2016年12月ACT回顧

2016 年 12 月 ACT 考題回顧:所有 4 篇閱讀文章!

過去這個週末學生考了 2016 年 12 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 12 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 12 月 ACT 考試閱讀文章

Passage 1

Passage A Is adapted from an essay by Marita Golden. Passage B is adapted from an essay by Larry L. King. Both essays are from the book Three Minutes or Less: Life Lessons from America’s Greatest Writers (©2000 by The PEN/Faulkner Foundation). 

Passage I

          Writers are always headed or looking for home.

Home is the first Sentence, questing into the craggy

terrain of imagination. Home is the final sentence,

polished, perfected, nailed down. I am an American writer,

and so my sense of place is fluid. ever shifting. The

spaciousness of this land reigns and pushes against the

borders of self-censorship and hesitation. I have

claimed at one point or other everyplace as my home.

          Like their creator, my fictional characters reject

the notion of life lived on automatic pilot. The most

important people in my books see life as a flame,

something that when lived properly bristles and squirms,

even as it glows. In the autobiography Migrations of the

Heart, the heroine, who just happened to be me, came

of age in Washington, D.C., and began the process of

becoming an adult person everywhere else. If you sell

your first piece of writing in Manhattan, give birth to

your only child in Lagos, experience Paris in the spring

with someone you love, and return to Washington after

thirteen years of self-imposed exile to write the Washington

novel nobody else had (and you thought you

never would), tickets, visas, lingua franca will all

become irrelevant. When all places fingerprint the soul.

which grasp is judged to be the strongest? In my novel

Woman’s Place, one woman leaves America to join a

liberation struggle in Africa. In Long Distance Life.

Naomi Johnson flees 1930s North Carolina and comes

up south to Washington, D.C., to find and make her

way. Thirty years later her daughter returns to that com-

plex. unpredictable geography and is sculpted like some

unexpected work of art by the civil-rights movement.

           I am a Washington writer, who keeps one bag in

the closet packed, just in case. I am an American. who

knows the true color of the nation’s culture and its

heart, a stubborn, wrenching, rainbow. I am Africa’s

yearning stepchild, unforgotten, misunderstood,

necessary. Writers are always headed or looking for home.

The best of us embrace and rename it when we get there.

Passage II

          If you live long enough, and I have, your sense of

place or your place becomes illusionary. In a changing

world, our special places are not exempt. The rural

Texas where l grew up in the 1930s and 1940s simply

does not exist anymore. It exists only in memory or on

 pages or stages where a few of us have attempted to

lock it in against the ravages of time. And it is, of

course, a losing battle. Attempting to rhyme my work

of an earlier Texas, with the realities of today’s urban-

tangle Texas. I sometimes feel that I am writing about

pharaohs.

           My friend Larry McMurtry a few years ago stirred

up a Texas tornado with an essay in which he charged

that Texas writers stubbornly insist on writing of old

Texas. the Texas of myth and legend, while shirking our

 responsibilities to write of the complexities of modern

Texas. Hardly had the anguished cries of the wounded

faded away on the Texas wind, until Mr. McMurtry

himself delivered a novel called Lonesome Dove. A

cracking good yarn, if a bit long on cowboy myths and

frontier legends. And decidedly short of skyscraper

observations or solutions to urban riddles. But not only

did Larry McMurtry have a perfect right to change his

mind, I’m delighted that he did.

          I spent my formative years in Texas, my first seventeen

years. before random relocation arranged by the

U.S. Army. Uncle Sam sent me to Queens. I must

admit. Queens failed to grow on me. But from it I dis-

covered Manhattan, which did grow on me, and I vowed

to return to Manhattan. And one day did. But before

that, in 1954, at the age of twenty-five. I  came to

Washington, D.C., to work in Congress.

          New York and Washington offered themselves as

measuring sticks against the only world I had previously

known. They permitted me to look at my natural habitat

with fresh eyes and even spurred me to leave my

native place. I have now tarried here in what I call the

misty East for almost forty years. This has sometimes

led to a confusion of place. I strangely feel like a Texan

in New York and Washington, but when I return home

to Texas, I feel like a New Yorker or a Washingtonian.

