過去這個週末學生考了 2021 年 5 月的 SAT 考試。如果這是你最後一次考 SAT，恭喜你完成了一個艱難的任務！
我們整理了 2021 年 5 月 SAT 考試當中的 5 篇閱讀文章，幫助學生準備未來的考試。
這些閱讀文章可以如何的幫助你？
1. 這些文章可以讓你知道你的英文程度以及準備考試的程度
首先，讀這些文章。你覺得他們讀起來很簡單還是很難？裡面有沒有很多生字，尤其是那些會影響你理解整篇文章的生字？如果有的話，雖然你可能是在美國讀書或讀國際學校、也知道 “如何讀跟寫英文”，但你還沒有足夠的生字基礎讓你 “達到下一個階段” （也就是大學的階段）。查一下這一些字，然後把它們背起來。這些生字不見得會在下一個 SAT 考試中出現，但是透過真正的 SAT 閱讀文章去認識及學習這些生字可以大大的減低考試中出現不會的生字的機率。
2. 這些文章會告訴你平時應該要讀哪些文章幫你準備閱讀考試
在我們的 Ivy-Way Reading Workbook（Ivy-Way 閱讀技巧書）的第一章節裡，我們教學生在閱讀文章之前要先讀文章最上面的開頭介紹。雖然你的 SAT 考試不會剛好考這幾篇文章，但你還是可以透過這些文章找到它們的來源，然後從來源閱讀更多相關的文章。舉例來說，如果你看第二篇文章 “The Problem with Fair Trade Coffee”，你會看到文章是來自 Stanford Social Innovation Review。閱讀更多來自 Stanford Social Innovation Review 的文章會幫助你習慣閱讀這種風格的文章。
3. 這些文章會幫助你發掘閱讀單元的技巧（如果閱讀單元對你來說不是特別簡單的話）
如果你覺得閱讀單元很簡單，或是你在做完之後還有剩幾分鐘可以檢查，那麼這個技巧可能就對你來說沒有特別大的幫助。但是，如果你覺得閱讀很難，或者你常常不夠時間做題，一個很好的技巧是先理解那一種的文章對你來說比較難，然後最後做這一篇文章。SAT 的閱讀文章包含這五種類型：
- 文學 (Literature)：1 篇經典或現代的文學文章（通常來自美國）
- 歷史 (History)：1 篇跟美國獨立/創立相關的文章，或者一篇受到美國獨立 / 創立影響的國際文章（像是美國憲法或者馬丁路德金恩 (Martin Luther King Jr.) 的演說）
- 人文 (Humanities)：1 篇經濟、心理學、社會學、或社會科學的文章
- 科學 (Sciences)：1-2 篇地理、生物、化學、或物理的文章
- 雙篇文 (Dual-Passages)：0-1 篇含有兩篇同主題的文章
舉例來說，假設你覺得跟美國獨立相關的文章是你在做連續的時候覺得最難的種類，那你在考試的時候可以考慮使用的技巧之一是把這篇文章留到最後再做。這樣一來，如果你在考試到最後時間不夠了，你還是可以從其他比較簡單文章中盡量拿分。
所有 2021 年 5 月 (亞洲/國際版) SAT 考試閱讀文章
Passage 1
his passage is adapted from Robertson Davies, What’s Bred in the Bone. ©1985 by Robertson Davies. Frank Cornish is a young boy in Canada during World War I.
Frank’s life was not at all dark; he was not clever
at school, but he attracted Miss McGladdery’s
attention by the seriousness with which he applied
himself in the weekly half-hour that was given to Art.
Miss McGladdery taught Art, as she taught
everything, and she instructed all three classes at
once in the mysteries of drawing a pyramid and
shading one side of it so that it appeared to have a
third dimension—or as she put it the shaded side
“went back” and the unshaded part “stuck out”. A
pyramid and a circle which shading made into a ball,
and, as the culmination of Art, an apple. Shading was
done by scuffling down one side of the object with
the flat of the pencil’s point. But Frank did not think
that was good enough; he had learned a craft at home
in which shading was done with tiny parallel lines,
achieved with great patience, and even by cross-
hatching.
“If you take the time to do all that tick-tack-toe on
your apple you won’t be finished by four, and you’ll
have to stay in till it’s done,” said Miss McGladdery.
