過去這個週末學生考了 2016 年 6 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 6 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 6月 ACT 考試閱讀文章
Passage 1
This passage is adapted from the novel
Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr (©1984 by Harriet Doerr).
Here they are, two North Americans, a man and a
woman just over and just under forty, come to spend
their lives in Mexico and already lost as they travel
cross-country over the central plateau. The driver of the
station wagon is Richard Everton, a blue-eyed. black-
haired stubborn man. On the seat beside him is his wife,
Sara. She pictures the adobe house where they intend to
sleep tonight. It is a mile and a half high on the out-
skirts of Ibarra, a declining village of one thousand
souls. Tunneled into the mountain is the copper mine
Richard’s grandfather abandoned fifty years ago during
the Revolution of 1910.
Dark is coming on and, unless they find a road,
night will trap at this desolate spot both the future oper-
ator of the Malagueila mine and the fair-haired unsus-
pecting future mistress of the adobe house. Sara
Everton is anticipating their arrival at a place curtained
and warm, though she knows the house has neither
electricity nor furniture and, least of all, kindling beside
the hearth. There is some doubt about running water in
the pipes. The Malagueria mine, on the other hand, is
flooded up to the second level.
“Let’s stop and ask the way,” says Sara. And they
take a diagonal course across a cleared space of land.
But the owner of this field is nowhere in sight,
“We won’t get to Ibarra before dark,” says Sara.
“Do you think we’ll recognize the house?”
“Yes.” he says, and without speaking they sepa-
rately recall a faded photograph of a wide, low struc-
ture with a long veranda in front. On the veranda is a
hammock, and in the hammock is Richard’s grand-
mother, dressed in eyelet embroidery and holding a
fluted fan.
Five days ago the Evertons left San Francisco in
order to extend the family’s Mexican history and patch
the present onto the past. To find out if there was still
copper underground and how much of the rest of it was
true, the width of the sky, the depth of the stars, the air
like new wine. To weave chance and hope into a fabric
that would clothe them as long as they lived.
Even their closest friends have failed to under-
stand. “Call us when you get there,” they said. “Send a
telegram.” But Ibarra lacks these services. “What will
you do for light?” they were asked. And, “How long
since someone lived in the house?” But this question
collapsed of its own weight before a reply could be
composed.
Every day for a month Richard has reminded Sara,
“We mustn’t expect too much.” And each time his wife
answered. “no.” But the Evertons expect too much.
They have experienced the terrible persuasion of a great-
aunt’s recollections and adopted them as their
own. They have not considered that memories are like
corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.
Now here, lost in the Mexican interior, Richard
and Sara remember the rock pick Richard’s grandfather
gave him when he was six. His grandfather had used
the pick himself to chip away copper ore from extru-
sions that coursed like exposed arteries down the slopes
of the mountains.
“What does he know about mining?” Richard’s
friends have asked one another. “What does she know
about gasoline stoves? In case of burns, where will they
find a doctor?” The friends learn that the Evertons are
taking a first aid manual, antibiotics for dysentery, and
a snakebite kit. There are other questions relating to
symphony season tickets, Christmas, golf, sailing. To
these, the answers are evasive.
A farmer, leading a burro, approaches the car from
behind. He regards the two Americans. “You are not on
the road to Ibarra.”he says. “Permit me a moment.”
And he gazes first at his feet. then at the mountains,
then at their luggage. “You must drive north on that dry
arroyo for two kilometers and turn left when you reach
a road. You will recognize it by the tire tracks of the
morning bus unless rain has fallen. But this is the dry
season.
“Without a tail wind we won’t be bothered by the
dust,” says Richard, and turns north.
He is mistaken. The arroyo is smooth and soft with
dust that, even in still air, spins from the car’s wheels
and sifts through sealed surfaces, the flooring. the dash-
board, the factory-tested weather stripping. It etches
black lines on their palms, sands their skin, powders
their lashes, and deposits a bitter taste on their tongues.
“This must be the wrong way,” says Sara, from
under the sweater she has pulled over her head.
Richard says nothing. He knows it is the right way,
as right as a way to Ibarra can be, as right as his deci-
sion to reopen an idle mine and bring his wife to a
house built half of nostalgia and half of clay.
