대일외고 2024 고2 1학기 기말 · 심화영어회화1

When a young child sees clouds ① moving across the sky, the clouds may seem alive and independent, perhaps dangerous. But if one sees clouds as fleecy lambs, a metaphorical chain begins to neutralize the fear. The cloud may still ____ of as alive, but it is no longer terrifying. Repression and neutralization through metaphor are possible strategies, but there is another. ③ Faced with the moving clouds, the child can theorize about their movement in such a way that the clouds cease to be alive. "Cloud movement" becomes differentiated from the kind of movement that makes things alive, because the clouds move only if they are "pushed" by the wind, and ④ what can't move without a push from the outside is not alive. Children develop theoretical constructs that separate the motion of clouds from the motion of people and animals so that eventually the fear of living clouds disappears. If things seem ⑤ uncomfortably on the border between the alive and the not-alive, use logic to redefine the boundaries so that things fall more comfortably into place. If it scares you, make a theory.

To make plans for the future, the brain must have an ability to take certain elements of prior experiences and reconfigure them in a way that does not copy any actual past experience or present reality exactly. To accomplish that, the organism must go beyond the mere ability to form internal representations, the models of the world outside. It must acquire the ability to manipulate and transform these models. We can argue that tool-making, one of the fundamental distinguishing features of primate cognition, depends on this ability, since a tool does not exist in a ready-made form in the natural environment and has to be imagined in order to be made. The neural machinery for creating and holding potential representations was a necessary prerequisite for tool-making, and thus for launching human civilization.

Many present efforts to guard and maintain human progress, to meet human needs, and to realize human ambitions are simply unsustainable—in both the rich and poor nations. They draw too heavily, too quickly, on already overdrawn environmental resource accounts to be affordable far into the future without bankrupting those accounts. They may show profit on the balance sheets of our generation, but our children will inherit the losses. We borrow environmental capital from future generations with no intention or prospect of repaying. They may blame us for our wasteful ways, but they can never collect on our debt to them. We act as we do because we can get away with it: future generations do not vote; they have no political or financial power; they cannot challenge our decisions.