So he did “stay in” with half a dozen other culprits
who had work to finish before they were released for
the weekend, and when he showed Miss McGladdery
his apple at half past four she admitted reluctantly
that it was “all right”, for she did not want to
encourage the boy to be “fancy” and try to go beyond
what the class demanded and what she herself
knew. Frank could draw, which was something not
required in Art, and Miss McGladdery had come
upon a caricature of herself done in the back of his
arithmetic workbook. Miss McGladdery, who was a
fair-minded woman, except about religion and
politics, and had no vanity, admitted to herself that it
was good, so she said nothing about it. Frank was an
oddity, and, like a true Scot, Miss McGladdery had a
place in her approval for “a chiel o’ pairts”, so long as
he did not go too far.
Almost every Saturday Frank could escape into a
world of imagination by going to the matinee at the
McRory Opera House, where movies were shown.
He got in for nothing, because the girl at the ticket
office recognized him, and as he pushed his ten-cent
piece across the little counter she winked and quietly
pushed it back again.
Then inside, and into his favourite seat, which was
on the aisle at the back; he did not crowd into the
front rows, as did the other children. Riches
unfolded. An episode—locally pronounced
“esipode”—of a serial, in which, every week, a noble
cowboy was brought to the point of a horrible death
by remorseless villains who sought to rob him of the
equally noble girl he loved. Of course, it all came out
right at the end of Esipode Twelve, and then another
great adventure was announced for the weeks to
follow. After the serial, a hilarious comedy,
sometimes about the Keystone Komedy Kops, who
were as incapable of dealing with disaster as the girl
in the serial.
Frank had an eye for the movies that took in more
than the action; he saw backgrounds, landscapes
(many of them painted, if you looked carefully), and
angles; he even saw light. It was to his grandfather,
the Senator, that he owed this extension of his
understanding, for the Senator was an amateur
photographer. His techniques were not sophisticated
in terms of the Great War period when Frank was so
often his companion; he worked with a large
box-camera and a tripod. With this load he trudged
happily around Blairlogie, taking pictures of the
town, and such of its more picturesque citizens as he
could persuade to stand or sit still for the necessary
number of seconds, and he drove out to the lumber
camps from which his growing fortune flowed, and
took pictures of the men at work, or standing by
giant trees lying on their sides. He took pictures in
his mills. He took pictures of young Blairlogie men
who were going off to war, with their rifles and kit,
and gave copies to their families. The Senator never
thought of himself as an artist, but he had an eye for
a picture and he was an enthusiastic pursuer of all the
many sorts of light the Canadian seasons afford. He
talked to Frank about it as if the boy were of his own
age. His senatorial and grandpaternal aloofness quite
disappeared on these expeditions in search of what
he called “sun-pictures”.
“It’s all a question of the light, Frank,” he said
repeatedly; “the light does it all.” And he explained
that all that painstaking shading in Art was related to
light—something which certainly had never occurred
to Miss McGladdery.
Passage 2
Passage 1 is adapted from a speech delivered by Paul Robeson, “For Freedom and Peace.” ©1978 by Brunner/Mazel, Inc. Originally published in 1949. Passage 2 is adapted from a speech delivered in 1949 by Jackie Robinson, “Testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee.” Robeson, an actor and singer, discusses remarks he made at a peace conference in Paris during a time of high tension between the United States and the communist Soviet Union, also called Russia. Robinson, a prominent athlete, was called before the House of Representatives to respond to Robeson’s remarks.
Passage I
. . . I love [the] Soviet people more than any other
nation, because of their suffering and sacrifices for
us, the Negro people, the progressive people, the
people of the future in this world.
At the Paris Peace Conference I said it was
unthinkable that the Negro people of America or
elsewhere in the world could be drawn into war with
the Soviet Union. I repeat it with hundred-fold
emphasis. THEY WILL NOT. . . .
I am born and bred in this America of ours. I
want to love it. I love a part of it. But it’s up to the
rest of America when I shall love it with the same
intensity that I love the Negro people from whom I
spring,—in the way that I love progressives in the
Caribbean, the black and Indian peoples of South
and Central America, the peoples of China and
Southeast Asia, yes suffering people the world
over,—and in the way that I deeply and intensely
love the Soviet Union. That burden of proof rests
upon America.
