過去這個週末學生考了 2016 年 4 月的 ACT 考試。如果這是你最後一次考 ACT，恭喜你完成了一個艱難的任務！
我們整理了 2016 年 4 月 ACT 考試當中的 4 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 ACT 考試中出現，但是透過真正的 ACT 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 ACT 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。閱讀更多來自這些地方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。ACT 的閱讀文章包含這五種類型：
- 社會研究：人類學，考古學，傳記，商業，經濟，教育，地理，歷史，政治學，心理學和社會學。
- 自然科學：解剖學，天文學，生物學，植物學，化學，生態學，地質學，醫學，氣象學，微生物學，自然史，生理學，物理學，技術和動物學。
- 散文小說：短篇小說或短篇小說的摘錄。
- 人文：回憶錄和個人散文，以及建築，藝術，舞蹈，倫理，電影，語言，文學批評，音樂，哲學，廣播，電視和戲劇等內容領域。
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 2016 年 4月 ACT 考試閱讀文章
Passage 1
This passage is adapted from the memoir “My Glove” by Katherine A. Powers (©2008 by the Creative Nonfiction Foundation).
My oldest personal possession is my baseball
glove, which I bought for eight dollars at Woolworth’s
in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1960, when I was almost
thirteen. It was a “modern” glove in that it had shape,
unlike the ancient specimens I came across in my
grandfather’s house that looked as if they’d been fash-
ioned for trolls and exhumed from a bog. My glove
had—has, I should say—a good deal of rawhide lacing.
Its metal eyelets number twenty-five. The strap’s black
nylon label boasts a “W,” which might stand for
“Wilson,” except it doesn’t. The glove’s inside surface
sports another beguiling “W,” as well as “Style 2681”
and “[illegible] Set Pocket.” I can’t remember what sort
of “Set Pocket” it was. Deep, I’d say. The inscription
has been flattened out of existence by almost fifty years
of service.
I bought this wonderful thing secretly, because my
father had met the few remarks I’d made about “think-
ing of getting a glove” with his rote response: “You
don’t want that.” (Other things I “didn’t want” were
blue jeans, a bicycle, a penknife, a fishing pole, a permanent
wave, and a pet of any sort.) A baseball glove?
What would I do with it? Who would I play with? Boys
at school? I was a girl. And what was I going to play
with? Not a hardball: we were not having anything to
do with hardballs. That’s how people got their teeth
knocked out and the next thing you knew there’d be a
broken window and “I’ll be out there doing my act with
the putty knife.”
For a week or so I fraternized with my new glove
on the sly. Behind the closed door of the room I shared
with my younger sister, I cradled my glove and pushed
my face in it, inhaling the deep, fertile leather smell it
pumped out. I kneaded it, shaped it, and slammed a
35 ball—a brand-new baseball—in it. Outside the house,
around the corner, out of sight, I found a clandestine
battery mate, the wall of a brick college dormitory that
had no windows on the lowest story. The glove activated
all the baseball boilerplate I had amassed from
incessant baseball-book reading. Confronting the wall,
I flicked off the sign, looked in for another, slapped the
glove against my thigh, wound up, and poured one in.
Sometimes (if the wall was hitting) I cupped my knee
with my glove, waiting for the batter to try to punch
one through. I snagged the ball, pounced on it, speared
it, whipped it home.
I walked around (out of sight of the house) with
the glove tucked under my arm, wishing I could shove
it in my back pocket like boys did in books, but of
course my pants, when I was allowed to wear pants, had
no pockets because my mother had made them. I
wished I knew where to get neat’s-foot oil, not avail-
able at Woolworth’s, but no one I could confide in
knew anything about that. Another thing I could not do,
I might as well confess, was spit in my glove. I could
direct the occasional spitting noise at the pocket, yes.
But shoot a gob of spit right in there and work it in like
you read about? No, I couldn’t.
I brought the glove to school, placing it beside me
on the old-fashioned bench seat, on top of my books—
just like the boys did. In that distant day, or perhaps
only in that parochial school, the boys and the girls
were not allowed to play sports together at recess, and
none of the girls had gloves. But we did play softball
and my glove had no problem at all handling the larger
sphere. It could handle anything.
