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2016 3月 SAT (美国/北美版) 考题回顾:所有 5 篇阅读文章!

Also in: 繁中 (繁中)

过去这个周末学生考了 2016 年 3 月的 SAT 考试。如果这是你最后一次考 SAT,恭喜你完成了一个艰难的任务!

这里,我们整理了 2016 年 3 月 SAT 考试当中的 5 篇阅读文章,帮助学生准备未来的考试。

这些阅读文章可以如何的帮助你?

1. 这些文章可以让你知道你的英文程度以及准备考试的程度

首先,读这些文章。你觉得他们读起来很简单还是很难?里面有没有很多生字,尤其是那些会影响你理解整篇文章的生字?如果有的话,虽然你可能是在美国读书或读国际学校、也知道 “如何读跟写英文”,但你还没有足够的生字基础让你 “达到下一个阶段” (也就是大学的阶段)。查一下这一些字,然后把它们背起来。这些生字不见得会在下一个 SAT 考试中出现,但是透过真正的 SAT 阅读文章去认识及学习这些生字可以大大的减低考试中出现不会的生字的机率。

2. 这些文章会告诉你平时应该要读哪些文章帮你准备阅读考试

在我们的 Ivy-Way Reading Workbook(Ivy-Way 阅读技巧书)的第一章节里,我们教学生在阅读文章之前要先读文章最上面的开头介绍。虽然你的 SAT 考试不会刚好考这几篇文章,但你还是可以透过这些文章找到它们的来源,然后从来源阅读更多相关的文章。举例来说,如果你看第二篇文章 “The Problem with Fair Trade Coffee”,你会看到文章是来自 Stanford Social Innovation Review。阅读更多来自 Stanford Social Innovation Review 的文章会帮助你习惯阅读这种风格的文章。

3. 这些文章会帮助你发掘阅读单元的技巧(如果阅读单元对你来说不是特别简单的话)

如果你觉得阅读单元很简单,或是你在做完之后还有剩几分钟可以检查,那么这个技巧可能就对你来说没有特别大的帮助。但是,如果你觉得阅读很难,或者你常常不够时间做题,一个很好的技巧是先理解那一种的文章对你来说比较难,然后最后做这一篇文章。SAT 的阅读文章包含这五种类型:

  • 文学 (literature)1 篇经典或现代的文学文章(通常来自美国)
  • 历史 (History)1 篇跟美国独立/创立相关的文章,或者一篇受到美国独立 / 创立影响的国际文章(像是美国宪法或者马丁路德金恩 (Martin Luther King Jr.) 的演说)
  • 人文 (Humanities):1 篇经济、心理学、社会学、或社会科学的文章
  • 科学 (Sciences)1-2 篇地理、生物、化学、或物理的文章
  • 双篇文 (Dual-Passages)0-1 篇含有两篇同主题的文章

举例来说,假设你觉得跟美国独立相关的文章是你在做连续的时候觉得最难的种类,那你在考试的时候可以考虑使用的技巧之一是把这篇文章留到最后再做。这样一来,如果你在考试到最后时间不够了,你还是可以从其他比较简单文章中尽量拿分。


所有 2016 年 3 月 (北美) SAT 考试阅读文章

PASSAGE 1

This passage is adapted from Michael Chabon,The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.©2000 by Michael Chabon.

Rose Saxon, the Queen of Romance Comics, was at her drawing board in the garage of her house in Bloom town, New York.

Miss Saxon was at work on the text of a new story,which she intended to begin laying out that night after her son went to bed. It would be the lead story for the June issue of Kiss Comics. She planned to call it “Te Bomb Destroyed My Marriage.”Te story would be based on an article that she had read in Red book about the humorous difficulties of being married to a nuclear physicist employed by the government at a top- secret facility in the middle of the New Mexico desert. She was not writing so much as planning out her panels, one by one, at the typewriter. Over the years, Sammy’s scripts had grown no less detailed but looser; he never bothered with telling an artist what to draw. Rosa couldn’t operate that way; she hated working from Sammy’s scripts. She needed to have everything figured out in advance—storyboarded, they called it in Hollywood—shot by shot, as it were.

Rosa had gotten her start in comics soon after Sammy’s return to the business, after the war. Upon taking over the editor’s desk at Gold Star. Sammy’s first move had been to clear out many of the subcompetents who littered the staff there. It was a bold and necessary step, but it left him with an acute shortage of artists, in particular of inkers.

Tommy had started kindergarten, and Rosa was just beginning to understand the true horror of her destiny, the arrant purposelessness of her life whenever her son was not around, one day when Sammy came home at lunch, harried and frantic,with an armload of Bristol board, a bottle of Higgins ink, and a bunch of 3 brushes, and begged Rosa to help him by doing what she could. She had stayed up all night with the pages— it was some dreadful Gold Star superhero strip,Te Human Grenade or he Phantom Stallion—and had the job finished by the time Sammy left for work the next morning. The reign of the Queen had commenced.