Passage 2
This passageis adapted from the article “Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World” by Carol Kaesuk Yoon (©2009 by The New York Tims Company).
Despite the field of taxonomy’s now blatant
modernity, with practitioners using DNA sequences,
sophisticated evolutionary theory and supercomputers
to order and name all of life, jobs for taxonomists con-
tinue to be in steady decline. The natural history collec-
tions crucial to the work are tossed.
Outside taxonomy, no one is much up in arms
about this, but perhaps we should he. because the order-
ing and naming of life is no esoteric science. The past
few decades have seen a stream of studies that show
that soning and naming the natural world is a universal,
deep-seated and fundamental human activity, one we
cannot afford to lose because it is essential to under-
standing the living world, and our place in it.
Anthropologists were the first to recognize that
taxonomy might be more than the science officially
founded by Carl Linnaeus. the Swedish botanist, in the
1700s. Studying how nonscientists order and name life,
creating what are called folk taxonomies, anthropolo-
gists began to realize that when people across the globe
were creating ordered groups and giving names to what
lived around them. they followed highly stereotyped
patterns, appearing unconsciously to follow a set of
unwritten rules. Not that conformity to rules was at first
obvious to anthropologists who were instead under-
standably dazzled by the variety in folk taxonomies.
The Ilongots, for example, a people of the Philippines,
name gorgeous wild orchids after human body parts.
There bloom the thighs, there fingernails, yonder
elbows and thumbs. The Rofaifo people of New Guinea
classify the cassowary, a giant bird complete with req-
uisite feathers and beak, as a mammal. In fact, there
seemed, at first glance,to be little room even for agree-
ment among people, let alone a set of universally fel-
lowed rules. More recently, however, deep underlying
similarities have begun to become apparent.
Cecil Brown, an anthropologist who has studied
folk taxonomies in 188 languages, has found that
people recognize the same basic categories repeatedly.
including fish. birds, snakes, mammals,”wugs” (mean-
ing worms and insects), trees, vines, herbs and bushes.
Dr. Brown’s finding would he considerably less
interesting if these categories were clear-cut depictions
of reality that must inevitably be recognized. But tree
and bush are hardly that. since there is no way to define
a tree versus a bush. The two categories grade insensi-
bly into one another. Wugs,likewise, are neither an
evolutionarily nor ecologically nor otherwise cohesive
group. Still,people repeatedly recognize and name
these oddities.
Likewise, people consistently use two-word epi-
thets to designate specific organisms within a larger
group of organisms, despite there being an infinitude of
potentially more logical method . It is so familar that it
is hard to otice. In English, among the oaks, we distin-
guish the pin oak, among hears, grizzly bears. When
Mayan Indians,familiar with the wild piglike creature
known as peccaries, encountered Spaniards’ pigs, they
dubbed them “village peccaries.” We use two-part
names for ourselves as well: Sally Smith or Li Wen.
Even scientists are bound by this practice, insisting on
Latin binomials for species.
There appears to be such a profound unconscious
agreement that people will even concur cm which exact
words make the best names for particular organisms.
Brent Berlin, an ethnobiologist at the University of
Georgia. discovered this when he read 50 pairs of
names, each consisting of one bird and one fish name,
to a group of 100 undergraduates, and asked them to
identify which was which. The names had been ran-
domly chosen from the language of Penis Huambisa
people. to which the students had had no previous
exposure. With such a large sample size—there were
5,000 choices being made—the students should have
scored 50 percent or very close to it if they were
blindly guessing. Instead, they identified the bird and
fish names correctly 58 percent of the time, significantly
more often than expected for random guessing. Some-
how they were often able to intuit the names’ birdiness
or fishiness.
Some researchers hypothesize that there might be
a specific part of the brain that is devoted to the doing
of taxonomy. Without the power to order and name life,
a person simply does not know how to live in the
world, how to understand it. How to tell the carrot from
the cat—which to grate and which to pet? To order and
name life is to have a sense of the world around, and, as
a result, what one’s place is in it.
