immune reaction. Refined delivery methods have since made the treatment considerably ⑤safer, and regulators in several countries have now approved gene therapies for a small but growing number of rare inherited disorders.

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. Slips of paper covered with Chinese characters are passed in through a slot, and by following the rulebook's instructions step by step, he produces replies that appear ①fluent to anyone outside. From the perspective of a native speaker reading the responses, the room seems to understand Chinese ②perfectly. Yet the man inside understands nothing at all; he is merely manipulating shapes according to formal rules, without grasping their ③meaning. This scenario was designed to challenge the assumption that a computer running a sophisticated program truly ④fails to understand language simply because it produces convincing output. Passing every external test of intelligence, the argument suggests, is not the same as possessing genuine understanding, since syntax alone can never generate ⑤semantics.

Change blindness refers to a striking limitation of human perception in which observers fail to notice substantial ① alterations to a visual scene, provided the change occurs during a brief disruption such as an eye movement or a momentary obstruction. In a now-famous demonstration, researchers showed participants two versions of a photograph in alternation ②, separated by a short blank screen, and asked them to identify what had changed. Even when an entire building disappeared or a person's clothing shifted color, many viewers stared at the picture without detecting anything unusual ③. This phenomenon occurs because visual attention, rather than passively recording every detail like a camera, actively selects only a narrow ④ subset of information for processing at any given moment. Whatever falls outside that narrow spotlight is represented only sparsely, if at all, leaving it vulnerable to being overwritten without notice. Consequently, change blindness demonstrates that our impression of a rich, complete visual world is, to a surprising extent, an illusion constructed by the mind, not an unreliable ⑤ record of external reality.

Philosopher Robert Nozick asked his 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. Neuroscientists would simply stimulate the brain to generate a lifetime of perfectly satisfying experiences. If pleasure and the avoidance of pain were truly all that mattered, as classical hedonism claims, then everyone should rush to connect themselves permanently to such a machine. Yet when people actually consider the offer, most hesitate, and many refuse outright. Nozick took this reluctance as evidence that _______________.

Two patients diagnosed with the same disease and prescribed the same medication can respond in strikingly different ways, one recovering quickly while the other experiences little benefit or even harmful side effects. Precision medicine starts from the observation that this variation often traces back to differences buried in each patient's genome, differences that determine how efficiently a body absorbs, breaks down, or responds to a given drug. _______________. This approach has proven especially valuable in cancer treatment, where tumors from two patients with the same diagnosis may carry entirely different genetic mutations that respond to entirely different drugs. Widespread adoption still faces real obstacles, since genetic sequencing remains expensive in many regions and few doctors have been trained to interpret the flood of genetic data such tests now produce.

When sociologist Émile Durkheim studied suicide rates across different societies, he noticed something puzzling: rates rose not only during economic depression but also during sudden prosperity. (B) Decades later, Robert Merton extended the concept to explain deviance within stable societies, proposing that anomie also arises when a culture insists that everyone pursue identical goals while denying many people the legitimate means to achieve them. (A) He concluded that both crises share a common feature, the collapse of shared norms, a state Durkheim called anomie, arguing that rapid social change can strip away the moral guidelines that regulate human desire. (C) Faced with this gap between aspiration and opportunity, some individuals conform, but others turn to innovation, ritual, retreat, or rebellion.

The practical consequence of this precision has been a dramatic acceleration in the pace of genetic research itself. Bacteria have been cutting up invading viral DNA for billions of years, long before any scientist thought to borrow the trick for use in a laboratory. ( ① ) The CRISPR-Cas9 system, as it is now known, relies on a short guide RNA that matches a specific DNA sequence, leading a scissor-like enzyme called Cas9 directly to that exact location in the genome. ( ② ) Once Cas9 arrives at the target site, it slices both strands of the DNA helix, and the cell's own repair machinery rushes in to mend the cut, often introducing a small change in the process. ( ③ ) By supplying the cell with a template during this repair step, scientists can direct that machinery to insert a specific new sequence. ( ④ ) This goes well beyond merely disabling the original gene. ( ⑤ ) What once required years of painstaking work to alter a single gene can now, with a properly designed guide RNA, be accomplished within days.