Rose Saxon had emerged slowly, lending her ink brush at first only now and then, unsigned and uncredited, to a story or a cover that she would spread out on the dinette table in the kitchen.Rosa had always had a steady hand, a strong line, a good sense of shadow. It was work done in a kind of unreflective crisis mode—whenever Sammy was in a jam or shorthanded—but after a while, she realized that she had begun to crave intensely the days when Sammy had something for her to do.

Ten one night, as they lay in bed, talking in the dark, Sammy told her that her brushwork already far exceeded that of the best people he could a ford to hire at lowly Gold Star. He asked her if she had ever given any thought to penciling; to layouts; to actually writing and drawing comic book stories. He explained to her that Simon and Kirby were just then having considerable success with a new kind of feature they’d cooked up, based partly on teen features like Archie and A Date with Judy and partly on the old true- romance pulps (the last of the old

pulp genres to be exhumed and given new life in the comics). It was called Young Romance. It was aimed at women, and the stories it told were centered on women. Women had been neglected until now as readers of comic books; it seemed to Sammy that they might enjoy one that had actually been written and drawn by one of their own. Rosa had accepted Sammy’s proposal at once, with a flush of gratitude whose power was undiminished even now.

PASSAGE 2

Passage 1 is adapted from Cesar Chavez, “Letter from Delano,” a letter sent to E. L. Barr Jr. in 1969. Passage 2 is from Mark Day,Forty Acres: Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers.© 1971 by Praeger Publishers, Inc. Cesar Chavez cofounded the National Farm Workers Association.E. L. Barr Jr. was the president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League.Forty Acres is a historical account written by a member of Chavez’s movement

Passage 1

You must understand-I must make you understand—that our membership and the hopes and aspirations of the hundreds of thousands of the poor and dispossessed that have been raised on our account are, above all, human beings, no better and no worse than any other cross-section of human society; we are not saints because we are poor, but by the same measure neither are we immoral. We are men and women who have suffered and endured much, and not only because of our abject poverty but because we have been kept poor.Te colors of our skins, the languages of our cultural and native origins, the lack of formal education, the exclusion from the democratic process, the numbers of our men slain in recent wars—all these burdens generation after generation have sought to demoralize us, to break our human spirit. But God knows that we are not beasts of burden, agricultural implements, or rented slaves: we are men. And mark this well, Mr. Barr, we are men locked in a death struggle against man’s inhumanity to man in the industry that you represent. And this struggle itself gives meaning to our life and ennobles our dying.

As your industry has experienced, our strikers here in Delano and those who represent us throughout the world are well trained for this struggle. They have been under the gun, they have been kicked and beaten and herded by dogs, they have been cursed and ridiculed, they have been stripped and chained and jailed, they have been sprayed with the poisons used in the vineyards;but they have been taught not to lie down and die nor to fee in shame, but to resist with every ounce of human endurance and spirit. To resist not with retaliation in kind but to overcome with love and compassion, with ingenuity and creativity, with hard work and longer hours, with stamina and patient tenacity, with truth and public appeal, with friends and allies, with nobility and discipline, with politics and law, and with prayer and fasting.

This is not to pretend that we have everywhere been successful enough or that we have not made mistakes.And while we do not belittle or underestimate our adversaries they are the rich and the powerful and they possess the land-we are not afraid nor do we cringe from the confrontation. We welcome it! We have planned for it! We know that our cause is just, that history is a story of social revolution, and that the poor shall inherit the land.

Passage 2
In the early spring of 1970, the leaves began appearing on the grapevines around Delano. An endless cycle repeated itself; birth, fruition, then the dead and cold of winter. Until recently, farm workers blended in with this scenario almost unnoticeably. People took their poverty, their hunger, and their dreary, hopeless existence for granted.

But in September 1965, a cry for justice went forth from Delano. It was a cry of outrage and a cry of hope.Te picket lines and the crowded strikers’meetings, the excitement in the air, spelled out a common longing: just because things were bad last year,and the year before, and the years before that-they did not have to be the same this year, or in the years to come.

The Delano strikers began a long, uphill fight in 1965. They began to chip away at the old foundation of the rural farm economy in order to build a new life for themselves and their families.It was an almost impossible task. They withdrew their labor from the vineyards and were replaced by foreign labor. They set up their picket lines and had them weakened by powerful injunction. They pledged themselves to nonviolence and had to face violence and hatred from the grower agents and the institutionalized violence of corrupt courts,brutal policemen, and self-seeking politicians

But, in spite of an endless stream of frustrating obstacles, victories have been won and despair has given way to hope. Farm workers unionized several ranches and have shouted “no” to the paternalism and exploitation of their bosses. They now have improved wages and working conditions. They have developed inspiring leadership among themselves on their ranches. They have learned the machinery of unionism: grievance procedures, negotiations, and the new sense of dignity and power every man needs in order to face the future.