Passage 3
Passage A is adapted from the article “Dear Jerry My adventures answering J. D. Salinger’s mail” by Joanna Smith Rakoff (©2010 by Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive Co LLC). Passage B is adapted from the article ‘Betraying Salinger” by Roger Lathbury (©2010 by New York Magazine Holdings LLC).
Passage I
I knew, I suppose, that Salinger was a recluse, but
I didn’t understand the extent of his removal from soci-
ety, in general, and the realms of literature and publish-
ing, specifically. Nor did l understand—naive as this
sounds—the cultlike devotion of his fans.
At Harold Ober Associates, a literary agency, we
were Salinger’s gatekeepers—charged with protecting
his life and work. We had to believe that Salinger’s pri-
vacy was the most important thing in the world, to be
protected at all costs.
During my first months on the job. Salinger
remained a comfortably abstract concept. Then, in Jlune,
he called. anxious to speak to Phyllis Wcstbcrg, the
company’s president. My stomach lurched a little when
I realized that it was Salinger, for real, on the other end
of the phone.
It turned out something momentous was afoot in
Salingerland: Eight years earlier, a small publisher in
Alexandria. Virginia. had written to him, asking
whether they might put out a book consisting solely of
Salinger’s novella Hepworth 16, 1924. which had
appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1965. To the
shock of Phyllis. Salinger had, after years of thought,
decided that this “fellow in Virginia” could publish
Hepworth. Suddenly, he was calling all the time, anx-
ious about the details of this new deal, which seemed
like it might mark a tentative re-entry into the world
he’d abandoned 30 years earlier. Ober. just as suddenly,
seemed charged with a frenetic energy. Phyllis hustled
around the office and had long conversations with
Salinger. going over the details of the new book, from
the cloth of the binding to the font to the paper stock.
She asked him about the publisher, a retired professor,
whom Salinger seemed to like very much, to Phyllis’
surprise. It was not often, I supposed, that Salinger took
a shine to someone new. In a way, I realized, the
Virginia publisher was simply one of the fans whose
letters I fielded, one who had managed to break through
the wall of Ober’s protectorate and prove to Salinger
that, yes, they really were kindred spirits.
The Hapworth book never materialized. The pub-
lisher gave an interview about Salinger to a local maga-
zine, and Salinger decided his new friend was a phony
after all.
Passage II
It was 1988. and I had written to J. D. Salinger
with a proposal: I wanted my tiny Virginia publishing
house,Orchises Press, to publish his novella Hapworth
16, 1924. And Salinger himself had improbably written
in reply, saying that he would consider it. I was
ecstatic, even if I doubted that he’d proceed. And then,
silence.
Eight years went by. In May of 1996, I received a
letter from Phyllis Westberg saying that Mr. Salinger
would soon write to me.
Why had he said yes? I think he chose me because
I didn’t chase him. I had left him alone for eight years;
I wasn’t pushy in the commercial way he found
offensive.
Two weeks later, a full-page letter arrived, and it
took my breath away. Chatty, personal, it expressed
Salinger’s high pleasure in finding a way to put out
Hepworth.
Well into discussions about the deal. I unwittingly
made the first move that would unravel the whole thing.
I applied for Library of Congress Cataloging in Publi-
cation data.
It sounds innocent. CIP data are the information
printed on the copyright page. The filings are public
information, but I didn’t imagine that anyone would
notice one among thousands.
Then I made another, bigger mistake. What I know
now, but did not then, was that CIP listings are not only
public but also appear on Amazon.com. Someone spot-
ted Hepworth there, and his sister was a reporter for a
local paper in Arlington. She telephoned.
It seems clear now how everything happened. She
asked me basic questions. Foolishly—if reasonably—I
answered most of them. I thought I could control
myself, but my ego came into play. Anyway, what harm
could it do? This was a tiny paper.
Then someone at The Washington Post saw it and
called. I refused to speak at first, then answered a few
questions, nervously.
After the story appeared in the Post, my phone
nearly exploded. Newspapers, magazines, television
stations, book distributors, strangers, foreign publish-
ers, movie people. South Africa, Catalonia, Australia.
The only one who didn’t call me was Salinger.
I couldn’t proceed without him, because we still had
too many details unsettled.