So if my native place has been guilty of change, then so

have I. Yet when I set out to write there is little of

ambivalence. The story speaks patterns. and values that

pop out are from an earlier time and of my original

place. I fancy  myself  a guide  to the recent  past. In an

age when the past seems not much value, I think that is

not a bad function for the writer.


Passage 2

This passage is adapted from the article “Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead” by Joshua Green (©2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group)

         Since the 1970s, the Grateful Dead has invited

academic examination. Musicologists showed interest,

although  the band’s  sprawling  repertoire and tendency

to improvise posed a significant challenge. Engineers

studied the band’s sophisticated sound system,  radical

at the time but widely emulated today. Other disciplines

have also found relevant elements of the band’s history

and cultural impact to be worth examining.

         Oddly enough, the Dead’s influence on the business

world may turn out to be a significant part of its

legacy. Without intending to—while intending, in fact,

to do just the opposite—the band pioneered ideas and

practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate

America. One was to focus intensely on its most loyal

fans. It established a telephone hotline to alert them to

its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement,

reserved for them some of the best seats in the house,

and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed

through its own mail-order house. If you lived in

New York and wanted to see a show in Seattle,  you

didn’t have to travel there to get tickets—and you could

get really good tickets, without even camping out. “The

Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior

customer value,” Barry Barnes, a business professor at

Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me.

Treating customers well may sound like common sense.

But it represented a break from the top-down ethos of

many organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. Only  in the

1980s, faced with competition from Japan, did American

CEOs and management theorists widely adopt a

customer-first orientation.

         As Barnes and other scholars note, the musicians

who constituted the Dead were anything but naive

about their business. They incorporated early on and

established a board of directors (with a rotating CEO

position) consisting of the band, road crew, and other

members of the Dead organization. They founded a

profitable merchandising division and, peace and love

notwithstanding, did not hesitate to sue those who violated

their copyrights. But they weren’t greedy, and

they adapted well. They famously permitted fans to

tape their shows, ceding a major revenue source in

potential record sales. According to Barnes, the deci­sion  

was not entirely selfless: it reflected a shrewd

assessment that tape sharing would widen their

audi­ence, a ban would be unenforceable,  and anyone

inclined to tape a show would probably spend money

elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets. The Dead

became one of the most profitable bands of all time.

         It’s precisely this flexibility that Barnes believes

holds the greatest lesson for business—he calls it

“strategic improvisation.” It isn’t hard to spot a few of

its recent applications. Giving something away and

earning money on the periphery is becoming the blueprint

for more and more companies doing business on the Internet.

Today, everybody is intensely interested in understanding

how communities form across distances, because that’s

what happens online.

         Much of the talk about “Internet business models”

presupposes that they are blindingly new and different.

But the connection between the Internet and the Dead’s

business model was made years ago by the band’s lyri­cist,

John Perry Barlow,  who became an Internet guru.

In 1994, Barlow posited that in the information economy,

“the best way to raise demand for your product is

to give it away.” As Barlow explained to me: “What

people today are beginning to realize is what became

obvious to us back then—the important correlation is

the one between familiarity and value, not scarcity and

value. Adam Smith taught that the scarcer you make

something, the more valuable it becomes. In the physi­cal

world, that works beautifully. But we couldn’t regulate

[taping at] our shows, and you can’t online. The

Internet doesn’t behave that way. But here’s the thing:

if I give my song away to 20 people, and they give it to

20 people, pretty soon everybody knows me, and my

value as a creator is dramatically enhanced. That  was

the value proposition with the Dead.” The Dead thrived

for decades,  in good times and bad.  In  a recession,

Barnes says, strategic improvisation is more important

than ever. “If you’re going to survive an economic

downturn, you better be able to turn on a dime,” he

says. “The Dead were exemplars.” It can be only a

matter of time until Management Secrets of the Grateful

Dead or some similar title is flying off the shelves of

airport bookstores everywhere.


Passage 3

This passage is adapted from the article “Out of Rembrandt’s Shadow” by Matthew Gurewitsch (©2009 by Smithsonian Institution).