Now these peoples of the Soviet Union, of the new
Eastern Democracies, of progressive Western
Europe, and the representatives of the Chinese
people whom I met in Prague and Moscow, were in
great part Communists. They were the first to die for
our freedom and for the freedom of all mankind. So
I’m not afraid of Communists; no, far from that. I
will defend them as they defended us, the Negro
people. . . .
But to fulfill our responsibilities as Americans, we
must unite, especially we Negro people. We must
know our strength. We are the decisive force. . . .
That’s why they fear us. And if we unite in all our
might, this world can fast be changed. Let us create
that unity now. And this important, historic role of
the Negro people our white allies here must fully
comprehend. This means increasing understanding
of the Negro, his tremendous struggle, his great
contributions, his potential for leadership at all levels
in the common task of liberation. It means courage
to stand by our side whatever the consequences, as
we the Negro people fulfill our historic duty in
Freedom’s struggle.
Passage II
I’ve been asked to express my views on Paul
Robeson’s statement in Paris to the effect that
American Negroes would refuse to fight in any war
against Russia because we love Russia so much. I
haven’t any comment to make on that statement
except that if Mr. Robeson actually made it, it sounds
very silly to me. But he has a right to his personal
views, and if he wants to sound silly when he
expresses them in public, that’s his business and not
mine. He’s still a famous ex-athlete and a great singer
and actor.
I understand that there are some few Negroes who
are members of the Communist Party, and in the
event of war with Russia they’d probably act just as
any other Communist would. So would members of
other minority and majority groups. There are some
colored pacifists, and they’d act just like pacifists of
any color. And most Negroes—and Italians and Irish
and Jews and Swedes and Slavs and other
Americans—would act just as all these groups did in
the last war. They’d do their best to keep their
country out of war; if unsuccessful, they’d do their
best to help their country win the war—against
Russia or any other enemy that threatened us.
This isn’t said as any defense of the Negro’s
loyalty, because any loyalty that needs defense can’t
amount to much in the long run. And no one has
ever questioned my race’s loyalty except a few people
who don’t amount to very much.
What I’m trying to get across is that the American
public is off on the wrong foot when it begins to
think of radicalism in terms of any special minority
group. It is thinking of this sort that gets people
scared because one Negro, speaking to a Communist
group in Paris, threatens an organized boycott by
15,000,000 members of his race.
I can’t speak for any 15,000,000 people any more
than any other one person can, but I know that I’ve
got too much invested for my wife and child and
myself in the future of this country, and I and other
Americans of many races and faiths have too much
invested in our country’s welfare, for any of us to
throw it away. . . .
But that doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop
fighting race discrimination in this country until
we’ve got it licked. It means that we’re going to fight
it all the harder because our stake in the future is so
big.
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from Elizabeth Pennisi, “How Birds Got Their Beaks.” ©2015 by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Agile beaks of all shapes and sizes, from the
gulping gape of a pelican to the needle nose of a
hummingbird, have enabled the 10,000 avian species
to thrive from the Arctic to the tropics, build
intricate nests, and eat many different foods.
Now, researchers may have identified genes that
transformed an ancestral snout into a bird’s bill.
By manipulating the genes’ proteins, they have
seemingly turned back the evolutionary clock,
producing snouts in developing chicken embryos
that resemble those of alligators today. “We’re trying
to explain evolution through developmental studies,
” says Harvard University evolutionary biologist Arhat
Abzhanov, who, with his colleagues, describes the
work in Evolution.
Their conclusions are at odds with an earlier
study. But even those who disagree with the result
say Abzhanov and Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, now a
post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago,
have demonstrated a powerful approach: pinning
down how anatomy changes using fossils, then trying
to recapitulate the changes in the lab by tinkering
with genetic signals. “The value of this paper is their
ability to blend paleontology with evolutionary
developmental biology,” says Richard Schneider at
the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF),
who has linked beak evolution to different genes.
In ancestral reptiles, a pair of small bones makes
up the tip of the snout. In today’s birds, those
premaxillary bones are long, narrow, and fused,
producing the upper bill. The ancient bird
Archaeopteryx reveals an intermediate step. Its
premaxillary bones were not very expanded, but in
later avian species the bones are progressively more
fused. Other work had also implicated the
premaxillary bones in beak evolution.
So Bhullar searched for earlier studies of genetic
pathways that control development of these bones.
