2019 ebs 수능완성 영어 8강 원문

2019 수능완성 8강.hwp

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2019 수능완성 8강

Let’s Check It Out

In 1976, the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in his classic The Selfish Gene, proposed the notion of memes. A meme is any bit of information that can spread from one human mind to another. Memes, Dawkins pointed out, share many of the traits of genes. They can reproduce by copying themselves from one mind to another. As you read this writing, memes that have entered my brain are being copied into your brain. They undergo a form of natural selection, with some memes dying out and some flourishing. If I tell you a thoroughly entertaining story, for example, or use a brilliant analogy to describe something, it will stick longer in your memory than if I give you some dry recitation of facts. If it’s interesting enough, you may even pass it on to someone else. (Please do!)

 

1

A dramatic form of blindness occurs in a pathological condition called blindsight, which involves damage to the brain’s visual cortex. Patients with this damage show the striking behavior of accurately reaching for and grasping an object placed in front of them, even while having no conscious visual experience of the object. If you place a hammer before the patient and ask, “Do you see something in front of you?” the patient will answer, “No, I don’t.” But ask the patient to reach for and grasp the hammer and the patient who just said it was invisible will do so successfully! This seemingly bizarre phenomenon happens because the condition of blindsight leaves intact subcortical retina-to-brain pathways that can guide visual behavior, even in the absence of consciously seeing the hammer.

 

2

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget frequently analyzed children’s conception of time via their ability to compare or estimate the time taken by pairs of events. In a typical experiment, two toy cars were shown running synchronously on parallel tracks, one running faster and stopping further down the track. The children were then asked to judge whether the cars had run for the same time and to justify their judgement. Preschoolers and young school-age children confuse temporal and spatial dimensions: Starting times are judged by starting points, stopping times by stopping points and durations by distance, though each of these errors does not necessitate the others. Hence, a child may claim that the cars started and stopped running together (correct) and that the car which stopped further ahead, ran for more time (incorrect).

 

3

The symbolism of the mountain in world mythology was of such crucial importance to the concept of cosmic order that the ancient Mesopotamians tried to replicate the mountain by building pyramidal mud brick towers called ziggurats. Those towers were constructed in most major cities between 2200 and 550 BCE and most likely served as the observatories from which the Babylonians calculated the movements of the celestial bodies and developed astronomical methods unrivaled even by scientists of the Victorian Age. To a large extent, the vision of the earth and the sky determined early perceptions of the universe. The Mesopotamians felt the need to build ziggurats high enough to afford them a panoramic view of the world, and the Maya tried to achieve something similar with their pyramids and temple towers. Those early peoples replicated the world mountain and thus, they believed, simulated the power of the peaks.

 

4

Bacteria are not only plentiful but also belong to many different types. Bacterial species outnumber any other biological life form in diversity, especially if we take the unknowns into account: it is estimated that we have characterized only one percent of all bacterial species that exist. Obviously, organisms invisible to the eye receive less attention than living things that we see around us, and doing research is hard if you can neither see nor grow the bugs. Most bacteria are not able to multiply under conditions that(which) we can provide in a laboratory. Nevertheless, since we can isolate their DNA, we can still estimate how many of the “unknowns” exist. It is possible to determine whether DNA is of bacterial origin (as opposed to DNA from eukaryotes), and if so, whether it belongs to a species, or group of species, that has already been cultured and described. From such explorative DNA studies, we know that 99% of all bacterial species living in the oceans, in soils, or in sediments have never been cultured.