영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Many households save far less for retirement than conventional financial advice would recommend, not necessarily because they ①lacks the resources to do so, but because a combination of procrastination, present bias, and the discomfort of forgoing current consumption repeatedly delays the decision to begin saving. Recognizing this gap between intention and action, some economists have proposed a savings program in which employees commit today to ②allocating a portion of their future salary increases toward retirement savings, rather than being asked to reduce their current take-home pay immediately. Because the sacrifice applies only to income not yet received, the commitment ③feels far less painful than an equivalent reduction in present earnings would, making employees considerably more willing to enroll. Once enrolled, the contribution rate automatically rises with each subsequent raise, ④gradually increasing savings without requiring any further deliberate action from participants. Field trials of such programs have reported substantial increases in average savings rates over several years, alongside participant satisfaction that ⑤remains notably high.

Every time a smartphone connects to a cell tower or a Wi-Fi network, it quietly records a data point that can later ①be pieced together into a detailed map of where its owner has been. Most users agree to this tracking without ②reading the fine print, assuming that a single company's database poses little threat. The real danger, however, emerges when location data from multiple sources ③combining. A pattern that reveals a person's home, workplace, and daily route can expose far more than any single app ever intended to share. Companies often argue that anonymized data cannot be traced back to individuals, yet researchers have repeatedly ④shown that a handful of location points is enough to identify a specific person. As a result, privacy experts increasingly insist that location data ⑤deserves the same legal protection as medical records.

Standard economic theory assumes that money is fungible, meaning that a dollar earned as salary is functionally ①identical to a dollar received as a tax refund or won in a lottery. In practice, however, people routinely sort their finances into separate mental accounts, treating money differently depending on its source or intended purpose. A household that would never dip into its retirement savings to pay for a vacation might nonetheless spend an unexpected bonus on that very trip without ②hesitation, even though both sums are, in strictly financial terms, equally available for either purpose. This ③compartmentalization can produce decisions that appear ④consistent when viewed through a purely rational lens: the same individual who diligently saves a portion of every paycheck may simultaneously carry high-interest credit card debt, effectively paying more to borrow than they earn on their savings. Mental accounting is not always harmful, however; by assigning specific categories to specific funds, individuals can also impose useful ⑤discipline on their spending, preventing money earmarked for essential needs from being diverted toward impulsive purchases.

When engineers design the software that controls a self-driving car, they inevitably face a question that philosophers have debated for ①decades. If a crash becomes unavoidable, should the vehicle protect its own passenger at all costs, or should it be programmed to ②minimize total harm, even if that means steering toward the person inside? Surveys reveal an uncomfortable ③contradiction: most people say a car should be programmed to save the greater number of lives, yet the same people admit they would never buy a vehicle designed to sacrifice its own owner. This gap between the ideal and the personal choice suggests that ethical programming cannot be settled by public opinion alone. Manufacturers, regulators, and philosophers must instead agree on ④transparent rules before autonomous vehicles are ⑤forbidden to make such decisions on the road.

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. 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. 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. Even though the two speakers hold identical thoughts and mental images when they use the word, their statements refer to two different substances, because the underlying chemical composition, not personal belief, fixes what a word ultimately picks out. Meaning, Putnam concluded, _______________.

When Mina graduated from college five years ago, she had never even heard the term "data scientist." Everything changed when a small tech startup, which was building an app to predict traffic patterns, hired her to analyze massive amounts of data. Mina quickly discovered that she loved turning raw numbers into insights that helped real people make better decisions. Within two years, ___________, as companies in every industry realized how valuable data could be. Today, Mina leads a team of ten analysts, mentoring young graduates who are drawn to a field that barely existed when she began her own career.

For decades, productivity advice has focused almost entirely on managing time efficiently, yet many experts now argue this approach overlooks something important. This alternative approach, known as energy management, suggests that ___________. Unlike time, which flows at a constant rate, human energy naturally rises and falls in cycles shaped by sleep, food, and mental fatigue. A person who tackles difficult tasks during a low-energy period, for instance, may need two hours to finish what takes thirty minutes at peak energy.

A rational approach to decision-making dictates that only future costs and benefits should influence a choice, since resources already spent cannot be recovered regardless of what is decided next. In practice, however, people routinely allow such irrecoverable expenditures, known as sunk costs, to shape their subsequent decisions, a pattern referred to as the sunk cost fallacy. Economists therefore urge decision-makers to evaluate each choice based solely on its prospective outcomes, treating past expenditures as ___________ to the decision at hand.

Facial recognition software has moved rapidly into shopping malls, schools, and apartment buildings. Proponents note that it can unlock doors and speed up identity checks far faster than any human guard. Independent studies, however, have repeatedly found that many commercial systems perform less accurately on women and people with darker skin tones, which means that _______________. Several cities have already reported cases in which an innocent person was detained based on a flawed match.

In purely material terms, of course, rejecting the offer leaves the responder objectively worse off than accepting it would have. In a typical round of the ultimatum game, a proposer offers to keep eighty percent of a sum of money, leaving only twenty percent for the responder. ( ① ) A responder who values only material gain should accept this offer without hesitation, since twenty percent of something is still more than one hundred percent of nothing. ( ② ) In practice, however, a substantial proportion of responders reject such lopsided offers outright. ( ③ ) Both participants then receive nothing, an outcome that a purely self-interested calculator would never choose voluntarily. ( ④ ) Researchers interpret this pattern as evidence that people are willing to incur a personal cost in order to punish behavior they perceive as exploitative. ( ⑤ ) This willingness to sacrifice material gain for the sake of fairness appears consistently across many different cultures, though the specific threshold for what counts as an unfair offer can vary considerably.