Soon enough, unable to keep my love object to
myself, I came clean with my parents. Fairly clean, at
least: I kept the hardball under wraps, nestling a tennis
ball into the glove’s pocket in a prissily responsible
manner. I told my father I thought I better tell him I’d
gotten a baseball glove. It was a really good one. He
massaged it with his thumbs, sort of churning them
around in the glove. The leather seemed okay, he
allowed, but he said he didn’t see why the glove had to
look the way it did. He whapped his fist in it a few
times and then took it with both hands and bent it back
and forth as if to reprimand it for the affectation of its
deep pocket. He entered briefly into the subject, familiar
to all baseball-book readers, of infielders sitting on
their gloves to keep them flat so they could turn the ball
over fast. I said I knew about that.
He said, “Is this the best you can do for a ball?” I
told him that actually I had bought a baseball, but that I
only used it against the side of the brick dormitory—
you know the wall that doesn’t have any windows low
down you could accidentally hit. He said that’s how
you ruin a good ball, leather gets all nicked. I said that
was true.
Passage 2
This passage is adapted from the article “Model Behaviour” by The Economist (©2009 by The Economist Newspaper Limited).
The warmongering ores depicted in the Lord of the
Rings trilogy are evil, unpleasant creatures that leave
death and destruction in their wake. But if you find
yourself in a burning building a few years from now,
they might just save your life. That is because the
technology used to make hordes of these menacing,
computer-generated monsters move convincingly on
screen turns out to be just what is needed to predict
how crowds of humans move around inside buildings.
The simulation of the behaviour of crowds of
people and swarms of animals (not just mythological
ones) is being applied to many unusual situations.
When the first film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy
was released in 2001, much was made of its heavy
reliance on computer-generated imagery. But what was
perhaps most impressive were the epic battle scenes,
which broke new ground in special effects by showing
huge numbers of characters with an unprecedented
degree of detail and realism. For this the trilogy’s director,
Peter Jackson, largely has Stephen Regelous to
thank. Regelous is the founder of Massive Software,
based in Auckland, New Zealand. His firm’s software
made it possible to generate as many as half a million
virtual actors in a single shot, each behaving in an
independent and plausible manner.
That is because every character was, in effect,
given a brain, says Diane Holland, Massive’s chief
executive. Each one was modeled as a software “agent”
with its own desires, needs and goals, and the ability to
perceive the environment and respond to the immediate
surroundings in a believable way. Any given ore, for
example, could work out which other fighters op. the
battlefield were in its line of sight, and hence whether it
should flee or attack. This produced far more realistic
results than orchestrating the motions of the digital
extras in a scripted, choreographed way.
Taking a similar approach is Dr. Demetri
Terzopoulos, a computer scientist at the University of
California in Los Angeles. He is using agents to simulate
the behaviour of commuters passing through Penn-
sylvania Station in New York. His agents have memory,
but they also have a sense of time and the ability to
plan ahead. An agent entering the station will typically
seek out the ticket office, stand in line to buy a ticket,
and then perhaps kill some time watching a street performer
if he has a few minutes before his train arrives,
says Terzopoulos. If he is running late, by contrast, he
may try to push his way to the front of the ticket line
before sprinting for the platform.
Terzopoulos’s research has shown that agents can
simulate complex behaviours with great realism. Work-
ing with Qinxin Yu, a graduate student, Terzopoulos
has modeled how people behave in public when some-
one collapses. People crowd around to help, and some
agents will even remember if they recently saw a police
officer nearby, and run to get help, he says. Such real-
ism is useful in the development of automated closed-
circuit television security systems. Using real cameras
for such research would raise privacy concerns, so he is
making agent simulations available instead to
researchers who are training cameras to detect unusual
behaviour. Another intriguing application is to help
archaeologists study ancient ruins. Using a model of the
Great Temple of Petra in Jordan, Terzopoulos has evaluated
how it would have been used by the people who
built it. He has concluded that the temple’s capacity had
previously been greatly overestimated.
Agents need not even represent humans. Massive
has been working with BMT Asia Pacific, a marine
consultancy, to model the behaviour of the thousands of
ships ‘operating in Hong Kong harbour. This involves
simulating the behaviour of the ships themselves, each
of which may be under the control of several people,
says Richard Colwill of BMT. And rather than assuming
that everyone will adhere to the maritime traffic
code, which determines who has right ‘of way, it can
incorporate acts of bravado and incompetence. “We get
about 150 collisions each year in Hong Kong,” says
Colwill. His firm plans to use the software to determine
which traffic-management strategies will be least
disruptive during the construction of an immersed road
tunnel that will need to be lowered into the harbour.
