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過去這個週末學生考了 2016 年 10 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！
這裡，我們整理了 2016 年 10 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 2016 年 10 月 (亞洲) SAT 考試閱讀文章
PASSAGE 1
This passage is adapted from Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre. Originally published in 1847. The title character is a governess at the Thornfield Hall estate. Governesses were employed to live in private homes and teach the children there. Adele is Jane’s student. Mrs. Fairfax is the housekeeper of Thornfield Hall.
The promise of a smooth career, which my first calm introduction to Thornfield Hall seemed to pledge, was not belied on a longer acquaintance with the place and its inmates. Mrs. Fairfax turned out to be what she appeared, a placid-tempered, kind-natured woman, of competent education and average intelligence. My pupil was a lively child, who had been spoilt and indulged, and therefore was sometimes wayward; but as she was committed entirely to my care, and no injudicious interference from any quarter ever thwarted my plans for her improvement, she soon forgot her little freaks, and became obedient and teachable. She had no great talents, no marked traits of character, no peculiar development of feeling or taste, which raised her one inch above the ordinary level of childhood; but neither had she any deficiency or vice which sunk her below it. She made reasonable progress, entertained for me a vivacious, though perhaps not very profound, affection; and by her simplicity, gay prattle, and efforts to please, inspired me, in return, with a degree of attachment sufficient to make us both content in each other’s society.
This, par parenthese, I will be thought coal language by persons who entertain solemn doctrines about the angelic nature of children, and the duty of those charged with their education to conceive for them an idolatrous devotion. But I am not writing to flatter parental egotism, to echo cant, or prop up humbug; I am merely telling the truth. I felt a conscientious solicitude for Adele’s welfare and progress, and a quiet liking to her little self; just as I cherished towards Mrs. Fairfax a thankfulness for her kindness, and a pleasure in her society proportionate to the tranquil regard she had for me, and the moderation of her mind and character.
Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when, while Adele played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line—that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen; that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good in Adele; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold.
Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it; the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it—and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.
PASSAGE 2
This passage is adapted from Thomas Paine, Common Sense. Originally published in January 1776. Paine was born in England in 1737 and immigrated to America in 1774.
I have heard it asserted by some that, as America has flourished under her former connection with Great Britain, the same connection is necessary le toward her future happiness and will always have the same effect. Nothing can be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert that, because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty. But even this is admitting more than is true; for I answer roundly that America would have flourished as much, and probably much more, had no European power taken any notice of her. The commerce by which she hath enriched herself are the necessaries of s life and will always have a market while eating is the custom of Europe.
But she has protected us, say some. That she hath engrossed us is true, and defended the continent at our expense as well as her own, is admitted; and she o would have defended Turkey from the same motive, viz., for the sake of trade and dominion.
Alas! we have been long led away by ancient prejudices and made large sacrifices to superstition. We have boasted the protection of Great Britain 5 without considering that her motive was interest not attachment and that she did not protect us from our enemies on our account but from her enemies on her own account, from those who had no quarrel with us on any other account, and who will always be our enemies on the same account. Let Britain waive her pretensions to the continent, or the continent throw off the dependence, and we should be at peace with France and Spain were they at war with Britain. The miseries of Hanover’s last war ought to warn us against connections.
It hath lately been asserted in Parliament that the colonies have no relation to each other but through the parent-country, i.e., that Pennsylvania and the Jerseys, and so on for the rest, are sister-colonies by the way of England; this is certainly a very roundabout way of proving relationship, but it is the nearest and only true way of proving enmity (or enemyship, if I may so call it). France and Spain never were, nor perhaps ever will be, our enemies as Americans but as our being the subjects of Great Britain.
But Britain is the parent-country, say some. Then the more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families; wherefore, the assertion, if true, turns to her reproach; but it happens not to be true, or only partly so, and the phrase parent- or mother-country hath been adopted by the king and his parasites, with a low design of gaining an unfair bias on the credulous weakness of our minds. Europe, and not England, is the parent-country of America. This New World hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home pursues their descendants still.
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from Sid Perkins, “Cold Climate Shrinks Mountains.” ©2013 by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Every year, billions of tons of rock and soil vanish from Earth’s surface, scoured from mountains and plains and swept away by wind, rain, and other e elements. The chief driver of this dramatic s resurfacing is climate, according to a new study. And when the global temperature falls, erosion kicks into overdrive.
Scientists have long debated what drives most of the world’s erosion: Is it predominantly triggered by o climate, or is it the result of mountain-building, tectonic activity? Most previous studies of erosion have relied on measuring the amounts of sediment that accumulate somewhere after being carried away from their sources and deposited elsewhere. But such 5 analyses focus on the aftereffects of erosion, not the process itself, says Frederic Herman, a geophysicist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. And most research has looked at limited regions of Earth—a particular mountain range, say, and not the planet as a whole.