         Telescopes trained on the night sky, astronomers

observe the phenomenon of the binary star,  which

appears to the  naked eye  to be a single star but consists

in fact of two, orbiting a common center of gravity.

Sometimes, one star in the  pair  can  so  outshine  the

other that its companion  may be detected  only by the

way its movement periodically  alters the brightness of

the greater one.

         The binary stars we recognize in the firmament of

art tend to be of equal brilliance: Raphael and

Michelangelo, van Gogh and Gauguin, Picasso and

Matisse. But the special case of an “invisible” compan­ion

is not unknown. Consider Jan Lievens, born in

Leiden in western Holland on October 24, 1607, just

15 months after the birth of Rembrandt van Rijn,

another Leiden native.

         While the two were alive, admirers spoke of them

in the same breath, and the comparisons were not

always in  Rembrandt’s favor.  After  their  deaths,

Lievens dropped out of sigh—for centuries.  Though

the artists took quite different paths, their biographies

show many parallels. Both served apprenticeships in

Amsterdam with the same master, returned to that city

later in life and died there in their 60s. They knew each

other, may have shared a studio in Leiden early on,

def­initely shared models and indeed modeled for each

other. They painted on panels cut from the same oak

tree, which suggests they made joint purchases of art

supplies from the same vendor. They later showed the

same unusual predilection for drawing on paper

imported from the Far East.

         The work the two produced in their early 20s in

Leiden  was not always easy to tell apart, and as time

went on, many a superior Lievens was misattributed to

Rembrandt. Quality aside, there are many reasons why

one artist’s star shines while another’s  fades.  It  mat­-

tered that Rembrandt spent virtually his entire career in

one place, cultivating a single, highly personal style,

whereas Lievens moved around, absorbing many different

influences. Equally important, Rembrandt lent him

­self to the role of the lonely genius, a figure dear to the

Romantics,  whose  preferences  would  shape the tastes

of generations to come.

         While Lievens’  name will be new to many, his

work may not be. The sumptuous  biblical  spectacular

The Feast of Esther, for instance, was last sold, in 1952,

as an early Rembrandt, and was long identified as such

in 20th-century   textbooks.  It  is  one  of   more  than

130 works featured in the current tour of  the international

retrospective “Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered.”

         The artworks, in so many genres, are hardly the

works of an also-ran. “We’ve always seen Lievens

through the bright light of Rembrandt, as a pale reflection,”

says Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., curator of northern

Baroque paintings at the National Gallery. “This show

lets you embrace Lievens from beginning to end, to

understand that this man has his own trajectory and that

he wasn’t always in the gravity pull of Rembrandt.”

Wheelock has been particularly struck by the muscular-

­ity and boldness of Lievens, which is in marked con-

­trast to most Dutch painting of the time. “The approach

is much rougher, much more aggressive,” he says.

“Lievens was not a shy guy with paint. He manipulates

it, he scratches it. He gives it a really physical

presence.”

         Lievens painted The Feast of Esther around 1625,

about the time Rembrandt returned to Leiden. It is

approximately four and a half by five and a half feet,

with figures shown three—quarter length, close to the

picture plane. (At that time, Rembrandt favored smaller

formats.) At the luminous center of the composition, a

pale Queen Esther points an accusing finger at Haman,

the  royal  councilor.  Her  husband,  the  Persian  King

Ahasuerus, shares her light, his craggy face set off by a

snowy turban and a mantle of gold brocade. Seen from

behind, in shadowy profile, Haman is silhouetted

against shimmering white drapery, his right hand flying

up in dismay.

         Silks, satins and brocades, elegant plumes and

gemstones—details like these give Lievens ample scope

to show off his flashy handling of his medium. Not for

him the fastidious, enamel-smooth surfaces of the

Leiden Fijnschilders—”fine painters,” in whose meticulously

rendered oils every brush stroke disappeared.

Lievens reveled in the thickness of  the  paint and  the

way it could  be shaped  and scratched  and swirled  with

a brush, even with the sharp end of a handle. This tac­-

tile quality  is one of  Rembrandt’s  hallmarks  as  well;

there are now those who think he picked it up from Lievens.


Passage 4

This passage is adapted from the article “Call of the Leviathan” by Eric Wagner (©2011 by Smithsonian Institution).

