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过去这个周末学生考了 2017 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 2017 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 2017 年 3 月 (北美) SAT 考试阅读文章
PASSAGE 1
The passage is from Ian McEwan, Atonement ©2001 by Ian McEwan
She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. Whereas her big sister’s room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes,unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Briony’s was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model farm spread across a deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way–towards their owner–as if about to break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled. In fact,Briony’s was the only tidy upstairs room in the house. Her straight-backed dolls in their many-roomed mansion appeared to be under strict instructions not to touch the walls; the various thumb-sized figures to be found standing about her dressing table–cowboys, deep-sea divers, humanoid mice— suggested by their even ranks and spacing a citizen’s army awaitingorders.
A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for secrets: in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. Ina toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool’s gold, a rain-making spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel’s skull as light as a leaf.
But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.
None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found. At the age of eleven she wrote her first story—a foolish affair, imitative of half a dozen folk tales and lacking, she realized later, that vital knowingness about the ways of the world which compels a reader’s respect. But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character’s weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? Only when a story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world, could she feel immune, and ready to punch holes in the margins, bind the chapters with pieces of string, paint or draw the cover, and take the finished work to show to her mother, or her father, when he was home.
PASSAGE 2
The passage is adapted from David Disalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite. 0 2011 by David DiSalvo
Whether in person or on screen, one of the strongest influences on our thinking is woven into the verbiage all of us use in discussions big and small: metaphors. Let’s say that we are comparing cities we have visited or would like to visit, and I mention one that I have not been to, but you have. You say, “It’s a massive, stinking cesspool filled with garbage and crawling with every form of filth imaginable.Immediately my mind conjures an image of a filthy retention pond covered with scum, loaded with trash and lousy with rats and roaches. How close the metaphor you have chosen is to actually describing the city is debatable, but in the few minutes we are speaking this doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you have provided the metaphorical rudiments for me to construct an image that is now schematically associated with the city in my mind. One day I may visit that city and determine that your metaphor was inaccurate, or I may conclude that it was dead-on. Until then- or until I come across information that contradicts or verifies your description, the image will be there. And even after, I’ll find removing that image from my mind very difficult.
That is the power of metaphor- a power so subtle we barely notice how much it impacts our thinking. Researchers Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky from Stanford University demonstrated how influential metaphors can be through a series of five experiments designed to tease apart the “why” and “when” of a metaphor’s power. First, the researchers asked 482 students to read one of two reports about crime in the city of Addison. Later they had to suggest solutions for the problem.
In the firstreport, crime was described as a “wild beast preying on the city” and “lurking in neighborhoods.”After reading these words, 75 percent of the students put forward solutions that involved enforcement or punishment, such as building more jails or even calling in the military for help. Only 25 percent suggested social reforms, such as fixing the economy, improving education, or providing better healthcare.
The second report was exactly the same except it described crime as a “virus infecting the city” and “plaguing” communities. After reading this version, only 56 percent opted for greater law enforcement while 44 percent suggested social reforms.
Interestingly, very few of the participants realized how affected they were by the differing crime metaphors. When Thibodeau and Boroditsky asked the participants to identify which parts of the text had most influenced their decisions, the vast majority pointed to the crime statistics, not the language. Only 3 percent identified the metaphors as culprits. The researchers confirmed their results with more experiments that use the same reports without as many vivid words. Even though these reports described crime as a beast or virus only once, the researchers found the same trend as before.
They also discovered that the words themselves do notwield much influence without the right context. When Thibodeau and Boroditsky asked participants to come up with synonyms for either “beast” or “virus” before reading crime reports that omitted the metaphors entirely, the participants provided similar solutions for solving the city’s problems. In other words, the metaphors only worked if they framed the story.
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from Erik Stokstad, “Bone Study Shows T. Rex Bulked Up with Massive Growth Spurt” ©2004 by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Tyrannosaurus rex was a creature of superlatives. As big as a bull elephant, T. rex weighed 15 times as much as the largest carnivores living on land today. Now, paleontologists have for the first time charted the colossal growth spurt that carried T. rex beyond its tyrannosaurid relatives.
