2017年6月ACT回顧

2017 年 6 月 ACT 考題回顧:所有 4 篇閱讀文章!

過去這個週末學生考了 2017 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 2017 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 2017 年 6月 ACT 考試閱讀文章

Passage 1

Passage A is adapted from the short story “Leaving Memphis” by Lauren Birden (©2008 by Narrative Magazine, Inc.). Passage B is adapted from the short story “Mandarins” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (©2006 by Fiction, Inc.). 

        You see her first in the Memphis bus station on a

two-hour layover. You pretend you haven’t because she

looks ready to talk. “Stonewashed jeans,” you think,

watching her tap her platform sandals at the front of the

boarding line. When she catches you staring, you pull

your lips tight and stare at the floor in front of her. She

starts toward you anyway. She plops down in the hard

plastic seat next to you, moving her purse to her lap.

You motion to your open novel and shrug as if to say,

“Can’t stop now,” but she asks, “Where you from?” and

now you can’t shake her.

        You’re not a bad person. You just wish Greyhound

assigned seating. It’s not the straw-blond hair teased up

around her face, not even the sad, neglected teeth that

make you want to turn off the overhead reading lamp

and smile at ber in the dark. “I have a sneaking suspicion

that we’re the same person,” she says, and you say,

“That’s funny,” because you know you’ve been inventing

yourself this whole time. She smiles and waits for

you to agree how similar the two of you are.

        She tells you about the man she’s taking the bus to

see. “Left for a construction job in Palm Beach. Says

my eyes are as blue as the Atlantic Ocean, and he can’t

bear to look at the thing but one more time if I’m not

there with him. You can’t trust a man with a gun or a

heart, but he swears he loves me.” She waits for you to

tell her of a better love. You can’t think of a story to

compare.

        She says, “We’re the same person.” She’s waiting

for yon to tell her yes, that you both have had the same

heartache and know about scars and love the same. But

you’re thinking at the window again as a radio tower

passes that reminds you of the Eiffel Tower.

         Firefly porch lights are perched, fat and throbbing,

outside every occasional home you pass. You say, “You

know, you’re so very right,” and then, nothing more.

The woman resigns herself to turning sway in the quiet.

You’re telling the truth for once.


Passage 2

This passage is adapted from the article “Travels with R.L.S.” by James Campbell (©2000 by The New York Times Ccmpany). 

         Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) preferred to

circumnavigate civilization, with its increasing reliance

on contraptions, and steer toward the rougher fringes.

He self-consciously turned his back on the Victorian

idol. pores,. In similar spirit. he chose the past more

often than the present as a setting for fiction. His most

popular novels—Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The

Master of Ballantrae—are set in a semimythical realm,

where the fire of adventure catches on every page.

Stevenson loved the sound of clashing swords; he

didn’t want them getting tangled up in telephone wires

overhead. 

         Stevenson, though, was destined to be a modem

man. He was born into a Scottish family of civil enginears,

esteemed for its technological genius. His grandfather,

also Robert. was Britain’s greatest builder of lighthouses,

and his graceful towers continue to guide sailors today.

Three of Robert’s sons followed him into the profession,

including Robert Louis Stevenson’s father, Thomas, who

made his own mark in the field of optics—his louvre-boarded

screens for the protection of thermometers are still in use today.

          It was expected that Robert Louis would enter the

family business in twin, and a great wringing of hands

geeted his announcement to the contrary. He told his

father that be wanted to be a writer, which Thomas

Stevenson regarded as no profession at all. We can

imagine the consternation when Stevenson’s letters

arrived bearing pleas such as “Take me as I am . . . I

must be a bit of a vagabond: And a vagabond was pre-

cisely what he set out to be: longhaired, careless about

food, walking through France or planning an epic ocean

voyage, a far cry from the offices of D. & T. Stevenson.

Engineers. He was forging the template for generations

of college-educated adventurers to come. “I travel not

to go anywhere, but to go: he wrote in Travels With a

Donkey (1879). 1 travel for travel’s sake. The great

affair is to move.” 

         Stevenson would not be an engineer, but he left his

own lights, in Scotland and across the world, by which

it is possible to trace his unceasing movement. No other

writer, surely, is as much memorialized by the words

“lived here” as he is. There are five houses with

Stevenson associations in Edinburgh alone, not to men-

tion the little schoolhouse he attended as a child and the

lavish gardens opposite the family home in Heriot Row,

where he played and, the fanciful will have you believe,

first acted out the quest for Treasure Island. I have

shadowed Stevenson up to the northeast of Scotland,

where he tried his hand at being an apprentice engineer.

back down to the Hawes Inn at South Queensferry,

where David Balfour is tricked into going to sea in Kid-

napped. There are landmarks in Switzerland, France

and on the Pacific Islands where the adventure of his

final years took place. 

