영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Long before cognitive scientists possessed the tools to observe the brain directly, Donald Broadbent proposed an influential model suggesting that the human capacity to process incoming sensory information ①constrained by a structural bottleneck through which only a single stream of input can pass at any given instant. According to this filter theory, multiple channels of stimulation, such as competing voices in a crowded room, ②are initially registered at a shallow, physical level, but only one channel is selected for further, meaning-based analysis while the rest are blocked from advancing beyond that early filter. Although later researchers challenged the rigidity of this early selection mechanism, ③pointing to instances in which unattended information, such as one's own name, nevertheless ④breaks through and captures awareness, the core insight that attention imposes a genuine processing limit rather than a mere matter of willpower has remained remarkably durable. This basic bottleneck principle ⑤continues to inform contemporary explanations of why multitasking so reliably degrades performance on demanding tasks.

Why do people often overvalue objects they have partly ① built themselves, even when the finished product is objectively inferior to something they could have simply purchased? This puzzle, which researchers ② 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 ③ assembled 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 ④ pour into a task, individuals become reluctant to judge the outcome objectively, because doing so would require admitting that their effort was partly ⑤ wasted.

Many teachers and parents worry that today's teenagers are losing the ability ① to read long, complex texts. National test scores show a slow decline in reading comprehension over the past ten years, and some experts blame smartphones and short videos for ② shortening students' attention spans. Other researchers disagree with this simple explanation. They point out that teenagers today ③ read constantly, just in different forms, such as text messages, captions, and online articles. According to this view, the real problem is not that students read less overall, but that they rarely practice reading long passages without any interruption. A team of researchers recently found that students ④ who read at least one full book every month scored noticeably higher on comprehension tests than students who mainly read short online posts. This result suggests that the format of reading, rather than simple screen time, may ⑤ being the more important factor behind the changing scores.

When people face a difficult decision, they often weigh not only the expected outcome of each option but also how painful it would feel ① to 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 ② shaping the final decision. Investors, for example, sometimes continue holding a declining stock rather than ③ selling it, not because they expect the price to recover, but because selling would force them to confront the possibility ④ of 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 ⑤ help explain why so many individuals default to inaction whenever a decision feels uncertain.

Part of the problem is that renting a scooter takes only a few taps on a phone screen, while finding and carrying a helmet requires ① planning that many riders simply skip. Emergency room doctors note that scooter-related head injuries have risen ② sharply in recent years, closely tracking the rise in scooter popularity itself. Unlike a bicycle, which typically requires balance skills built up over years of practice, an electric scooter can reach a ③ surprising speed within seconds, often faster than new riders expect from something that looks simple to operate. A fall at that speed, onto pavement rather than grass, can cause a head injury just as ④ severe as one from a bicycle or a small motorcycle. Cities that have begun requiring helmets for scooter rentals report a measurable ⑤ rise in serious injuries.

Science labs feel far ① safer than they actually are, largely because the equipment looks harmless and the experiments are carefully planned by a teacher. This false sense of security leads some students to skip small precautions, such as wearing safety goggles for a "simple" experiment or tasting a substance out of ② curiosity. Chemical reactions, however, do not distinguish between a professional laboratory and a classroom; a small amount of the wrong substance splashed into an eye can cause ③ permanent damage within seconds, regardless of how basic the experiment seemed. Teachers repeatedly emphasize reading each instruction before touching any material, since even a familiar-looking chemical can behave ④ unpredictably when combined with something new. Most laboratory accidents, researchers note, do not happen during advanced or unusual experiments but during routine ones that students have performed many times before, precisely because familiarity breeds ⑤ caution rather than carelessness.

Few ideas in policy debate provoke as much philosophical unease as the notion that a government might ① deliberately steer citizens toward better choices while leaving every option technically available. Defenders insist that freedom is ② preserved as long as no option is banned and no penalty is attached, arguing that a citizen who is merely steered, rather than coerced, remains free to choose otherwise. Critics counter that this defense rests on an ③ impoverished notion of liberty, one that ignores how engineered defaults and calculated framing can shape decisions just as powerfully as an outright prohibition would. If a policy is designed because officials expect it to bypass conscious deliberation, these critics ask, can the resulting choice still be called ④ autonomous, even though no law was broken? The dispute ultimately turns on what freedom actually requires: the mere absence of coercion, or a decision-making process that remains ⑤ opaque and undistorted.

In a classic experiment inspired by Keynes's beauty contest analogy, participants choose a number between zero and one hundred, and the winner is whoever selects the number closest to two-thirds of the average of all guesses submitted. A perfectly rational player, assuming every other participant reasons with unlimited depth, would conclude the equilibrium number is zero. In practice, however, actual guesses rarely converge on zero; most participants stop reasoning after a round or two of imagining what others might guess, producing _______________. This gap between theoretical equilibrium and observed behavior reveals that human reasoning is bounded.

Psychologists have long wondered whether reading fiction can change how people treat others in real life. (A) This kind of mental practice, researchers argue, can carry over into everyday situations, making readers more likely to notice a classmate's hidden sadness or understand a stranger's unusual behavior. (B) Not every book produces this effect equally. Stories that stay focused only on fast action, with little attention to characters' inner lives, appear to build empathy far less than stories that slow down to explore emotion. For this reason, some psychologists now recommend that young readers balance fast-paced adventure novels with quieter stories about ordinary people and their feelings. (C) Several studies suggest that novels which describe a character's inner thoughts in detail can train readers to imagine what other people are feeling, a skill closely related to empathy. When readers follow a character through difficult choices, they practice stepping into someone else's perspective without any real risk to themselves.

The lining, weakened in this way, no longer functions as the tight barrier it is meant to be. The human gut hosts trillions of microorganisms whose combined genetic material outnumbers that of the human genome itself many times over. ( ① ) Once dismissed as passive hitchhikers, these bacteria are now understood to actively shape digestion, regulate immune responses, and even influence the production of chemicals that affect mood and behavior. ( ② ) A microbiome disrupted by antibiotics, poor diet, or chronic stress can leave the gut lining more permeable than it should be. ( ③ ) This allows substances to leak into the bloodstream that would normally stay contained. ( ④ ) Researchers studying this connection have found that transplanting gut bacteria from a healthy donor into a patient can, in some cases, relieve symptoms of certain digestive disorders that conventional medication had failed to treat. ( ⑤ ) Still, scientists caution that the microbiome varies enormously between individuals, which means a treatment that restores balance in one person's gut may do little for someone else's.