Growth rates have been studied in only a half-dozen dinosaurs and no large carnivores. That’s because the usual method of telling ages—counting annual growth rings in the leg bone—is a tricky task with tyrannosaurids. “I was told when I started in this field that it was impossible to age T. rex,” recalls Gregory Erickson, a paleobiologist at Florida State University, who led the study. The reason is that the weight-bearing bones of large dinosaurs become hollow with age and the internal tissue tends to get remodeled, thus erasing growth lines.
But leg bones aren’t the only place to check age. While studying a tyrannosaurid called Daspletosaurus at the Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH) in Chicago, Erickson noticed growth rings on the end of a broken rib. Looking around, he found similar rings on hundreds of other 25 bone fragments in the museum drawers, including the fibula, gastralia, and the pubis. These bones don’t bear substantial loads, so they hadn’t been remodeled or hollowed out. Switching to modern alligators, crocodiles, and 30 lizards, Erickson found that the growth rings accurately recorded the animals’ ages. He and his colleagues then sampled more than 60 bones from 20 specimens of four closely related tyrannosaurids. Counting the growth rings with a microscope, the team found that the tyrannosaurids had died at ages ranging from 2 years to 28.
By plotting the age of each animal against its mass—conservatively estimated from the circumference of its femur—they constructed growth curves for each species. Gorgosaurus and Albertosaurus, both more primitive tyrannosaurids, began to put on weight more rapidly at about age 12. For 4 years or so, they added 310 to 480 grams per day.
By about age 15, they were full-grown at about 1100 kilograms. The more advanced Daspletosaurus followed the same trend but grew faster and maxed out at roughly 1800 kilograms.
T. rex, in comparison, was almost off the chart. As the team describes this week in Nature, it underwent a gigantic growth spurt starting at age 14 and packed on 2 kilograms a day. By age 18.5 years, the heaviest of the lot weighed more than 5600 kilograms. Jack Homer of the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, and Kevin Padian of the University of California, Berkeley, have found the same growth pattern in other specimens of T. rex.
It makes sense that T.rex would grow this way, experts say. Several lines of evidence suggest that dinosaurs had a higher metabolism and faster growth rates than living reptiles do (although not as fast as birds’). Previous work by Erickson showed that young dinosaurs stepped up the pace of growth, then tapered off into adulthood; reptiles, in contrast, grow more slowly, but they keep at it for longer.
Being able to age the animals will help shed light on the population structure of tyrannosaurids. For instance, the researchers determined the ages of more than halfa dozen Albertosaurs that apparently died together. They ranged in age from 2 to 20 in what might have been a pack. “You’ve got really young living with the really old,” Erickson says. “These things probably weren’t loners.
The technique could also help researchers interpret the medical history of individuals. Growth rings might reveal at what age various types of injuries occurred. And because a variety of scrap bones can be analyzed for growth rings, more individuals can be examined.
Logistics Growth Curves for Tyrannosaurus and Three Related Tyrannosaurids
Adapted from Gregory M. Erickson. et al. “Gigantism and Comparative Life History Parameters of Tyrannosaurid Dinosaurs”
Passage 4
This passage is adapted from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Politics”. Originally published in 1844.
Every man’s nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows. My right and my wrong, is their right and their wrong. Whilst I do what is fit for me, and abstain from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree in our means, and work together for a time to one end.
But whenever I find my dominion over myself not sufficient for me, and undertake the direction of him also, I overstep the truth, and come into false relations to him. I may have so much more skill or strength than he, that he cannot express adequately his sense of wrong, but it is alie, and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and nature cannot maintain the assumption: it must be executed by a practical lie, namely, by force. This undertaking for another, is the blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of the world. It is the same thing in numbers, as in a pair,only not quite so intelligible. I can see well enough a great difference between my setting myself down to a self-control, and my going to make somebody else act after my views: but when a quarter of the human race assume to tell me what I must do, I may be too much disturbed by the circumstances to see so clearly the absurdity of their command. Therefore, all public ends look vague and quixotic beside private ones. For, any laws but those which men make for themselves, are laughable. If I put myself in the place of my child, and we stand in one thought, and see that things are thus or thus, that perception is law for him and me. We are both there, both act. But if, without carrying him into the thought, I look over into his plot, and, guessing how it is with him, ordain this or that, he will never obey me. This is the history of governments, — one man does something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me, ordains that a part of my labor shall go to this or that whimsical end, not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts, men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think they get their money’s worth, except for these.