Work in mice and chickens had implicated two sets
of signals. A gene called Fibroblast growth factor 8
(Fgf8) becomes active in the front part of the face as
it takes shape in 3-day-old chick embryos; later, just
before bones form, a gene called WNT helps drive
the proliferation of cells in the middle of the face,
where it may prompt expansion of the premaxillary
bones. In mammals, lizards, turtles, and alligators, in
contrast, activity of the WNT gene is highest on the
sides of the embryonic face.
To explore these genes’ role, Bhullar and
Abzhanov treated bird embryos with inhibitors of
the WNT and Fgf8 proteins. When the two signals
were curbed, the premaxillary bones became round
and never fused, as in birds’ dinosaur relatives,
instead of growing long and pointy.
To the pair’s surprise, a palatal bone, which makes
up the roof of the mouth, also changed dramatically.
In many vertebrates, this bone is flat and fused to
surrounding bones. But in birds, it’s reduced and
disconnected, which frees the top part of the bill to
move upward, expanding birds’ gape. In the treated
chick embryos, the palate looked more like it does in
other vertebrates: flat and seemingly reconnected to
jaw bones. The studies suggest that Fgf8 and WNT
signaling changes allowed skulls of ancient birds “to
evolve in a whole new direction” and form a beak,
Abzhanov says.
Not everyone agrees. In 2014, UCSF’s Nathan
Young and Ralph Marcucio, working with Schneider,
carried out extensive skull measurements on a variety
of embryonic vertebrates and determined the point
during development at which the bird face begins to
diverge from those of other vertebrates. The work
and later experiments supported a 2009 idea
proposed by Marcucio that the activity of another
gene, SHH (for sonic hedgehog), was critical for
forming the beak. Unlike Fgf8, he says, it’s active in
the right place and right time in bird embryos.
Marcucio, a developmental biologist, also worries
that the changes in facial structure observed by the
Harvard team may stem from unintended cell death
caused by the inhibitors they used. “Adding the fossil
record to this work is really an important step, but I
think they are just looking at the wrong pathway,” he
says. Abzhanov and Bhullar counter that Fgf8 and
SHH are often coexpressed and may work together.
Passage 4
This passage is adapted from Robert Cialdini, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. ©2016 by Robert Cialdini.
Suppose you’ve started an online furniture store
that specializes in various types of sofas. Some are
attractive to customers because of their comfort and
others because of their price. Is there anything you
can think to do that would incline visitors to your
website to focus on the feature of comfort and,
consequently, to prefer to make a sofa purchase that
prioritized it over cost?
You’ve no need to labor long for an answer,
because two marketing professors, Naomi Mandel
and Eric Johnson, have provided one in a set of
studies using just such an online furniture site.
When I interviewed Mandel regarding why she
decided on this particular set of issues to explore, she
said her choice had to do with two big, unresolved
matters within the field of marketing—one relatively
recent and one long-standing. The new topic at the
time was e-commerce. When she began the research
project in the late 1990s, the impact of virtual stores
such as Amazon and eBay was only beginning to be
seen. But how to optimize success within this form of
exchange had not been addressed systematically. So
she and Johnson opted for a virtual store site as the
context for their study.
The other matter that had piqued Mandel’s
interest is one that has vexed merchandisers forever:
how to avoid losing business to a poorer-quality rival
whose only competitive advantage is lower cost.
That is why Mandel chose to pit higher-quality
furniture lines against less expensive, inferior ones in
her study. “It’s a traditional problem that the
business-savvy students in our marketing courses
raise all the time,” she said. “We always instruct them
not to get caught up in a price war against an inferior
product, because they’ll lose. We tell them to make
quality the battleground instead, because that’s a
fight they’ll most likely win.
“Fortunately for me,” she continued, “the best of
the students in those classes have never been satisfied
with that general advice. They’d say, ‘Yeah, but how?’
and I never really had a good answer for them, which
gave me a great question to pursue for my research
project.”
Fortunately for us, after analyzing their results,
Mandel and Johnson were in a position to deliver a
stunningly simple answer to the “Yeah, but how?”
question. In an article, they described how they were
able to draw website visitors’ attention to the goal of
comfort merely by placing fluffy clouds on the
background wallpaper of the site’s landing page. That
maneuver led those visitors to assign elevated levels
of importance to comfort when asked what they were
looking for in a sofa. Those same visitors also became
more likely to search the site for information about
the comfort features of the sofas in stock and, most
notably, to choose a more comfortable (and more
costly) sofa as their preferred purchase.