         In 1839, in the first scientific treatise on the sperm

whale, Thomas Beale, a surgeon aboard a whaler, wrote

that it was “one of the most noiseless of marine ani-

­ mals.”  While they do not sing elaborate songs,  like

humpbacks or belugas, in fact they are not silent.

Whalers in the 1800s spoke of hearing loud knocking,

almost like hammering on a ship’s hull, whenever

sperm whales were present. Only in 1957 did two scien­tists

from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

confirm the sailors’ observations. Aboard a research

vessel, the Atlantis, they approached five sperm whales,

shut off the ship’s motors and listened with an under­-

water receiver. At first, they assumed the “muffled,

smashing noise” they heard came from somewhere on

the ship. Then they determined the sounds were coming

from the whales.

         Biologists now believe that the sperm whale’s

massive head functions like a powerful telegraph

machine, emitting pulses of sound in distinct patterns.

At the front of the head are the spermaceti organ,  a

cavity that contains the bulk of the whale’s spermaceti,

and a mass of oil-saturated fatty tissue. Two long nasal

passages branch away from the bony nares of the skull,

twining around the spermaceti organ and the fatty

tissue. The left nasal passage runs directly to the blow­hole

at the top of the whale’s head. But the other twists

and turns, flattens and broadens, forming a number of

air-filled sacs capable of reflecting  sound.  Near  the

front of the head sit a pair of clappers called “monkey lips.”

         Sound generation  is a complex  process.  To make

its clicking sounds, a whale forces air through the right

nasal passage to the monkey lips, which clap shut. The

resulting click! bounces off one air-filled sac and travels

back through the spermaceti organ to another sac

nestled against the skull. From there, the click is sent

forward, through the fatty tissue, and amplified out into

the watery world. Sperm whales may be able to manip­ulate

the shape of both the spermaceti organ and the

fatty tissue, possibly allowing them to aim their clicks.

         Biologist Dr. Hal Whitehead has identified four

patterns of clicks. The most common clicks are used for

long-range sonar. So-called “creaks” sound like a

squeaky door and are used at close range when prey

capture is imminent. “Slow clicks” are made only by

large males, but no one knows precisely what they

signify. (“Probably something to do with mating,”

Whitehead guesses.) Finally, “codas” are distinct pat­terns  

of clicks most often heard when whales are socializing.

         Codas are of particular interest. Whitehead has

found that different groups of sperm whales, called

vocal clans, consistently use different sets; the repertoire

of codas the clan uses is its dialect. Vocal clans

can be huge—thousands of individuals spread out over

thousands of miles of ocean. Clan members are not nec­essarily

related. Rather, many smaller, durable matrilin­eal units

make up clans, and different clans have their own specific ways of behaving.

         A recent study in Animal Behaviour took the

specialization of codas a step further. Not only do clans

use different codas, the authors argued, but the codas

differ slightly among individuals. They could be, in

effect, unique identifiers: names.

         Whitehead cautions that a full understanding of

codas is still a long way off. Even so, he believes the

differences represent cultural variants among the clans.

“Think of culture as information that is transmitted

socially between groups,” he says. “You can make predictions

about where it will arise: in complex societies,

richly modulated, among individuals that form self­-

contained communities.” That sounds to him a lot like

sperm whale society.

         But most of a sperm whale’s clicking, if not most

of its life, is devoted to one thing: finding food. And in

the Sea of Cortez, the focus of its attention is Dosidicus

gigas, the jumbo squid.

         The most celebrated natural antagonism between

sperm whales and squid almost certainly involves the

jumbo squid’s larger cousin, the giant squid, a species

that grows to 65 feet long. The relationship between

sperm whales and squid is pretty dramatic. A single

sperm whale can eat more than one ton of squid per

day. They do eat giant squid on occasion, but most of

what whales pursue is relatively small and over

­ matched. With their clicks, sperm whales can detect a

squid less than a foot long more than a mile away, and

schools of squid from even farther away. But the way

that sperm whales find squid was until recently a puzzle.


2016 年 12 月 ACT 考試閱讀題目

Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到 2016 年 12 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!


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