Hence, the less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all things tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king.
To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy, — he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favorable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him, needs not husband and educate a few, to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers.
We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy. As a political power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected.
Passage 5
Passage 1 is adapted from “A Warm Little Pond?” 02013 by The Economist Newspaper Limited. Passage 2 is adapted from Stuart Clark, “Fire & Ice: What Really Happened to Water on Mars.- ©2008 by Reed Business Information, Ltd.
Passage 1
Soon after it formed about 4.5 billion years ago, liquid water seems to have flowed over the surface of the planet. Its climate may also have been warmer than it is today, courtesy of an atmosphere much thicker than its wispy modern counterpart. But what the Curiosity rover [which landed on Mars in 2012] has done is to suggest that all the ingredients for life were present in one specific place, and for a reasonably long stretch of time.
That place is what appears to be part of a dried-up lake bed called Yellowknife Bay just south of the Martian equator. Analysis by Curiosity revealed the presence of mudstone, a type of rock formed by fine grains of sediment settling out of a column of calm, still water. The surrounding geology supports that hypothesis, with evidence of ancient river channels that lead into a lake which would have been about 50km (30 miles) long and 5km wide.
Chemical analysis of Yellowknife Bay’s rocks bolsters the researchers’ case. The six elements held by biologists to be fundamental to Earthlike life—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulphur, nitrogen and phosphorous—are all present. Better still, the rocks suggest the ancient lake was neither too acidic, nor too alkaline, nor too salty.
And it may have persisted for quite some time. By measuring the thickness of the strata, and making some educated estimates about how quickly they might have formed, John Grotzinger and his colleagues reckon the lake could have endured for anything from centuries to millennia. Add in a little plausible speculation—specifically, that there may be more sedimentary rocks buried beyond Curiosity’s reach, or that other rocks may have eroded over the course of time—and the lake’s possible lifespan rises to tens of millions of years. The surface may not have been wet for all of that period, notes Dr Grotzinger, but groundwater could have persisted even when the surface was temporarily dry.
Passage 2
According to the conventional view, from soon after its formation about 4.5 billion years ago until 2 to 2.5 billion years ago, Mars was a watery world like Earth, with luxuriant seas, perhaps even an ocean, that might have supported life. These large bodies of water were gradually lost through climate change, caused by a decline in volcanic activity and the whittling away of the planet’s atmosphere by radiation from the Sun. Some water remained frozen in the polar caps, but most drained downwards into the rocks and froze.
While there can be no mistaking that water did exist on Mars in large quantities, as new information from Mars’s many probes and landers comes in, it is looking increasing likely that this simple tale isn’t true. Instead, the “warm, wet phase” of Mars, when life might have originated, was actually quite short-lived, lasting less than a billion years, and was followed by a series of extreme conditions unlike any experienced on Earth.
If this is true, Mars’s reputation as a once-habitable planet that may still harbor microscopic life is at stake. A billion years might well have been long enough for life to emerge, but the speed with which those conditions vanished would have made it much more difficult for that early life to truly establish itself.
The main evidence for this new view of Mars comes from recent observations of the planet’s surface. Gerhard Neukum used images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express probe [which reached its working orbit in 2004] to date the Martian surface, using the number of craters present as a yardstick. Since planets were most severely bombarded early in the formation of the solar system, and since lava from Mars’s volcanoes can cover evidence of bombardment. Neukum assumed that areas with fewer craters are younger.
Neukum’s analysis found no evidence to support the conventional view that Mars lost its water once, very slowly over billions of years. Instead, it seemed that the water disappeared within a billion years of the planet’s formation and then reappeared five times following major volcanic upheavals. The earliest of these mega-eruptions took place 3.5 billion years ago, with repeat performances 1.5 billion, 800 million, 200 million, and 100 million years ago.
During these episodes, major releases of lava partially resurfaced the planet. This sudden outpouring of internal heat thawed frozen reserves of underground water and drove it upwards to the surface. These events may not have lasted more than a few tens of thousands of years but they left ample evidence of water on the surface of the planet in the form of outflows channels, river beds, and even shorelines.
2017年 3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！
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