2017 12月 SAT (美国/北美版) 考题回顾：所有 5 篇阅读文章！ - Ivy-Way留學部落格

过去这个周末学生考了 2017 年 12 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 2017 年 12 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 2017 年 12 月 (北美) SAT 考试阅读文章

PASSAGE 1

This passage is adapted from Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, originally published in 1814. Sir Thomas, a rich man, is telling Fanny, the poor niece he raised from age ten, that their neighbor wishes to speak to her to continue his courtship of her.

Mr. Crawford, as you have perhaps foreseen, is yet in the house. He is in my room, and hoping to see you there.”

There was a look, a start, an exclamation on hearing this, which astonished Sir Thomas; but what was his increase of astonishment on hearing her exclaim—”Oh! no, sir, I cannot, indeed I cannot go down to him. Mr. Crawford ought to know—he must know that: I told him enough yesterday to convince him; he spoke to me on this subject yesterday, and I told him without disguise that it was very disagreeable to me, and quite out of my power to return his good opinion.”

“I do not catch your meaning,” said Sir Thomas, sitting down again. “Out of your power to return his good opinion? What is all this? I know he spoke to you yesterday, and (as far as I understand) received as much encouragement to proceed as a well-judging young woman could permit herself to give. I was very much pleased with what I collected to have been your behaviour on the occasion; it shewed a discretion highly to be commended. But now, when he has made his overtures so properly, and honourably—what are your scruples now?”

“You are mistaken, sir,” cried Fanny, forced by the anxiety of the moment even to tell her uncle that he was wrong; “you are quite mistaken. How could Mr. Crawford say such a thing? I gave him no encouragement yesterday. On the contrary, I told him, I cannot recollect my exact words, but I am sure I told him that I would not listen to him, that it was very unpleasant to me in every respect, and that I begged him never to talk to me in that manner again. I am sure I said as much as that and more; and I should have said still more, if I had been quite certain of his meaning anything seriously; but I did not like to be, I could not bear to be, imputing more than might be intended. I thought it might all pass for nothing with him.”

She could say no more; her breath was almost gone.

“Am Ito understand,” said Sir Thomas, after a few moments’ silence, “that you mean to refuse Mr. Crawford?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Refuse him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Refuse Mr. Crawford! Upon what plea? For what reason?”

“I—I cannot like him, sir, well enough to many him.”

“This is very strange!” said Sir Thomas, in a voice of calm displeasure. “There is something in this which my comprehension does not reach. Here is a young man wishing to pay his addresses to you, with everything to recommend him: not merely situation in life, fortune, and character, but with more than common agreeableness, with address and conversation pleasing to everybody. And he is not an acquaintance of to-day; you have now known him some time. His sister, moreover, is your intimate friend.”

“Yes,” said Fanny, in a faint voice, and looking down with fresh shame; and she did feel almost ashamed of herself, after such a picture as her uncle had drawn, for not liking Mr. Crawford.

“You must have been aware,” continued Sir Thomas presently, “you must have been some time aware of a particularity in Mr. Crawford’s manners to you. This cannot have taken you by surprise. You must have observed his attentions; and though you always received them very properly (I have no accusation to make on that head), I never perceived them to be unpleasant to you. I am half inclined to think, Fanny, that you do not quite know your own feelings.”

“Oh yes, sir! indeed I do. His attentions were always—what I did not like.”

Sir Thomas looked at her with deeper surprise. “This is beyond me,” said he. “This requires explanation. Young as you are, and having seen scarcely any one, it is hardly possible that your affections—”

He paused and eyed her fixedly. He saw her lips formed into a no, though the sound was inarticulate, but her face was like scarlet. That, however, in so modest a girl, might be very compatible with innocence; and chusing at least to appear satisfied, he quickly added, “No, no, I know that is quite out of the question; quite impossible. Well, there is nothing more to be said.”

And for a few minutes he did say nothing. He was deep in thought. His niece was deep in thought likewise, trying to harden and prepare herself against farther questioning.