To more directly estimate rates of erosion, researchers use techniques generally known as thermochronometry, or the measure of how a rock’s temperature has changed through time. Many such > techniques rely on assessing how the decay of radioactive elements within a rock has affected its minerals. For their new study, Herman and his colleagues used four such techniques. In two of them, the researchers measured how much decay-produced helium had built up in a rock’s minerals. (Once the rock falls below a certain temperature, the helium stops diffusing out of the minerals efficiently.) In the other two, the team tallied the amount of microscopic damage produced by radioactive decay. (Once the rock falls below a certain temperature, the atoms in a crystal aren’t able to shift and heal the damage.) Using these approaches, the researchers could estimate the dates at which the rocks cooled to temperatures between 250°C and 70°C—and therefore track the speed at which the rocks rose toward ground level as the overlying strata eroded away.
Using data they’d gathered themselves, as well as that gleaned from other studies, the scientists compiled almost 18,000 data points from across the globe. During the past 8 million years, rates of erosion have varied from less than 0.01 millimeter per year (in central and western Australia and in central North America, for example) to as much as 10 mm/yr (at sites in the Himalayas, Taiwan, and New Zealand).
These regional trends may not be surprising: Australia is relatively flat and dry, and the Himalayas and Taiwan host relatively steep terrain that’s often lashed by monsoons. But the big story, Herman says, lies in the global trends seen as those 8 million years unfolded.
About 6 million years ago, as Earth’s climate cooled, erosion rates generally rose at all latitudes but increased most notably in mountainous regions. Then, in the wake of even stronger cooling that helped trigger a series of ice ages and interglacial periods beginning about 2.4 million years ago, erosion rates doubled. Because erosion increased most dramatically in midlatitude mountain ranges—areas most likely to first experience glaciers as climate gradually cooled—Herman and his colleagues blame the acceleration in erosion on glacial scouring.
The new findings, and especially their global scale, “confirms for me that [the increases in erosion rates] are a climate signal,” says David Egholm, a geophysicist at Aarhus University in Denmark. In particular, he notes, the latitude-dependent variation in erosion rates “most probably” can be attributed to glaciers.
If Earth’s climate continues to cool, as it has over the long term in the past few million years, rates of erosion will likely continue to rise. But if that•cooling trend stalls, erosion worldwide will gradually decrease.
Passage 4
This passage is adapted from Eric Jaffe, “Cities Are Innovative Because They Contain More Ideas to Steal.” 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.
We all know that cities are great engines of innovation. One reason that’s the case is that cities grow “superlinearly”: interpersonal connections e grow at a greater rate than sheer population, and with that super proximity comes a super exchange of ideas. The secrets of industry, as economist Alfred Marshall once wrote, are truly “in the air.”
But innovation is a blanket term that can encompass very different things. Scholars who study the subject typically limit it to the urban proliferation of patents. For sure, the creation of original concepts and products is a sign of innovation. At the same time, it could also reflect a new way of doing business—applied from some other sector, perhaps, or even adapted from a competitor for some other purpose.
So we know cities innovate, but we don’t necessarily know what that innovation means.
Well, we have a slightly better idea now thanks to ) the recent work of economists Neil Lee of Lancaster University Management School and Andres Rodriguez-Pose of the London School of Economics. Lee and Rodriguez-Pose used a sweeping 2010 business survey to study the innovation patterns of roughly 1,600 small and medium enterprises across. the United Kingdom. The survey divided innovation into two types (products and processes) and two sources (entirely “original” ideas or merely those newly “learned” to the firm).
The main results of the survey fit well with what’s already known about urban innovation. U.K. firms located in the city were indeed more likely than those in rural areas to report both new products (52 to 46 percent, respectively) and new processes (43 to 34 percent). From there, Lee and Rodriguez-Pose dug deeper to try to understand how exactly this urban advantage emerged.
When it came to new business products, cities seemed to derive their innovation from some combination of original and learned ideas—not really one or the other. So the city environment, ripe with chance exchanges and interactions, might only explain a sliver of new product development. Some complex combination of other forces (e.g., creative inspiration or specific demands or more approaches to problem solving) is also involved.
When it came to new business processes, however, the urban advantage seemed to rely almost entirely on ideas learned from neighboring firms (as opposed to original ideas). Here the city itself would appear to play its greatest role in innovation. Greater proximity to other firms, and perhaps also greater employee movement from company to company, no doubt increases the flow of outside information and leads to new ways of working.
