영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Every day, people throw away piles of used paper without ①thinking about where it goes. However, most of that paper does not have to end up in a landfill. Instead, it can travel to a recycling factory and become brand new paper again. First, workers collect old newspapers, boxes, and notebooks ②left in recycling bins. These papers are then soaked in water and ③turned into soft, mushy pulp. You can think of this process like breaking a cookie back into flour and water. For example, ink and small pieces of plastic ④is removed from the pulp during this stage. The clean pulp is pressed into thin sheets and ⑤dried in large machines. Therefore, a wrinkled old newspaper can be reborn as clean white paper. In contrast to throwing paper away, recycling it saves trees and reduces waste.

When consumers compare two products and assume that the one labeled "eco-friendly" is automatically the more ①sustainable choice, they often overlook the complexity involved in verifying such a claim. Life cycle assessment, commonly abbreviated as LCA, is a systematic method developed to evaluate the environmental impact of a product across every stage of its existence. By tracing a product from its origin to its disposal, this approach reveals impacts that might otherwise remain ②hidden from consumers who see only the finished item on a shelf. For example, an electric vehicle may produce no emissions while being driven, yet the mining of metals for its battery can generate ③substantial environmental costs elsewhere. Without accounting for these earlier stages, a ④superficial comparison could mistakenly present the vehicle as entirely emission-free. Therefore, researchers increasingly rely on life cycle assessment to make ⑤uninformed decisions rather than trusting labels alone.

The ecological footprint, a widely cited measure of how much biologically productive land and water a population requires to sustain its consumption, has become one of the most familiar tools for communicating humanity's environmental impact. By converting diverse activities, from driving to eating meat, into a single unit of land area, the measure allows policymakers to grasp whether a lifestyle exceeds what the planet can regenerate. This simplicity, however, is also the source of its most persistent criticism. Because the footprint aggregates dissimilar impacts, such as carbon emissions and water scarcity, into one composite figure, _______________. A region might reduce its footprint by lowering carbon emissions while simultaneously depleting a local aquifer, yet the aggregate number could still appear to improve, concealing damage that demands urgent attention. Furthermore, the method assumes that all bio-productive land is roughly interchangeable, treating a hectare of forest as equivalent to a hectare of farmland, even though the two provide markedly different ecological functions.

Cities are frequently several degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside, a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect, which intensifies in summer and threatens public health. This disparity arises largely because asphalt and concrete absorb solar radiation during the day and slowly release it as heat throughout the night, preventing urban areas from cooling down. Furthermore, the scarcity of vegetation in densely built areas removes a natural cooling mechanism, since plants lower temperatures by evaporating water from their leaves. To address this problem, urban planners _______________. One widely used solution involves reflective "cool" roofing engineered to reflect more sunlight than dark rooftops absorb. Another strategy, green infrastructure, incorporates rooftop gardens and tree-lined streets that provide shade while releasing moisture. In contrast, some cities have pursued permeable pavements that let water seep through and evaporate, cooling nearby surfaces. Collectively, these strategies show that reducing urban heat depends on combining approaches suited to a city's geography.

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 destabilizing 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 irreversible 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 interdependent system rather than a collection of isolated regions. Crossing one boundary, proponents argue, _______________, 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 confidence than the data can support.

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.

Among the many strategies proposed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, one of the oldest draws on an agricultural technique predating modern industry, converting organic material into a stable form of charcoal known as biochar. (A) When mixed into farmland, biochar also improves soil structure, retaining moisture and nutrients otherwise lost, which can boost crop yields in depleted soils. For example, farmers cultivating nutrient-poor tropical soils have reported measurable increases in productivity after adding biochar. (B) Biochar is produced through pyrolysis, a process in which crop residues or wood chips are heated in an environment with little or no oxygen, preventing the material from burning away as in an open fire. This process leaves behind a carbon-rich solid that resists decomposition far longer than raw organic matter, locking carbon in a form remaining stable in soil for centuries. (C) Nevertheless, researchers caution that the climate benefits of biochar depend on the feedstock and method used, since poorly managed pyrolysis can release as much carbon as it sequesters, undermining its own purpose.

Cognitive load theory begins from the premise that working memory, the mental workspace in which incoming information is temporarily held and manipulated, can accommodate only a limited number of novel elements at any given moment, in stark contrast to the comparatively vast capacity of long-term memory. (A) Because much of this burden arises not from the intrinsic difficulty of the subject matter itself but from the manner in which information is presented, instructional designers can substantially reduce unnecessary strain by eliminating redundant explanations, aligning visual and verbal elements so that learners need not mentally integrate scattered sources, and gradually withdrawing guidance as competence develops. (B) When instructional materials introduce more interacting elements than this narrow workspace can simultaneously process, learners experience what theorists call cognitive overload, a condition under which comprehension deteriorates and errors multiply regardless of how motivated the learner might be. (C) Ignoring these principles, by contrast, risks overwhelming novices with demands that exceed their processing capacity, however well-organized the underlying content may be.

**주어진 문장**: This danger arises because no single participant possesses both the authority and the incentive needed to restrict others' access to the resource. When a resource is shared among many users, none of whom bears the full cost of its depletion, each individual is tempted to extract as much value as possible before others do the same. ① This dynamic, famously labeled the tragedy of the commons, describes how shared pastures and fisheries can be degraded even when every participant privately understands the danger of overuse. ② A single herder who adds one more animal to a communal pasture gains the entire benefit of that addition, whereas the resulting damage to the grass is shared among other herders who depend on the land. ③ Because self-interest offers no incentive to restrain consumption unilaterally, the resource tends to be exhausted long before any user intends such an outcome. ④ For decades, economists assumed that only two remedies existed: strict regulation or the conversion of shared resources into private property. ⑤ Elinor Ostrom challenged 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. ① ② ③ ④ ⑤

**주어진 문장**: This question has motivated economists to search for empirical patterns linking national income levels to measurable indicators of environmental quality. Economists have long debated whether prosperity and environmental quality are fundamentally opposed, or whether the relationship between them changes shape as an economy matures. ① The Environmental Kuznets Curve, a hypothesis borrowed from earlier theories of income inequality, proposes that pollution initially rises alongside economic growth before eventually declining once a society crosses a certain threshold of wealth. ② In its early stages, industrializing nations prioritize output over conservation, treating clean air and water as expendable costs of development to be addressed later. ③ Beyond a certain point, however, rising incomes generate both the technological capacity and the political will to demand stricter regulation, so degradation begins to reverse even as production keeps expanding. ④ Some scholars regard this trajectory as a reassuring paradox, suggesting that the very growth blamed for ecological harm may eventually finance its own repair. ⑤ Critics, by contrast, argue that the curve rests on a narrow selection of pollutants that happen to decline with wealth, while ignoring greenhouse gases and resource depletion, which show no comparable tendency to fall. ① ② ③ ④ ⑤