PASSAGE 2

Socrates once feared that technology would corrupt human memory. Quaint as it sounds today, he was worried about a form of communication called writing. The more easily people could access something in a document, he reasoned, the less inclined they’d be to remember it.

The great philosopher’s point rings as true in the digital age as it did in ancient Greece. Recent tests have found that people who think a computer will save their information recall much less of it than those led to believe the machine will delete it. A difficult trivia question is as likely to bring Google to mind as it is the answer.

Fairfield University psychologist Linda Henkel believes something similar may be happening with digital photography. The more easily people can take and access pictures, she says, the less inclined they may be to remember the moment itself. “You’re just kind of mentally discounting it – thinking, ‘Well, the camera’s got it,” Henkel says.

Henkel draws that conclusion from a study she recently conducted at the Bellarmine Museum ofArt on Fairfield’s campus. In one of her experiments, she gave test participants a digital camera and an itinerary of museum objects to view. Some of the objects were simply observed. Some were photographed whole with the digital camera. Some were photographed with explicit instructions to zoom in on a detail.

The following day, Henkel gathered the participants and tested their memories about the museum experience. She showed them the names (or pictures) of all the objects they’d seen, as well as 10 they hadn’t, and asked them whether or not they’d gone up to the item, and if so whether they’d simply observed it or photographed it. For each item they said they saw, she also questioned them about a detail.

Socrates would have enjoyed the results. Test participants recognized fewer objects they’d photographed whole than those they’d observed on their museum tour (from both the list of names and the roster of pictures). They were also much less accurate in recalling visual details of museum objects they’d photographed whole, compared with those they’d only observed. Simply put, they took the picture and missed the moment.

Henkel calls her finding the”photo-taking -impairment effect” When people know a camera will document an object or event, they may well dismiss it from their own mind. Digital cameras seem particularly conducive to the effect since its far easier (and cheaper) to take and store digital pictures than it is to develop film or compile photo albums.

In other words, the facility of digital photography may well come at the cost of cognitive engagement. “I think its about the mindlessness with which people approach the task,” says Henkel. “If you treat acquiring the photograph as if its just something to get off your checklist – been there, done that, check – thafs what’s going to create this dismiss-this-from-memory thing.”

The experiment also revealed an important limitation of the photo-taking-impairment effect. When test participants zoomed in on an object, they remembered it as vividly as those objects they had observed (and, of course, far better than the ones they’d photographed whole). What’s more, participants even remembered details about the object that they hadn’t zoomed in on.

Henkel suspects that zooming triggered a completely different cognitive process. While the rote act of photographing a whole object led a person to dismiss it from memory, the slight uptick in focus required to zoom in on a detail caused the same person to absorb the scene as if there were no camera present at all. The brief mental climb from click to zoom-click was enough to overcome the impairment effect.

Of course, an impaired memory for photographs doesn’t have to be a bad thing at all. Looking at photographs later on does help recover memories of the moments in question, just as a quick web search helps recover information. In that sense, the transfer system is working as expected. Socrates might have frowned on shifting knowledge into documents, but no less a mind than Einstein once advised people not to memorize what they could easily look up in books.

Passage 3

Rows of moose skulls, moose antlers, and club-size moose metatarsal bones fill a clearing behind the weathered wooden cottage where biologist Rolf Peterson has spent the last 40 summers, on Isle Royale, Michigan. Hauled each year from the spruce bogs and fir forests on the Lake Superior island, the display is part of the world’s largest collection of moose bones.

The bones tell many tales—of periodontal disease and arthritis, of lean years and flush years, of two bulls that crossed antlers in a duel and died that way, racks locked. Most famously, they tell a long-running tale of predator and prey, of how wolf numbers have affected moose numbers, and vice versa. Now Peterson, John Vucetich, and their colleagues have extracted a new evolutionary tale from the bones: Living on the island downsized the moose.