To make sure their results were due to the landing
page wallpaper and not to some general human
preference for comfort, Mandel and Johnson
reversed their procedure for other visitors, who saw
wallpaper that pulled their attention to the goal of
economy by depicting pennies instead of clouds.
These visitors assigned greater levels of importance
to price, searched the site primarily for cost
information, and preferred an inexpensive sofa.
Remarkably, despite having their importance ratings,
search behavior, and buying preferences all altered
by the landing page wallpaper, when questioned
afterward, most participants refused to believe that
the depicted clouds or pennies had affected them in
any way.
Passage 5
This passage is adapted from Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction. ©2017 by Chris D. Thomas.
California enjoys a Mediterranean-style climate,
with cool and relatively moist winters and dry, hot
summers, so it is not surprising that the European
yellow star-thistle Centaurea solstitialis and its
relative the sulphur star-thistle Centaurea sulphurea
established wild populations there. The yellow
star-thistle, in particular, has become so successful
that it is regarded as a noxious weed—despite the fact
that its spiky golden-yellow flowers supply nectar to
butterflies and bees and it mainly grows on disturbed
ground where native wildflowers are rare. In any
event, there is no getting rid of it now.
Long established in California, there have been
plenty of generations available for the two plants to
evolve in isolation from their Spanish ancestors—the
sulphur star-thistle was introduced to California
around 1923, allowing the Spanish and Californian
populations to develop in isolation for up to
eighty-six generations. But could they actually have
become that different after such a short period of
time? No one would really have expected this to be
the case, and University of Montana researchers
Daniel Montesinos, Gilberto Santiago and Ray
Callaway were no exceptions—ecologists and
evolutionary biologists have been brought up on the
‘knowledge’ that it takes a very long time for new
species to form. In fact, they were not thinking about
it at all. The main goal of their experiment was to
obtain ‘pure’ seeds of each population and species to
use in the rest of their research. However, just to
amuse himself, Montesinos, who is now at the
Universidade de Coimbra in Portugal, in his own
words ‘playfully decided’ to transfer pollen from
Spanish to Californian plants ‘just to see what
happened’.
The results were very surprising. Californian
sulphur star-thistles produced 44 per cent fewer
seeds per flower when they were fertilized using
Spanish pollen than when they were supplied with
Californian pollen. Over the period since the plants
were introduced to California, the compatibility of
the Spanish with the Californian sulphur star-thistle
has declined. Isolation in the yellow star-thistle is
even greater, at around 52 per cent reduction in
fertility. However, this is over a larger number of
generations. The yellow star-thistle was first found
growing in California in 1824, but its journey was an
indirect one, via Chile, so the chances are that the
Spanish and Californian yellow star-thistles last
interbred 350 or so generations ago. Nonetheless,
this is still exceptionally fast. The Californian and
Spanish star-thistles seem to be losing the ability to
mate with one another. They are on the path towards
becoming separate species.
Because closely related species can sometimes
mate with one another and produce hybrid offspring,
the benchmark for Californian plants to be regarded
as different species is not a full 100 per cent
reduction in fertility. Knowing this, Montesinos and
his colleagues decided to find out what the fertility
might be when you cross different wild star-thistle
species with one another. They tried to fertilize
yellow star-thistles with the pollen of sulphur
star-thistles, and also with the pollen of yet another
related species. The answer was a 65–88 per cent
reduction in the number of seeds produced when
crosses were made using pollen from different
species. This suggests that the Californian plants, at
44 per cent and 52 per cent reduction in fertility, are
probably not yet fully-fledged species, but are well on
the way towards it, a mere 86 to 350 years after they
separated from their Spanish ancestors. If they
continue to diverge at the same rate, then they might
well be quite distinct ‘human-created’ species within
a few more centuries.
2021 年 5 月 (亞洲/國際版) SAT 考試閱讀題目
Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到 2021 年 5 月以及其他的官方歷年考題。除此之外，我們也有讓學生來我們的教室或在家做模考的服務讓學生評估自己的學習進度並看到成績。如果你想預約時間來我們的教室或在家做模考，請聯繫我們！如果你想購買考題在家做，學生可以在Ivy-Way蝦皮商城、Ivy-Way臉書粉專、或 Line (ivyway) 直接購買喔！