Passage 3

This passage is adapted from Robert Martin How We Dok. ©2013 by Robert Martin

Rapid brain growth during the first year of life is connected with an unusual feature of newborn human infants: their striking plumpness. In an average human newborn weighing some seven and a half pounds, fat tissue accounts for over a pound,around 14 percent of body weight. Our babies are among the plumpest found among mammals.Human babies at birth look markedly different from the scrawny newborns of other primates, such as chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys.Te proportion of fat tissue in a newborn human matches that in mammals living under arctic conditions and actually exceeds the level found in baby seals. As anthropologist Christopher Kuzawa has shown, a newborn human has about four times as much fat as expected for a standard newborn mammal of the same body size. In fact, the proportion of body fat in a human baby increases further over the first nine months after birth, building up to about a quarter of body weight. During that period, around 70 percent of the energy allocated to growth is used to deposit fat. In short, healthy babies do not lose their baby fat after birth but consolidate it and maintain it for up to three years. A mother’s investment in building up her infant’s fat reserves continues long after birth,largely thanks to nursing.

A standard explanation for our plump babies has been that natural selection favored an increase in body fat to of set the loss of insulating body hair.It is known that the optimal temperature for a human infant kept in an incubator is about 90 °F, so cooling could be a problem. Baby fat is distinctively distributed, being mainly located just beneath the skin. In contrast to adult fat stores,there is relatively little fat in the belly cavity. Anthropologist Boguslaw Pawlowski supported this view, arguing that various features of the human newborn evolved in early humans to counter excessive cooling during nights spent sleeping in open savannah. Those features include relatively large size as well as a greater proportion of subcutaneous fat.However, Kuzawa’s studies yielded only weak evidence for the role of subcutaneous fat proposed by Pawlowski. Kuzawa went on to explore a more likely explanation for our exceptionally plump babies: increased fat reserves as a crucial energy buffer. This would be particularly advantageous during the period of rapid brain growth in the first year of life. It could of set any disruption in the flow of resources to the growing infant. Going a step further, a 2003 paper by two nutritionists, Stephen Cunnane and Michael Crawford, argued that plump babies are the key to the evolution of the large human brain, and not only because of energy supply. About half the brain consists of fat, and a baby’s fat reserves contain special fats—long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCPUFAs)—that are essential for normal brain development. Calculations indicate that LCPUFAs present in baby fat at birth should be enough to fuel three months of brain growth. Deposition of fat in the human fetus takes place only during the last third of pregnancy; almost no fat is present during the first six months. As a result, fat reserves are well below normal in premature babies. A baby born five weeks early has only half the usual amount of fat, and a baby born ten weeks early has less than a sixth. Insufficient fat deposits mean that preemies are not well buffered for the rapid brain growth that takes place after birth. Although normal brain growth can nevertheless occur given adequate nutrition, it is vital to recognized the special needs of premature babies. Cunnane aptly describes stored fat in the newborn human as “insurance.

Passage 4

Adapted from Neal J. Roese and Kathleen D.Vohs, “HindsightBias” 2012 by Neau. Roese and Kathleen D.Vons

Hindsight bias is defined as the belief that an event is more predictable after it becomes known than it was before it became known. For example,a voter might believe that after accepting the Democratic nomination for president in August 2008, Barack Obama’s chances of winning the U.S. presidency were about 60%. After Obama’s victory in November 2008, this same voter might look back,seethe victory as more predictable than it was before the outcome was known, and conclude that were at least 80% at the time of the convention. Sometimes termed the “Knew it all along effect,” hindsight bias involves the inability to recapture the feeling of uncertainty that preceded an event. When there is a need to understand past events as they were experienced at the time,hindsight bias thwarts sound appraisal.

Hindsight bias has important consequences for the legal system, particularly with respect to negligence, product liability, and medical malpractice. In legal applications, the danger of hindsight bias is clear, in that law of many nations states that a defendant may only be judged on the basis of what he or she could reasonably have known at the time of action. Knowledge that is gathered later, such as from accident scene investigations, forensic tests, or the arbitrary discovery of an oddly misused product, is deemed irrelevant in evaluating the quality of the decisions made in the moment, that is, before a focal mishap occurred. As empirical studies have shown, however, hindsight bias routinely afficts judgments of a defendant’s past conduct.

The reality of hindsight bias is sometimes difficult to convey to seasoned decision makers because hindsight bias can be confused with simple learning from experience. Individual and organizations innovate, thrive, and prosper when they analyze mistakes and adjust their strategies accordingly. This interpretation follows along the lines of “only fools wouldn’t know more after learning an outcome than before it occurred.” When, then, is knowledge born of hindsight a benefit to be embraced, and when is it a bias to be avoided? The answer is in the Hindsight Bias among Entrepreneurs.