The phenomenon has been found elsewhere: Mini hippos and elephants once resided on Mediterranean islands, and a hobbit-like human ancestor lived on an island in what is now Indonesia. Limited resources can account for this island rule, and that seems to have been the case for Isle Royale’s moose, says Peterson, at least for the first half of their history.

That history dates back to the early 1900s, when a few Canadian moose probably swam 20 miles of Lake Superior to the 210-square-mile island of predator-free boreal forest. They displaced the caribou, gorged on bog plants in summer and balsam fir in winter, and exploded in number, reaching several thousand in the 1920s. Their free rein ended in 1949, when a curious pair of Canadian wolves managed the same journey across a frozen lake and claimed the new territory. Ten years later, when Allen of Purdue University began studying the predator-prey interaction, the wolves were up to 20 and the moose down to 538. The two population numbers have seesawed ever since.

Peterson, who joined the project as a graduate student in 1970 and later moved to Michigan Technological University in Houghton, was teaching dissection using some moose metatarsal bones that he had collected from mainland Michigan. (The metatarsus in a moose makes up the hind leg and serves as a proxy for body size.) Peterson noticed that their size was “consistently above the average for Isle Royale moose. Then when researchers in Minnesota started collaring moose and making collections from dead animals, I saw an opportunity to collect enough moose bones to do a respectable comparison.”

Researchers measured the length of more than 1000 metatarsal bones collected on Isle Royale and found that the mean was significantly shorter than that of bones collected from nearby mainland moose, by about 9 millimeters for females and double that for males. The difference with moose bones collected from mainland Sweden and Alaska was even greater; Isle Royale moose, it seems, may be among the smallest in the world.

Shripad Tuljapurkar, a Stanford University evolutionary biologist who has worked on the evolution of phenotypic traits, calls the paper “an insightful historical analysis that provides valuable detail about evolution in a large mammalian species and marches with the general island rule.” The detail, he notes, should help in creating analytical models of size change for species with island and mainland populations.

Although the island’s limited resources have downsized the moose, ongoing research suggests that another evolutionary process has been countering that force: Wolf predation seems to be selecting for larger moose. Smaller moose are more likely to end up as wolf fare, and that preference shows up in the bone collection: The longer the metatarsus was, the older the moose was, which makes it more likely that the moose had had more offspring. And since most of the metatarsus develops in utero and is fully grown by the time the moose is one to two years old, “the pattern of increasing bone length with increasing age can’t have a physiological explanation,” says Vucetich.

That leaves the role of the wolves, which creates another evolutionary tale. “Darwin was keen that predators shape the lives of their prey,” says Vucetich. What is distinctive, he notes, is the wolves’ effect on the body size of a large, long-lived vertebrate and during a relatively short period. “Even though it’s 50 years, it’s very brief in evolutionary time.”

Passage 4

Passage 1 is adapted from Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique. 1963 by Betty Friedan. Passage 2 is adapted from the Statement of Purpose and the Bill of Rights of the National Organization for Women (NOW), adopted at NOW’s first national conference in 1966.

Passage 1

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night–she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question–“Is this all?”

For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire–no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him …. how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights—the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.

Passage 2

Statement of Purpose
We, men and women who hereby constitute ourselves as the National Organization for Women, believe that the time has come for a new movement toward true equality for all women in America, and toward a fully equal partnership of the sexes, as part of the world-wide revolution of human rights now taking place within and beyond our national borders—.

We reject the current assumptions that a man must carry the sole burden of supporting himself, his wife, and family, and that a woman is automatically entitled to lifelong support by a man upon her marriage, or that marriage, home and family are primarily woman’s world and responsibility — hers, to dominate — his to support. We believe that a true partnership between the sexes demands a different concept of marriage, an equitable sharing of the responsibilities of home and children and of the economic burdens of their support—.

In the interests of the human dignity of women, we will protest, and endeavor to change, the false image of women now prevalent in the mass media, and in the texts, ceremonies, laws, and practices of our major social institutions. Such images perpetuate contempt for women by society and by women for themselves—.