         Recently, I stumbled across Abernethy House

where Stevenson lived briefly in London when he was

23. It stands in a secluded corner of Hampstead. high

up on a bill. and separated from foggy London by farms

and heath. It was while standing on Hampstead Hill one

night that he gazed down on London and imagined a

technological miracle of the future. “when in a moment,

in the twinkling of an eye, the design of the monstrous

city flashes into vision—a glittering hieroglyph.” He is

anticipating the effects of electricity and a time when

the streetlamps would be lighted “not one by one” by

the faithful old lamplighter, but all at once, by the touch

of a button. Not for him improvements in optics;

give him the flickering gas lamp and the “skirts of

civilization” any day.

         Lamps occur frequently in Stevenson’s writing.

There are the essays “A Plea for Gas tamps” and “The

Lantern Bearers, and his poem for children, “The

Lamplighter,” which celebrates an old custom: “For we

are very lucky, with a lamp before the door, / And

Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more.”

Then there is his memoir in which he describes how,

when a child and sick, his nurse would take him to the

window, “whence I might look forth into the blue night

starred with street lamps, and set where the gas still

burned behind the windows of other sickrooms.” And

the lights shine again, with a subdued glow, in the obituary

he wrote of his father. Thomas Stevenson’s name

may not have been widely known, yet “all the time, his

lights were in every part of the world, guiding the

mariner.” 

         A year later, Stevenson chartered a schooner and

became a mariner himself, sailing circuitously through

the South Seas He had, in a sense, entered the family

business at last.


Passage 3

This passage is adapted from the article “Proceed with Caution: Using Native American Folktales in the Classroom” by Debbie Reese (©2007 by the National Council of Teachers of English). 

        Traditional stories include myths, legends, and

folktales rooted in the oral storytelling traditions of a

given people. Through story, people pass their religious

beliefs, customs, history, lifestyle, language, values.

and the places they hold sacred from one generation to

the next. As such, stories and their telling are more than

simple entertainment. They matter—in significant

ways—to the well-being of the communities from

which they originate. Acclaimed Laguna Pueblo writer

Leslie Marmon Silko writes that the oral narrative, or

story, was the medium by which the Pueblo people

transmitted “an entire culture, a worldview complete

with proven strategies for survival.” In her discussion of

hunting stories, she says:

        These accounts contained information of critical

importance about the behavior and migration patterns

of mule deer. Hunting stories carefully described key

landmarks and locations of fresh water. Thus, a deer-hunt

story might also serve as a map. Lost travelers and lost

piflon-nut gatherers have been saved by sighting a rock

formation they recognize only because they once heard

a hunting story describing this rock formation.

        Similarly, children’s book author Joseph Bruchac

writes. … rather than being ‘mere myths,’with ‘myth’ being

used in the pejorative sense of ‘untruth’, those ancient

traditional tales were a 90 distillation of the deep knowledge

held by the many Native American nations about the work-

lags of the world around them.

         Thus, storytelling is a means of passing along

information, but it does not mean there is only one corrept

version of any given story. During a telling, listeners can

speak up if they feel an important fact or detail was omitted,

or want to offer a different version of the story. In this way,

the people seek or arrive at a communal truth rather than

an absolute truth. A storyteller may revise a story according

to his or her own interpretation, or according to the

knowledge of the audience, but in order for it to be

acceptable to the group from which the story originated,

it should remain true to the spirit and content of the original.

        Traditional stories originate from a specific

people, and we expect them to accurately reflect those

people, but do they? As a Pueblo Indian woman, I

wonder, what do our stories look like when they are

retold outside our communities, in picture book format,

and marketed as “Native American folktales” for children?

Are our religious, cultural, and social values presented

accurately? Are children who read these folktales learning

anything useful about us?

        Much of what I bring to bear on my research

emanates from my cultural lens and identity as a Pueblo

Indian woman from Nambe Pueblo. I was born at the

Indian hospital in Santa Fe. New Mexico, and raised on

our reservation. As a Pueblo Indian child, I was given a

Tewa (our language) name and taught to dance. I went

 to religious ceremonies and gathenngs, and I learned

how to do a range of things that we do as Pueblo

people. This childhood provided me with “cultural intuition.”

Cultural intuition is that body of knowledge anyone acquires

based upon their lived experiences in a specific place.

As a scholar in American Indian studies, I know there are

great distinctions between and across American Indian

tribal nations. For instance. my home pueblo is very

different from the other pueblos in New Mexico, among

which there are several different langunge groups.