As agent software becomes better able to capture
complex real-world behaviour, other uses for it are sure
to emerge. Indeed, this could soon become a crowded
field.
Passage 3
Passage A is adapted from the article “America America: Two Plays about the Country’s Complexities” by Hilton Als (©2010 by Conde Nast). Passage B is adapted from the article “O.K. Chorale: An English Take on Rodgers and Hammerstein” by John Lahr (©2002 by Conde Nast).
Passage I
Molly Smith, the artistic director of Arena Stage in
Washington, D.C., directed the company’s current
revival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s
first musical collaboration, Oklahoma! Smith’s production
is extraordinary in thought and execution and
utterly satisfying on so many levels. Smith’s conceit is
entirely ofiginal: instead of taking this nearly perfect
show at face value, she has dug back into the history of
Oklahoma itself. Sold to the United States as part of the
1803 Louisiana Purchase, Oklahoma was opened for
settlement in 1889. By the time it became a state, eigh-
teen years later, the Territory, as it was known, was
populated by white settlers from other parts of the
country, as well as a number of emancipated slaves and
forcibly resettled Native Americans, who braved
drought, harsh economic times, and often brutal and
complicated racial interactions to make the Territory
their home.
Smith doesn’t explain any of this in her production
—who would rewrite Rodgers and Hammerstein?—
but it shows in her casting. As in the original Broadway
production, which opened in 1943, there are no stars
onstage. Smith raises the roof not so much with “color-
blind” casting as by paying attention to how the charac-
tars might have looked if they were actual Oklahomans
of the period. The wonderful Aunt Eller (E. Faye
Butler) and her niece, Laurey (the buoyant and complex
Eleasha Gamble), are black, while Laurey’s suitor,
Curly (the outstanding Nicholas Rodriguez), could be
taken for Native American. This deviation from stan-
dard casting brings a new force to the musical—which
itself changed musicals forever by introducing Rlot and
narrative development into what had previously been
considered a frivolous genre. Altogether, the actors
seem relieved to be not segregated in black or white
shows but together in an utterly American one.
The afternoon I saw Oklahoma!, it was clear that
the members of the audience didn’t feel overwhelmed
by a “classic”; instead, they were as moved as I was by
the humility and hope that Smith and her company
brought to the show.
Passage II
Because of Oklahoma!”s enormous subsequent
influence, its novelties—no opening ensemble number,
chorus girls in long dresses, dancers who don’t appear
until late in the first act, the integrated score—have lost
some of their original lustre. In the Royal National
Theatre’s three-hour revival (now at New York’s
Gershwin Theatre), directed by Trevor Nunn, the
show’s heady mixture of wonder and ambition is best
captured in its production values. Anthony Ward’s pic-
turesque set immediately submerges us in a gorgeous
world of folk innocence.
in the making of musicals, Nunn is a four-star gen-
eral. His stage pictures spill over with meticulous, artic-
ulate energy. But technique, which can make the show
work, is not enough to make it wonderful. Here, I think,
the issue of cultural chemistry comes into play. Ameri-
can optimism has its root in abundance and in the vast-
ness of the land that Oklahoma! celebrates. Britain, on
the other hand, is an island the size of Utah. Its culture
is one of scarcity; its preferred idiom is irony—a lan-
guage of limits. In the retranslation of an award-
winning English version of an American classic to its
natural Broadway habitat, an emotional lopsidedness
has become evident, particularly in the casting.
The linchpins of the show are Aunt Eller, played
by the gritty, droll comedienne Andrea Martin, who is
American and nails it, and the feisty lovelorn Laurey,
played by the fine-voiced, demure Josefina Gabrielle,
who is English and doesn’t. It’s not talent that’s at issue
here—Gabrielle is the first Laurey to dance her own
Dream Ballet—but national character. The show is
about Western women, and Gabrielle’s Laurey lacks
that very American sense of gumption, a combination
of buoyancy and backbone.
In his memoir, “Musical Stages,” Richard Rodgers
averred that the show’s opening scene—a cowboy
strolling onto the stage where a single woman is churn-
ing butter—announced to the audience, “Watch out!
This is a different kind of musical.” He went on to say,
“Everything in the production was made to conform to
the simple open-air spirit of the story; this was essen-
tial, and certainly a rarity in the musical theatre.”
Trevor Nunn’s version of Oklahoma! preserves the
crowd-pleasing commercial zest of the original; but on
the evening I saw the show only a handful of audience
members stood to applaud the hardworking cast, con-
firming my suspicion that the open-air spirit of the
evening had been slowly leached away.