We believe that women will do most to create a new image of women by acting now, and by speaking out in behalf of their own equality, freedom, and human dignity – not in pleas for special privilege, nor in enmity toward men, who are also victims of the current, half-equality between the sexes — but in an active, self-respecting partnership with men.

We Demand:
That the U.S. Congress immediately pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to provide that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex” and then such then be immediately ratified by the several states.

Passage 5

This passage is adapted from Fenella Saunders, “Copper Heal Thyself.” 2010 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society.

A single particle, such as an atom or a neutron, when fired into a piece of copper, causes a fountainlike cascade of disturbance, knocking countless copper atoms out of their positions in the metal’s crystalline structure. A few trillionths of a second later, most of the atoms settle back into the crystal’s lineup, but a handful are permanently displaced, misaligned and unable to fit back in anywhere. If that material is in an environment with radiation, such as part of a nuclear reactor, over time those wayward atoms migrate and build up on the part’s surface, leaving behind voids that can make the material brittle. “After irradiation the size can increase up to 10 percent because of the atoms moving to the surface,” says Blas Uberuaga, a materials scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “And that’s bad because if you make parts that all fit together, and then they swell, nothing fits together like it’s designed to.”

With the development of new fusion and fission reactors, researchers are looking for more radiation-resistant construction materials. It’s known that materials with a nanocrystalline structure often resist radiation damage better than regular, “bulk” versions of the same compounds. In the former, the material is made up of tiny grains, each one of which is a single crystal. When the grains are agglomerated, their crystal lattices don’t line up, so there are boundaries between the grains. Such grain boundaries are undesirable in some applications, such as in electronics, where they impede electron flow, but they are known to make substances stronger as well as more resistant to radiation damage. However, until recently the complete mechanism behind this radiation resiliency was not well understood on the atomic scale.

As Uberuaga, Xian-Ming Bai and their colleagues reported recently, the group performed computer simulations of nanocrystalline copper undergoing radiation damage to figure out what happens inside the metal. The loose atoms, a type of defect known as interstitials, are attracted to the grain boundaries because there’s a little more room there than in the rest of the crystal. “Conventionally it has been assumed that once a defect gets to a boundary it just disappears, it gets very quickly to the surface or something like that,” says Uberuaga. However, their simulations found something new, as Bai explains: “We found that some of the absorbed interstitials at the grain boundary can come out to annihilate vacancies. So this is a new mechanism behind the self-healing phenomenon.”

Rather than just acting as a transport route to the surface, the grain boundaries seem to be a temporary sink for the loose atoms. The vacancies diffuse through the material much more slowly than the interstitials. But in a nanocrystal material, the chances are good that a grain boundary is relatively nearby, which can hold the atom until it finds a vacancy. “If the interstitials just got swept away somewhere else, that healing would not be able to occur. So that local trapping is crucial,” says Uberuaga.

In addition, the large number of grain boundaries in nanocrystalline materials gives the vacancies a shorter finish line for their catch-up race. “The vacancies don’t have to diffuse all the way to the boundary. There’s this extra zone in our simulation of about a nanometer or so where the interstitials can come out and directly zap the vacancies,” says Uberuaga.

Bai and Uberuaga suspect that the self-healing mechanism they’ve found will work with certain other metals and ceramics, and could reopen the consideration of whole classes of structural materials thought not to be sufficiently radiation resistant for use in reactors. Radiation does tend to make the crystal grain size grow over time in some metals such as copper, but using an alloy of two materials that don’t mix, and therefore can’t create larger crystals, could solve that problem. A bigger roadblock may be that nanocrystalline materials are not yet mass-produced. “There are a number of challenges like that before any kind of reactor material is really designed from the nanoscale,” says Uberuaga. “But these results give some insight into what kind of interfaces you might need to get some benefit in nuclear environments, both for fission and fusion reactors.

2017年 12月 (北美) SAT 考试阅读题目

Ivy-Way 学生在上课的过程就会做到2017年4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！

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