I yearned to write to Salinger, but I knew that it
would do no good. He must have been furious with me,
for betraying him by leaking news to the press, or even
confirming it I could no longer be trusted. I had proven
myself part of the crass, opportunistic world that
Salinger’s heroes disdain.
Passage 4
This passage is adapted from the article “Swarm Savvy” by Susan htikue (©2009 by Society for Science & the Public).
Only a few millimeters long, rock ants (Temnotlho-
rax albipennis) prove difficult to track in the wild but
excellent for the tabletop world of the laboratory.
When something terrible happens to a rock ant
home, such as a researcher lifting off the roof, the
majority of ants cluster in the ruins. A quarter to a third
of the colony scurries out looking for new possibilities.
“I think of the ants as a sort of search engine.” ant
biologist Nigel Franks says. In one set of tests, he and
his students disrupted a nest and watched to see what
the ants would make of a series of new possibilities that
improved with distance. The best nest was almost three
meters distant, nine times as far from the original home
as a nearby but less appealing choice. “It was just such
fun doing this experiment because the ants won,”
Franks says.
In spite of the epic distances. the ants typically
found and agreed to move into the best nest. “They’re
fantastic at it,” Franks says.
Franks and Elva Robinson. both of the University
of Bristol, monitored rock ants by fitting them with
radio-frequency identification tags. The data suggest
that each scout follows a simpler rule than previously
thought. Robinson, Franks and their colleagues
reported online in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Instead of making direct comparisons between
sites, a scout follows a threshold rule. If she finds a
poor site, she keeps searching. When she finds a site
that exceeds her “good enough” threshold. she returns
to the original nest.
Next, previous work shows, the scout recruits a
new scout to join her on a trek to the good site. She
dashes around tapping her antennae on other ants and
releasing a pheromone from her sting gland. explains
Stephen Pratt of Arizona State University in Tempe.
Usually she finds a volunteer within a minute or so, and
the two set off tandem running.
Scout A. who knows the way. runs back toward the
nest while her follower. B. jogs closely enough to tap
antennae against the leader. Should A sprint a little too
fast and dash beyond antennae range. she slows until
her partner catches up. Periodically the two ants stop,
and the limbic looks around as if learning landmarks.
It’s a slow way to get to the site. and Franks argues that
it qualifies as animal teaching.
When the ants do reach the possible site, the
recruit explores it and, depending on her assessment,
returns to recruit yet another scout.
As with bees, it’s the quorum of scouts at the sites
that matters. When enough of them gather at a particu-
lar place to encounter each other at a sufficiently high
rate. they’ve got a decision.
Once scouts reach that decision. their behavior
changes. Each scout dashes back to the nest. but instead
of coaxing a nest matt for a tour, she just grabs some-
body. She uses a mouthpan hook, an over-the-shoulder
throw, and off she goes with the passive nest mate
curled on her hack in an ant version of the fetal posi-
tion. Carrying takes about a third as long as leading
would. and scouts can haul the rest of the colony to a
new home within hours. The ants shift from the inde-
pendent into gathering of scouts to group implementa-
tion of the quorum’s decision.
Rock ants’ willingness to thrive in the lab allows
experiments on finer points of collective decision
making. Pratt says. For example. forcing a crisis among
the ants demonstrates that they will, in a pinch, trade
accuracy for speed. When researchers destroy an old
nest so that ants are completely exposed. the ants scope
and relocate within hours. Other experiments that just
offer the ants a beater nest but don’t ruin their current
one can result in days of deliberation. Speed has its
costs, and ants in a hurry now and then make mistakes,
such as splitting the colony between two nests. Slower
moves prove more accurate.
The quorum system could be widespread in group
behavior in nature, Pratt says. Overall it’s a beautiful
tool, allowing for carefully balanced independence plus
some shortcut speed. Yet the system “has a dark side,”
he acknowledges. Once individuals have made their
independent assessments and then a quorum has
reached agreement, fellows copy the quorum behavior.
The chances are low that the whole quorum will reach
the same wrong decision. But flukes can happen. In
most uses of a quorum, “it’s going to make a decision
more accurate,” he says, “but it also slightly increases
the incidence of these rare events when you get it really
spectacularly wrong.”
2016 年 6 月 ACT 考試閱讀題目
Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到 2021 年 6 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！
