영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

In the late nineteenth century, the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus undertook a rigorous investigation of forgetting ①by serve as his own experimental subject. He memorized thousands of meaningless three-letter syllables ②so that prior knowledge could not skew his results. After learning each list to perfection, he tested his retention at intervals ③ranging from twenty minutes to a month later. He recorded how many repetitions were required to relearn the material each time. The resulting curve revealed a consistent pattern. Forgetting proceeds rapidly during the initial hours following learning, then gradually ④decelerates until the rate of loss becomes almost imperceptible. Roughly half of the acquired information vanished within the first hour alone. Yet whatever survived that initial plunge tended to persist for much longer periods. Ebbinghaus further found that ⑤distributing study sessions across several days produced better retention than cramming the same repetition into one sitting.

Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly ①built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? This puzzle, which researchers ②named after a furniture retailer famous for selling items that require home assembly, challenges the standard economic assumption that value is determined solely by an object's inherent qualities. In a series of experiments, participants who ③assembled a plain storage box were willing to pay nearly as much for their own imperfect creation as they were for a professionally built version, despite being fully aware of its flaws. Labor, it seems, functions as a kind of psychological investment: once effort has been ④pour into a task, individuals become reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly ⑤wasted.

Speed-reading courses promise a simple result: read several times faster while ①understanding just as much as before. The techniques usually involve moving your eyes quickly down the page, skipping small words, and ②avoid the habit of silently pronouncing each word in your head. Some students do learn ③to move their eyes faster after a short course. However, researchers who study reading have found a serious problem with these claims. Understanding a text is not just about how quickly your eyes move across it; it depends on how deeply your brain ④processes each sentence and connects new ideas to what you already know. When readers rush through a page at extreme speed, their comprehension usually drops sharply, even though they feel confident that they understood everything. In careful studies, speed-reading graduates often score no better on comprehension tests than ordinary readers ⑤who read at a normal pace.

Before a single line of dialogue is written for many animated shows, a character designer has already spent weeks deciding how that character should look, move, and be recognized at a glance. A visiting illustrator who spoke at our school explained that a truly successful design should be ①identifiable even as a plain black silhouette, since audiences often ②ignore a character's outline before they notice any facial detail. She showed us early sketches of a now-famous cartoon hero, in which the same personality had been tested through dozens of different body shapes, from short and round to tall and angular, before the final version was ③chosen. Small choices, she added, carry surprising weight: rounded shapes tend to feel friendly and safe, while sharp angles suggest ④danger or power, even to viewers who have never studied design. I left the talk realizing that a character's personality is communicated through its silhouette long before it ever speaks a single ⑤word.

As solar and wind power expand ①rapidly across national grids, engineers face a challenge that receives far less public attention than the construction of the generating facilities themselves. Unlike conventional power plants, which can adjust their output to match demand at almost any moment, solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity only when sunlight or wind is available, producing supply that fluctuates ②rarely. One proposed solution involves large-scale battery storage systems, which absorb ③surplus electricity generated during periods of high output and release it later when generation declines. Another approach relies on expanding transmission networks across wider regions, so that electricity generated in a sunny area can be redirected to places experiencing a ④shortfall. Without such investment, integrating renewable energy could ⑤paradoxically undermine the very reliability that modern electricity grids are expected to provide.

A ①shrinking number of teenagers are joining book clubs that exist only on their phones. These apps let users track how many pages they read each day, write short reviews, and join group chats about a chosen book. Some students say the apps make reading feel less ②lonely, because they can share their honest reactions the moment they finish a chapter instead of waiting for a weekly meeting. The apps also use gentle reminders and reading streaks to keep members ③motivated, turning a private habit into a small social game. However, a few teachers worry that constant notifications from a reading app can pull attention away from the book itself, since users may spend more time ④chatting about the story than actually reading it. Despite this concern, many students report that the sense of community keeps them reading books they would have quit halfway through if they had been reading completely ⑤alone.

When people encounter an individual who appears to memorize enormous quantities of specialized information ①effortlessly, they often assume that person possesses an innate gift. Cognitive psychologists, however, contend that such feats ②rarely stem from raw talent alone. Instead, such feats arise from a learned skill known as chunking, whereby scattered pieces of information are consolidated into larger, meaningful units. A landmark study of chess players demonstrated this principle. When shown a board arranged according to plausible game positions, grandmasters reproduced the layout perfectly. Yet when the same pieces were scattered randomly, their performance ③collapsed to the level of novices. This pattern reveals that expert memory is not larger in raw capacity but is instead organized around patterns accumulated through years of deliberate practice. If chunking, rather than innate aptitude, ④contradicts expert performance, then educators should stop treating talent as fixed and destiny-bound. Curricula ought to be redesigned to cultivate pattern recognition explicitly, since doing so would grant far more students access to expertise once ⑤presumed reserved for the naturally gifted.

People often recognize, in calm reflection, that their future selves will be tempted to abandon a goal they currently value. Rather than relying solely on willpower at the critical moment, they may choose to _______________, a strategy known as precommitment. By making certain choices costly, inconvenient, or impossible to reverse, individuals can protect a long-term goal from a short-term impulse that has not yet arisen. Similarly, someone determined to finish a project might publicly announce a deadline, transforming private intentions into a commitment that carries social consequences if broken. What unites these examples is a simple insight: because future desires cannot always be trusted, the wisest moment to act may be now.

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.

The reason, he insisted, lies outside the speaker's mind entirely, in the actual chemical composition of the substance being referred to. Imagine a distant planet identical to Earth in every visible respect, except that the clear liquid its inhabitants call "water" is not H2O but a different compound, XYZ, that happens to look, taste, and behave exactly the same. ( ① ) When an Earthling and a Twin Earthling each say the word "water," they seem to mean the same thing, since neither could tell the substances apart without a chemistry lab. ( ② ) Philosopher Hilary Putnam used this scenario to argue that the meaning of a word is not determined solely by what happens inside a speaker's head. ( ③ ) Even though the two speakers hold identical thoughts and mental images when they use the word, their statements refer to two different substances. ( ④ ) Meaning, Putnam concluded, depends partly on the world outside the mind, not merely on the private mental states of whoever happens to be speaking. ( ⑤ )