In a 2009 study by economists Gavin Cassar and Justin Craig, hundreds of entrepreneurs who were starting new businesses were asked to estimate the likelihood that their businesses would be successful. Years later,those whose businesses has failed were asked to recall,when they were getting started, what they had thought their chances of success were.

Mean response of participants before their start-up failedMean response of participants after their start-up failed
77.3% probability of success58.8% probability of success
Adapted from Douglas E. Hough, Irrationality in Health Care: What Behavioral Economics Reveals about What We Do and Why. 2013 by Stanford University Press.

Passage 5

This passage is adapted from Angus Chen, “The Dawn of Plate Tectonics.” ©2014 by American Association for the Advancement of science.

A journey to the Mariana Trench, the deepest crevice on Earth’s surface, reveals the great Pacific tectonic plate descending deep into the planet where it recycles back into mantle rock. This recycling of old tectonic plate, called subduction, drives plate tectonics and is nothing new to scientists, but exactly when the process got started is a hot debate. A new study may put that to rest by unmasking a sequence of 4.4-billion-year-old lavas as the remnants of the first subduction zone on Earth. If correct, the discovery marks the dawn of plate tectonics and thus several geological processes critical to Earth’s environment and perhaps even its life.

In 2008, scientists studying ancient lavas in northern Quebec, known to geologists as the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt, saw that they had the same geochemical signature as lavas from modern subduction zones like the Mariana. This meant that they must have mixed with briny fluids squeezed up through subduction zones and only there. The geochemistry of those rocks could be used as a sort of fingerprint to help identify subduction zone lavas.

Geologists Tracy Rushmer and Simon Turner of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, decided to take a closer look. They and their colleagues noticed a distinct chemical pattern to the layers in the lava, creating a unique sequence of rocks.Te team thought this sequence could be similar to lava sequences made by modern subduction zones like the Mariana Trench. Mark Reagan, a geologist at the University of Iowa who has taken submersibles in to the trench five times as deep as 6500 meters, confirmed Rushmer and Turner’s suspicions.“Te whole sequence,” Rushmer says, “ linked in with what Mark was seeing in the Mariana Trench.”Te team says each rock layer in the sequence at the Mariana lavas and the Nuvvuagittuq lavas describes a step in the birth of a subduction zone.

The key is in how rocks and their chemistry change with each successive layer. As the oceanic slab descends, magma begins rising up and erupts on the surface in layers atop one another, creating a rising sequence of igneous rocks. Within creasing depth,heat and pressure begin squeezing different elements out of the slab in fluids. Over time, these fluids change the chemical composition of the lavas so that they become rich in rare earth elements like ytterbium, but poor in the element niobium. The first layer in the sequence erupts before the fluids can escape the slab, but the next layer in the sequence gets just enough fluid to make a partial signature. The final layer carries huge amounts of rare earth elements and very little niobium, together making the clarion mark of subduction zone lava.

The team realized not only do both rocks carry the same geochemical signature, but in comparing the Mariana and Nuvvuagittuq, they also discovered the rocks and the geochemistry of both sequences change in the exact same way. This finding bolstered the theory that the Nuvvuagittuq sequence is an ancient subduction zone. “Seeing the evolving chemical signature,” Turner says, “was much more robust than just saying there is or isn’t niobium.”

Geochemist Julian Pearce of Cardif University in the United Kindom still isn’t completely convinced,though. He says the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt might just be too old and warped to have a reliable signal from 4.4 billion years ago. “Te evidence would be compelling if the rocks were young, undeformed, and fresh,” Pearce says. As they are now, the Nuvvuagittuq rocks have been modified by intense heat and pressure “which can mask and modify geochemical signal” though contamination from nearby rocks. Furthermore, while Pearce believes a subduction zone is one place these geochemical signatures can be made, “it is not the only location.”

While those are legitimate concerns, geoscientist Norman Sleep of Stanford University in Palo Alto,California, isn’t too bothered. “It’s not fully sorted out yet,” Sleep says, but the Nuvvuagittuq rocks“really seem like modern arclike lavas” found at the Mariana. When it comes to the geochemical signature of subduction, Turner and the members of the team say that heat and pressure don’t alter the geochemical fingerprint much, and Sleep says this is reasonable. Despite all of the difficulties of studying such timeworn rocks, he says “the work done in this paper is very valuable.


2016 年 3 (北美) SAT 考试阅读题目

Ivy-Way 学生在上课的过程就会做到2016年3月以及其他的官方历年考题。除此之外,我们也有让学生来我们的教室或在家做模考的服务让学生评估自己的学习进度并看到成绩。如果你想预约时间来我们的教室或在家做模考,请联系我们!

Also in: 繁中 (繁中)

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