Essential English Reading Comprehension Passages
21번 지문: 신념과 행동의 상호관계
① It is common sense that people’s inner beliefs may drive their external behavior.
② If you’re attracted to a certain person, you should be more likely to socialize with that person.
③ If you favor a brand of toothpaste, you’re more likely to buy it.
④ Of course, our internal thoughts don’t always predict our public behavior, but overall what we do obviously reflects what we think.
⑤ But beliefs and behaviors are also related in a more remarkable way.
⑥ It turns out that the arrow is as likely to point in the reverse direction.
⑦ As social psychologist David Myers observes, “If social psychology has taught us anything during the last 25 years, it is that we are likely not only to think ourselves into a way of acting but also to act ourselves into a way of thinking.”
29번 지문: 전문가의 지식 구조와 이해
① Studies of experts provide insight into what it means to have deep and flexible understanding.
② Experts in a particular domain are people who have deep, richly interconnected ideas about the world.
③ They are not just good thinkers or people who are exceptionally smart.
④ Rather, experts have knowledge in a specific domain — such as chess, chemistry, or tennis — and are not generalists.
⑤ However, experts do not just know “a bunch of facts.”
⑥ In fact, having expertise in a topic means that knowledge is organized into coherent frameworks, and the expert understands the inter-relationship between facts and can distinguish which ideas are most central.
⑦ This kind of deep but organized understanding allows for greater flexibility in learning and facilitates application across multiple contexts.
31번 지문: 경험과 주의력의 상관관계
① In everyday life, we use previous experience to predict where we should pay attention. Different environments create different expectations.
② This was profoundly illustrated by the scientist Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel.
③ He describes an adventure wandering through the New Guinea jungle with native New Guineans.
④ He relates that these natives tend to perform poorly at tasks Westerners have been trained to do since childhood.
⑤ But they are hardly stupid.
⑥ They can detect the most subtle changes in the jungle, know where food exists, can build and tear down shelters with ease, and know how to follow the tracks of a predator or find the way back home.
⑦ Diamond points out that Westerners who have never spent time in such places have no ability to pay attention to these things.
33번 지문: 종별 번식 전략의 차이
① In most respects, humans are one of a relatively small number of species that evolved a very different strategy of investing more energy to reproduce more slowly.
② Like apes and elephants, we mature at a leisurely pace, grow large bodies, and have few babies but devote much time and energy to raising them well.
③ This unusual strategy succeeds because while apes and elephants produce fewer babies than mice, a larger percentage of their offspring survive to then reproduce.
④ A house mouse can become a mother when she is just five weeks old, has four to ten pups per litter, and can have a new litter every two months over the course of her approximately twelve-month life.
⑤ However, the vast majority of her pups die young.
⑥ In contrast, a chimp or elephant mother does not reproduce until she is at least twelve years old, and she gives birth to only one infant every five or six years over the next thirty or so years.
⑦ About half of these offspring make it to becoming parents.
39번 지문: 인간의 잠수 반사 기전
① We have a ‘diving reflex’, like other marine mammals.
② This means that special nerve endings on our faces, around the mouth and nose, trigger this reflex only when the facial region goes under water.
③ If we are in the water, with our head out in the air, there is no diving reflex.
④ But if we sink just our face in a bowl of water, while the whole of the rest of our body is in the dry air, the diving reflex is triggered.
⑤ It automatically closes down the airway, reducing the risk of swallowing water, and it narrows the small air-passages in the lungs.
⑥ At the same time, the heart rate is slowed down to half speed and blood is shunted to the vital organs, protecting them from the effects of the brief stop in breathing.
⑦ By contrast, if a chimpanzee or a gorilla found itself in water with its face below the surface, it would panic, its heart would race, and it would quickly drown.