영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

As solar and wind power expand rapidly across national grids, engineers face a challenge that ①receive 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, ②producing supply that fluctuates constantly. One proposed solution involves large-scale battery storage systems, ③which absorb surplus electricity generated during periods of high output and release it later when generation declines. Grid operators must therefore invest in infrastructure capable of ④accommodating this variability, rather than assuming renewable sources can simply replace fossil fuels without adjustment. Without such investment, integrating renewable energy could paradoxically undermine the very reliability that modern electricity grids are ⑤expected to provide.

When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh not only the expected outcome of each option but also how painful it would feel ①to discover later that a different choice had been better. This anticipation of future regret, rather than the size of the potential loss itself, frequently becomes the dominant factor ②shaping the final decision. Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than ③selling it, not because they expect the price to recover, but because selling would force them to confront the possibility ④of having made a clear mistake. Researchers have found that people feel sharper regret over losses that resulted from taking action than over identical losses that resulted from doing nothing, which ⑤help explain why so many individuals default to inaction whenever a decision feels uncertain.

In the late nineteenth century, the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus undertook a rigorous investigation of forgetting by serving as his own experimental subject. He memorized thousands of ①meaningless three-letter syllables so that prior knowledge could not skew his results. After learning each list to perfection, he tested his retention at intervals ranging from twenty minutes to a month later. He ②ignored 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 decelerates until the rate of loss becomes almost imperceptible. Roughly half of the acquired information ③vanished within the first hour alone. Yet whatever survived that initial plunge tended to ④persist for much longer periods. Ebbinghaus further found that distributing study sessions across several days produced better retention than cramming the same repetition into one sitting. This finding, now central to modern learning theory, implies that revisiting material shortly before it would otherwise be forgotten ⑤interrupts the decline of the forgetting curve.

Why do people often ①overvalue objects they have partly built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively ②inferior to something they could have simply purchased? This puzzle, which researchers named 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 assembled a plain storage box were willing to pay nearly as much for their own ③imperfect 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 poured into a task, individuals become ④reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly wasted. This tendency helps explain why consumers often prefer products that demand some degree of personal assembly, even when a comparable finished item is available at a ⑤higher price and requires no time investment whatsoever.

When workers receive a five percent raise in a year when prices have climbed five percent as well, their real purchasing power has not changed at all, yet many still report feeling ①noticeably better off. This tendency to judge economic well-being by ②nominal figures printed on a paycheck, rather than by what that money can actually purchase, is known among economists as money illusion. Employers exploit this pattern by favoring modest nominal raises over deeper structural adjustments, since a visible increase on a payslip ③disappoints employees more effectively than an explanation about inflation could. The illusion persists even among people who claim to understand inflation well, which suggests that the bias operates at an ④intuitive level that formal knowledge does not easily override. Some economists argue that policymakers should exploit this illusion strategically, since workers resist nominal wage cuts far more ⑤fiercely than they resist the equivalent erosion of real wages.

In the days leading up to an endurance event, many athletes deliberately ①increase their carbohydrate intake while reducing training volume, a practice known as carbohydrate loading. The strategy is designed to ②maximize the amount of glycogen, the storage form of carbohydrate, packed into muscle tissue before competition begins. Sports nutritionists caution, however, that the timing and composition of meals matter as much as the total quantity of carbohydrate consumed, since eating ③familiar foods immediately before competition can cause digestive discomfort. Athletes are therefore advised to ④practice their nutrition strategy during training rather than experimenting with it for the first time on race day. Beyond carbohydrates, adequate protein and micronutrient intake throughout the training cycle remains ⑤essential, since fueling strategy is only one part of a much larger nutritional picture.

Metacognition, broadly defined as the capacity to monitor and evaluate one's own cognitive processes, is often treated as a reliable guide to what we actually know, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the correspondence between subjective confidence and objective accuracy is far weaker than intuition would suggest. Individuals routinely overestimate how thoroughly they have understood a passage of text immediately after reading it, a phenomenon partly attributable to the fluency with which the material was processed rather than to any genuine grasp of its underlying structure. Because rereading familiar material tends to feel effortless, _______________, a misattribution that can lead them to abandon further study prematurely. This gap between perceived and actual mastery, sometimes labeled the illusion of knowing, has practical consequences for education, since students who trust their inflated self-assessments are less likely to seek out the more effortful, retrieval-based strategies that would otherwise consolidate their learning.

When anthropologists first began systematically studying societies far removed from their own, many unconsciously judged unfamiliar customs against the standards of their home culture, a tendency now known as ethnocentrism. (A) Anthropologist Franz Boas argued that no culture possesses an inherently superior set of values, and that apparent oddities, once examined closely, typically serve coherent functions within their own social systems. (C) Cultural relativism emerged as a corrective principle, holding that a society's practices should be understood within their own cultural context rather than measured against an outside standard presumed to be universal. (B) Critics caution, however, that taken to an extreme, the principle risks excusing practices that cause genuine harm.

A small bakery once sold a basic loaf of bread for three dollars and a premium loaf for six dollars, and most customers, uncertain about the added value of the pricier option, simply bought the cheaper one. (A) Almost nobody chose this new seven-dollar loaf, yet sales of the six-dollar loaf rose sharply, because it now appeared to be an obvious bargain beside the inferior newcomer. (B) This pattern, confirmed across countless pricing experiments in other markets, demonstrates that people rarely judge options in isolation but instead evaluate them relative to whatever alternatives happen to be nearby. (C) The owner then introduced a third option: a slightly larger premium loaf priced at seven dollars, one that was clearly inferior to the six-dollar loaf in terms of value for money.

Emissions trading, a market-based mechanism for curbing greenhouse gases, allows governments to set an overall limit on carbon output while letting firms trade permits within that limit. (A) Under this system, known as cap-and-trade, companies that cut emissions more cheaply than required can sell surplus allowances to firms facing higher reduction costs. Proponents argue that this flexibility lets society reach a given environmental target at the lowest overall cost, since abatement shifts toward whoever can achieve it most economically. (B) Consequently, many economists now advocate combining trading with a price floor, a minimum permit price that keeps the market from collapsing during weak demand, thereby preserving the cost-effectiveness for which trading is valued. (C) Critics, however, contend that trading schemes frequently allocate too many permits, a flaw that has historically depressed carbon prices and blunted incentives to invest in cleaner technology. For example, early phases of several regional markets granted allowances so generously that permit prices collapsed, leaving polluters with little pressure to change their practices.