2026 수능특강 영어독해연습 4강
7 인간처럼 구문을 사용하는 일본 박새의 노래
The bird songs we hear ____ day are more than beautiful.
They serve a ____ purpose.
Birds employ their voices to ____ their mates, find their flock, claim territory, scare off intruders, warn others about predators, and for countless other functions.
For ____, Japanese and Swiss researchers recently discovered that Japanese great tits, small birds with jet-black heads and necks with prominent white cheeks, use syntax in their songs, just as humans do in their speech.
Syntax is crucial to language. For example, if ____ say, “I love that restaurant,” the message is clear.
But not even Star Wars’ ____ Yoda could understand, “Restaurant love that I.” Until recently, scientists believed that only humans could string together such vocalizations.
The Japanese great tit, it turns out, is the first animal apart from humans who can use phonological syntax — the ability to ____ sounds that individually have no meaning into a collective sound — that does.
To instruct other members of his flock to scan for predators, or to attract a mate, a great tit must sing several distinct notes in the ____ order — if the notes are sung differently, the study found, other birds will not react.
8 불안에 대한 유전자의 역할
____ an organism is confronted with some sort of threat, it typically becomes vigilant, searches to gain information about the nature of the threat, struggles to find an effective coping response.
And once a signal indicates safety — the lion has been evaded, the traffic cop ____ the explanation and doesn’t issue a ticket — the organism can relax.
But this is not what ____ in an anxious individual.
Instead, there is a nervous scrambling among coping responses — abruptly shifting from one to another without checking whether ____ has worked, an agitated attempt to cover all the bases and attempt a variety of responses simultaneously.
Or there is an inability to ____ when the safety signal occurs, and the restless vigilance keeps going.
By definition, ____ makes little sense outside the context of what the environment is doing to an individual.
In that framework, the brain chemicals and, ultimately, the genes relevant to anxiety don’t make ____ anxious.
They make you more responsive to anxiety-provoking situations, make it harder to detect ____ signals in the environment.
9 확률을 예측하는 아기
Babies use statistical learning to make predictions about the world, guiding their ____.
Like little statisticians, they form hypotheses, assess probabilities based on their knowledge, integrate new evidence from the environment, and perform ____.
In ____ creative study by the developmental psychologist Fei Xu, ten- to fourteen-month-old children first expressed a preference for pink or black lollipops, then were shown two candy jars:
one containing more black lollipops than ____, and one with more pink than black.
The experimenter then closed her eyes and drew one lollipop from each jar so infants could ____ only the stick, not the color.
Each lollipop was placed into a separate, opaque ____ with only the stick showing.
Infants crawled to the cup that was ____ more likely to contain their preferred color, because it came from a jar where that color was in the majority.
Experiments like this demonstrate that infants are ____ merely reactive to the world.
Even from a very young age, they actively ____ probabilities based on patterns that they observe and learn, to maximize the outcomes they desire.
10 냄새의 기능
David Howes, a professor of anthropology, notes the frequent association in different cultures between scents and rituals of transition, such as funerals or rites of ____.
He suggests that scent is felt to be symbolically appropriate for moments of social transition because it so frequently accompanies and marks ____ types of physical transition,
as when ____ smells signal the transformation of raw ingredients into food.
While scents tend to escape spaces and ____ out of human control, our experience of them is frequently liminal, as we notice scents far more strongly when first entering their range.
You smell baking bread ____ as you enter a house, but after a few minutes inside, you may no longer be able to smell it even with deliberate effort, a physical process known as olfactory adaptation or exhaustion.
It takes an overwhelming smell to retain our notice ____ a period of constant exposure.
Smells signal transitions through space as well as changes of state, and are thus used to ____ socially important moments of change.
11 다양한 접근 방식의 필요성
Variability in judgments is ____ and welcome in a competitive situation in which the best judgments will be rewarded.
When several companies (or several teams in the same organization) compete to generate innovative ____ to the same customer problem, we don’t want them to focus on the same approach.
The same is true when multiple teams of researchers attack a scientific problem, such as the development of a vaccine: we very much want them to look at it ____ different angles.
Even ____ sometimes behave like competitive players.
The analyst who ____ calls a recession that no one else has anticipated is sure to gain fame, whereas the one who never strays from the agreement remains unnoticed.
In such settings, variability in ideas and judgments is again welcome, because ____ is only the first step.
In a second phase, the results of these judgments will be ____ against one another, and the best will triumph.
In a market as in nature, ____ cannot work without variation.
12 철저한 사전 조사
____ failures begin with preparation.
No scientist wants to waste time or materials on experiments that have been ____ before and failed.
Do your homework. The classic intelligent failure is hypothesis ____.
You’ve taken the time to think through what might happen — why you have reason to ____ that you could be right about what will happen.
My Harvard colleague Thomas Eisenmann, an entrepreneurship expert, finds that many start-up failures are caused by the skipping of ____ homework.
For example, Triangulate, an online dating start-up, rushed to launch fully functional offerings that didn’t fit ____ market needs.
Eager to launch fast, founders ____ the research — customer interviews to probe for unmet needs.
Paying no attention to that crucial preparation, the company paid the ____.
Thomas attributes this common failure, in part, to “the ‘fail fast’ mantra,” which overemphasizes action, ____ preparation.
Moreover, while this might seem self-evident, once you’ve done the ____, you must pay attention to what it’s telling you.