As Lee and Rodriguez-Pose conclude, in an upcoming issue of Urban Studies, there’s probably “a greater degree of nuance with respect to the ways in which cities support innovation” than often perceived:
“Underlying the innovation advantage of cities are two separate processes. One may allow new approaches to problem solving and the development of entirely new products. Yet alongside this, a second allows urban firms to learn, or rather mimic, other firms and gain an innovation advantage from this.”
There are any number of reasons why cities might be better suited to perpetuate learned ideas than to harvest original ones. For starters, truly original innovations are quite rare. They’re also quickly patented, which makes them tough to emulate. Beyond that, customers might not flock to a company seen as creating only copycat products, whereas they probably couldn’t care less how the firm actually operates.
So there may well be secrets of industry wafting through the city air, but they don’t stay secret for long.
Passage 5
Passage 1 adapted from Erin Wayman, “Oxygen Boost Aided Carnivore Evolution in Cambrian Explosion.” ©2013 by Society for Science & the Public. Passage 2 is adapted from Tamarra Kemsley, “Discovery Challenges Theory Behind Reason for Cambrian Explosion.” 02013 by Nature World News.
Passage 1
The major groups of modern animals—everything from insects to creatures with a backbone—popped up 540 million to 500 million years ago in a proliferation known as the Cambrian explosion. Fossil and molecular evidence hint that the most primitive animals appeared a couple hundred million years earlier, leading scientists to wonder about the cause of the lag.
Now scientists have stitched together earlier theories to come to a comprehensive explanation. Erik Sperling, an earth scientist at Harvard University, and colleagues say an increase in oxygen in the geologic record at the onset of the Cambrian period allowed carnivores to evolve. The oxygen boost could have accommodated the high energy costs of pursuing and digesting prey, Sperling says.
Once carnivores arrived, an evolutionary arms race broke out between predators and prey, the team suggests. As prey evolved new defenses and predators developed new weapons, new kinds of animals sprung up.
Support for the oxygen-carnivore theory comes from modern polychaetes, tiny earthworm relatives that live on the seafloor and vary in their feeding habits. Combing through data from previous studies on polychaetes, Sperling’s team examined 962 worm species from 68 locations worldwide. The researchers found a clear association: The number of carnivorous species was lower in areas with the lowest oxygen levels. In some of these regions, predatory polychaetes were completely absent.
Previously, scientists either invoked an oxygen increase or an arms race to account for the Cambrian explosion, says Guy Narbonne, a paleobiologist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Linking oxygen to carnivores provides strong evidence that the explanations are “intimately interrelated,” he says.
Paleobiologist Nicholas Butterfield of the University of Cambridge sees the data differently. He thinks the rise of oxygen was actually an effect of the animals on the environment. He contends that shallow marine areas, where early animals most likely lived, were probably well oxygenated and therefore a lack of the gas did not stifle their evolution. It just took a while for a burst of complex animals to arise from simpler ones, he says. “It takes a whole lot of tinkering and experimenting and false o starts until you trip over something that works.”
Passage 2
Ample oxygen saturated Earth’s atmosphere prior to the sudden eruption in the development of life during the Cambrian explosion some 542 million years ago, according to a study published in the 5 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Led by an international team of researchers, the report reveals that the oxygen content was roughly the same 2.1 billion years ago as 500 million years ago. The finding challenges a long-held theory o that the Cambrian explosion was in part triggered by a sudden uptick in the element required by all higher organisms.
“We have examined rocks that are 2.15 billion to 2.08 billion years old,” coauthor Emma 5 Hammarlund, a researcher from the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution at the University of Southern Denmark, said in a statement. “They show us that there was oxygen in deep water and thus also in the atmosphere at that time. We cannot say exactly how much, but there was probably ample oxygen and also ample time to permit advanced life to evolve.”
Previously, the team discovered a series of unique fossils from the same site they suggest represents evidence of a specimen that attempted to evolve into a multicellular life-form.
“It was not a life-form that in any way is comparable to large life as we know it today,” Hammarlund said. “It was rather microbes that experimented with a way to evolve into some form of multicellular existence. It had enough oxygen for the experiment, but its destiny is unknown.”
One possible reason for the apparent eruption of life 540 million years ago, the scientists suggest, is simply an absence of fossils from previous life-forms. An organism that lacked bones or a shell would be unlikely to leave any kind of trace behind 2 billion years later, they point out.
Not only does the discovery potentially rewrite the history of evolution, it also offers a new narrative regarding Earth’s development. Atmospheric oxygen, it shows, has fluctuated several times throughout history, rising to 25 percent between 250 million-300 million years ago, up from 21 percent today and more than double the estimated 10 percent of the Cambrian explosion.
2016年 10月 (北美) SAT 考試閱讀題目
Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到2016年10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！
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