Passage 4
This passage is adapted from the article “Not Dead Yet: A Dying Star Is Caught Flaring Briefly Back to Life” by Charles Liu (©2005 by Natural History Magazine, Inc.).
About a billion years before a sunlike star “dies,”
or stops generating energy via nuclear fusion, it
becomes a red giant, growing dramatically to a’ hundred
times its original diameter. Then, as the red-giant phase
ends, the star blows off its outer layers, giving rise to an
expanding gas cloud called a planetary nebula. The
planetary nebula, in turn, swells in size and drops in
density for at most another 100,000 years, exposing the
remaining stellar core at its center. That core becomes a
white dwarf—the most common celestial cadaver visi-
ble in the sky.The white dwarf usually radiates its left-
over heat into space for billions of years, and it slowly
fades to black.
Some soon-to-be white dwarfs, however, seem to
heed the counsel of poet Dylan Thomas: “Do not go
gentle into that good night.” According to the theory of
stellar evolution, the temperature in the stellar core can
fluctuate wildly, and sometimes spikes as high as tens
of millions of degrees. For a little while at least, the
core may even flicker back into stellar life as a giant
star, generating new energy with new flares of nuclear
fusion.
Alas, such a giant can’t last long, because the core
is, in essence, running on fumes. Without a substantial
fuel source to sustain fusion, a nuclear re-ignition of
this kind runs out of gas within a few centuries, and the
star heads back toward white dwarfhood. But during its
brief return to fusion-powered life, its interaction with
the surrounding cloud of gas creates a fascinating astro-
nomical laboratory for the study of stellar and interstel-
lar processes.
The star FG Sagittae, a highly variable star in the
constellation Sagitta, seems to be a case in point. FG
Sagittae lies at the heart of a planetary nebula called
He 1-5. In the past thirty years the star’s temperafure
has dropped from more than 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit
to less than 10,000 degrees, though its brightness has
changed erratically from year to year. As with an old,
grease-choked diesel engine struggling to start back up,
the star’s efforts to restart nuclear fusion create puffs of
thick smoke—carbon atoms coughed up from the
fading stellar core. The smoke absorbs the star’s radiat-
ing heat and periodically obscures the visible light it
emits. To see through the haze and examine the goings-
on near the star’s surface, astronomers must look at its
radiation in less obscured wavelengths, such as infrared
light.
A research team led by Robert A. Gehrz of the
University of Minnesota in Minneapolis has now done
just that. Recently the team published the results of
twenty years of monitoring the infrared properties of
FG Sagittae with three telescopes equipped with
infrared photometers—in effect, photon counters. One
instrument is in Minnesota, one in Arizona, and one in
Wyoming. Gehrz and his colleagues discovered that,
though the star’s overall brightness and temperature
have changed dramatically through the years, carbon
dust from the surface of FG Sagittae has been shining
more or less steadily at a temperature of about
1,200 degrees F (650 degrees Celsius). That’s roughly
hot enough to melt aluminum, but substantially cooler
than the core of any star undergoing active nuclear
fusion. Gehrz and his colleagues conclude that, besides
giving rise to clouds of obscuring gas, FG Sagittae is
powering a strong stellar wind peppered with this
carbon dust. They think this dust has been glowing con-
tinuously for the past decade. On the basis of the mea-
sured amount of emitted infrared radiation, Gehrz’s
team estimates that the wind is carrying between
1.5 and 7.5 quadrillion (1.5 to 7.5 x 1015 )tons of stellar
material away from FG Sagittae each second—or about
eight to forty Earth masses each year.
Sooner rather than later the current burst of new
nuclear fusion will cease, and the dusty stellar wind
will cease. The stellar core, no longer obscured by a
thick, dusty blanket, will turn once more into a hot
white dwarf. If, as theoretical models predict, the stellar
renaissance of FG Sagittae lasts a few hundred years,
the wind will deposit thousands of Earth-masses’ worth
of carbon-rich matter into the star’s surroundings. The
carbon atoms, as they cool down, could become seeds
for the buildup of interstellar dust grains—which, in
turn, could seed the formation of asteroids, moons,
planets, and perhaps eventually even life as we know it.
Maybe the astronomers of the twenty-fourth or twenty-
fifth century will look toward FG Sagittae and see, in
its surroundings, the potential makings of a new and
distant earth.
2016 年 4 月 ACT 考試閱讀題目
Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到 2016 年 4 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！