         I draw upon both my cultural intuition and knowledge

when reading a book about Pueblo Indians. For example,

when I read Gerald McDermott’s Arrow to the Sun:

A Pueblo Indian Tale (1974). I wondered what Pueblo

the book is about. There are 19 different Pueblos

in New Mexico. and more in Arizona. In which Pueblo

did this story originate? That information is not included

anywhere in the book, and there are other problems as

well. In the climax of the story, the boy must prove himself

by passing through “the Kiva of Lions, the Kiva of Serpents,

the Kiva of Bees, and the Kiva of Lightning” where he fights

those elements. McDermott’s kivas are frightening places of

trial and battle, but I know kivas are safe places of worship and

instruction. 

        Depictions that are culturally acceptable at one

Pueblo are not necessarily acceptable at a different

Pueblo. As such, elders at one Pueblo would say the

book could be used with their children, while elders at

another Pueblo would disagree. This is not a question

of cultural authenticity; it is one of appropriateness in

teaching, given a specific audience.


Passage 4

This passage is adapted from the article “The Asphalt Jungle” by Peter Del Tredici(©2010 by Natural History Magazine, Inc.). 

         The ecology of the city is defined not only by the

cultivated plants that require maintenance and the protected

remnants of natural landscapes, but also by the spontaneous

vegetation that dominates the neglected interstices.

Greenery fills the vacant spaces between our roads,

homes, and businesses; lines ditches and chain-link fences;

sprouts in sidewalk cracks and atop neglected rooftops.

Some of those plants, such as box elder, quaking aspen,

and riverside grape, are native species present before

humans drastically altered the land. Others, including

chicory. Japanese knotweed, and Norway maple, were

brought in intentionally or, unintentionally by people.

And still others—among them common ragweed,

path rush (Juncus tenuis), and tufted lovegrass

(Eragrostis pectinacea)—arrived on their own,

dispersed by wind, water, or wild animals. Such species

grow and reproduce in many American cities without

being planted or cared for. They can provide important

ecological services at very little cost to taxpayers, and

if left undisturbed long enough they may even develop

into mature woodlands.

         There is no denying that most people consider

many such plants to be “weeds” From a utilitarian perspective,

a weed is any plant that grows on its own where people do not

want it to grow. From the biological perspective, weeds are

opportunistic plants that are adapted to disturbance in all its

myriad forms, from bulldozers to acid rain. Their pervasiveness

in the urban environment is simply a reflection of the continual

disruption that characterizes that habitat—they are not its

cause. In an agricultural context, the competition of

weeds with economic crops is the primary reason for

controlling them. In an urban area, a weed is any plant

growing where people are trying to cultivate something

else, or keep clear of vegetation altogether. The com-

plaints of city dwellers are usually based on aesthetics

(the plants are perceived as ugly, or as signs of blight

and neglect) or on security concerns (they shield human

activity or provide habitat for vermin).

         From a plant’s perspective, it is not the density of

the human population that defines the urban environment,

but the abundance of paving (affecting access to

soil and moisture) and prevalence of disturbance. In

other words, a sidewalk crack is a sidewalk crack

whether it is in a city or a suburb. Urbanization is a

process, not a place—a process that tends to leave the

soil in a compacted, impoverished, and often contami-

nated state. 
         The plants that grow and survive in derelict urban

wastelands are famous (or infamous) for their ability to

grow under extremely harsh conditions. Through a quirk

of evolutionary fate, they developed traits in their native

habitats that seem to have “preadapted” them to

flourish in cities. One study, by biologist Jeremy T. 

Lundholm of St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova

Scotia, and his then student Ashley Marlin, concluded

that many successful urban plants are native to exposed

cliffs, disturbed rock outcrops, or dry grasslands, all of

which are characterized by soils with a relatively high

pH. Cities, with their tall, granite-faced buildings and

concrete foundations, are in a sense the equivalent of

the natural limestone cliff habitats where those species

originated. Similarly, as the British ecologist and

“lichen hunter” Oliver L. Gilbert noted in his classic

book The Ecology of Urban Habitats, the increased use

of deicing salts on our roads and highways has resulted

in the development of microhabitats along their margins

that are typically colonized by calcium-loving grass-

land species adapted to limestone soils or by salt-loving

plants from coastal habitats.

         In general, the successful urban plant needs to be

flexible in all aspects of its life history, from seed germination

through flowering and fruiting; opportunistic in its ability

to take advantage of locally abundant resources that may

be available for only a short time; and tolerant of the stressful

growing conditions caused by an abundance of pavement

and a paucity of soil. The plants that grow in our cities managed

to survive the transition from one land use to another as cities

developed. The sequence starts with native species adapted

to ecological conditions before the city was built. Those

are followed, more or less in order, by species

preadapted to agriculture and pasturage, to pavement

and compacted soil, to lawns and landscaping, to infra-

structure edges and environmental pollution—and

ultimately to vacant lots and rubble.


2017 年 6 月 ACT 考試閱讀題目

Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到 2017 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!


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