고등 영어 빈칸 추론 예상문제

A major city introduced a congestion pricing program that charged drivers a fee to enter the downtown core during peak hours, and the city's environmental agency tracked the downtown air quality index for the year before and the year after the program began. In the year following implementation, the number of days on which the air quality index exceeded the "unhealthy" threshold fell from 47 days to 19 days, even though downtown pedestrian and cycling traffic increased substantially over the same period, activities that themselves generate negligible air pollution. Vehicle counts entering the congestion zone during peak hours also fell by 26 percent according to toll records, closely tracking the decline in unhealthy air quality days. Given the close correspondence between reduced vehicle counts and improved air quality readings, the agency concluded that the reduction in unhealthy air quality days _______.

A workplace research firm surveyed employees at a mid-sized software company about their daily coffee consumption and asked them to self-rate their own productivity on a scale from 1 to 10. The survey found that employees who reported drinking one to two cups of coffee per day rated their productivity an average of 7.4 out of 10, while employees who reported drinking either zero cups or more than four cups per day both rated their productivity closer to 6.1 out of 10. Notably, employees who drank five or more cups reported the lowest average productivity rating, 5.8 out of 10, along with the highest rates of self-reported afternoon fatigue and difficulty concentrating. The firm's researchers, however, cautioned readers not to conclude that coffee directly causes higher productivity, since the survey measured only self-reported perceptions rather than objectively verified output, and other factors such as job satisfaction or sleep quality could independently affect both coffee habits and self-rated productivity. Based on the pattern the survey actually observed, the researchers concluded only that self-rated productivity appears highest at a _______.

A detailed anthropological study of daily scientific practice in the Salk Institute laboratory in La Jolla, California shows how difficult it is to ______. Bruno Latour describes how scientists arrived at the elucidation of TRF (thyrotropin-releasing factor), a hormone that is secreted by the brain. He says that his observations led him to "the conviction that a body of practices widely regarded by outsiders as well organized, logical, and coherent, in fact consists of a disordered array of observations with which scientists struggle to produce order." The final consensus formulation of TRF (i.e., when it became a scientific "fact") emerged some time between January 1968 and January 1970. Half of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 1977 for this discovery was shared between the Salk group and another competing group in New Orleans, but each of these two competing groups strongly felt that they deserved sole credit and that the other did not deserve even a share of the award.
* elucidation: 규명 secrete: 분비하다 * array: 배열

Astronomers cannot see dark matter directly, since by definition it does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. Its existence is inferred instead from its gravitational effects on visible matter. When astronomers measured the speed at which stars orbit the center of spiral galaxies, they expected orbital speed to decrease with distance from the galactic center, just as the speed of planets decreases the farther they are from the sun. Instead, they found that stars far from the center orbit almost as fast as those near it — a pattern that would only make sense if a large amount of unseen mass, distributed throughout the galaxy, were exerting additional gravitational pull on the outer stars. Because visible stars and gas alone could not account for this extra pull, astronomers concluded that galaxies must contain far more matter than telescopes can detect, and they inferred its presence by ___________.

Financial educators explaining how a personal credit score functions to consumers unfamiliar with lending often compare it to a restaurant's online reputation rating. A restaurant that consistently serves quality food, keeps its promised reservation times, and handles complaints professionally tends to accumulate a strong rating over time as more satisfied diners leave positive reviews, and this strong rating in turn makes new customers more willing to trust the restaurant with their reservation without having eaten there before. A restaurant that repeatedly cancels reservations or serves inconsistent food, by contrast, accumulates a poor rating that makes new customers hesitant to take a chance on it. In much the same way, a consumer who consistently repays borrowed money on time gradually builds a strong credit score, while missed or late payments gradually lower it, and lenders who have never personally interacted with a given borrower rely heavily on this score when deciding whether to approve a loan. This comparison suggests that a consumer with a long history of missed payments is likely to find that lenders _______.

Logistics researchers studying the introduction of robotic systems into large e-commerce warehouses have observed a pattern that differs from the wholesale replacement of human workers many initially expected. When one major online retailer introduced fleets of wheeled robots that carry entire shelving units to stationary human workers rather than requiring workers to walk to distant shelves themselves, the company found that the total number of warehouse workers employed at facilities using the robots did not decline as sharply as executives had projected; instead, workers were reassigned to tasks such as verifying item accuracy and packing orders, tasks the robots could not reliably perform themselves. A separate logistics company that automated its sorting process using robotic arms guided by computer vision found a similar outcome: the robots handled repetitive, physically strenuous sorting tasks with fewer errors than human workers previously had, while human employees shifted toward supervising the automated systems, handling irregularly shaped items the robots frequently misidentified, and resolving exceptions the software could not process on its own. Across both companies, and across several additional case studies reviewed by researchers, robots consistently took over narrowly defined, repetitive physical tasks while human workers concentrated increasingly on judgment-based tasks the robots could not perform reliably. These parallel outcomes suggest that warehouse automation tends to result in _______.

A mother cosigns her son's student loan. If the son drops out or cannot find adequate employment after graduation, the bank needs recourse to recover its funds. Without enforceable contracts and a functioning judicial system, the bank would have no way to compel repayment — and, critically, knowing this in advance, it would never have issued the loan. This scenario illustrates a principle that extends far beyond individual transactions. Every time a stranger lends money to another stranger, every time a company extends credit to a customer, every time an investor purchases a bond issued by a government thousands of miles away, the transaction is undergirded by the same assumption: that ______. Remove that assumption, and the entire architecture of modern finance collapses — not gradually, but immediately, as trust evaporates and every participant rushes to withdraw from a system they no longer believe will protect them.
* undergird: ~의 기반이 되다

Every choice we make carries a hidden price tag that never appears on any receipt. When a farmer decides to plant corn instead of soybeans on a plot of land, the true cost of that decision is not merely the price of seed and fertilizer. It also includes the income the farmer could have earned from the soybean crop that was never planted. Economists call this the opportunity cost: the value of the best alternative that is given up when a choice is made. A student who spends an afternoon studying for an exam instead of working a part-time job forgoes the wages she would have earned. A city that builds a new stadium instead of a hospital forfeits the benefits the hospital would have provided. In each case, the real cost of a decision is measured not in money alone but in _______.