2017 5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 5 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 5 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 5 月 (北美) SAT 考试阅读文章

PASSAGE 1

One night in the summer of 1985, while visiting New York, I went out to see the Mets play the Astros, and while circling the stadium with my friends, looking for the gate to our seats, I saw the Swede, Thirty-six years older than when I’d watched him play baseball for Upsala. He wore a white shirt, a striped tie, and a charcoal-gray summer suit, and he was still terrifically handsome. The golden hair was a shade or two darker but not any thinner; no longer was it cut short but fell rather fully over his ears and down to his collar. In this suit that fit him so exquisitely he seemed even taller and leaner than I remembered him in the uniform of one sport or another. The woman with us noticed him first. “Who is that? That’s—that’s… Is that Mayor Lindsay?” she asked. “No,” I said. “My God. You know who that is? It’s Swede Levov.” I told my friends, “That’s the Swede!”

A skinny, fair-haired boy of about seven or eight was walking alongside the Swede, a kid under a Mets cap pounding away at a first basemen’s mitt that dangled, as had the Swede’s, from his left hand. The two, clearly a father and his son, were laughing about something together when I approached and introduced myself. “I knew your brother at Weequahic.”

“You’re Zuckerman?” he replied, vigorously shaking my hand. “The author?”

“I’m Zuckerman the author.”

“Sure, you were Jerry’s great pal.” “I don’t think Jerry had great pals. He was too brilliant for pals. He just used to beat my pants off at Ping-Pong down in your basement. Beating me at Ping-Pong was very important to Jerry.”

“So you’re the guy. My mother says, ‘And he was such a nice, quiet child when he came to the house.’ You know who this is?” the Swede said to the boy. “The guy who wrote those books. Nathan Zuckerman.”

Mystified, the boy shrugged and muttered, “Hi” “This is my son Chris.”

‘These are friends,” I said, sweeping an arm out to introduce the three people with me. “And this man.” I said to them, “is the greatest athlete in the history Weequahic High. A real artist in three sports. Played first base like Hernandez’—thinking. A line -drive doubles hitter. Do you know that?” I said to his son “Your dad was our Hernandez.”

“Hernandez is left-handed” he replied.

“Well, that’s the only difference,” I said to the little literalist, and put out my hand again to his father. “Nice to see you, Swede.”

“You bet. Take it easy, Skip.”

“Remember me to your brother,” 1 said.

He laughed, we parted, and someone was saying to me, “Well, well, the greatest athlete in the history of Weequahic High called you ‘Skip.'”

“I know, I can’t believe it,” And I did feel almost as wonderfully singled out as I had the one time before, at the age of ten, when the Swede had got so personal as to recognize me by the playground nickname I’d acquired because of two grades I skipped in grade school.

Midway through the first inning, the woman with us turned to me and said, “You should have seen your face-you might as well have told us he was Zeus.’ I saw just what you looked like as a boy.”

PASSAGE 2

This passages adapted from A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. Originally published in 1799 under the pseudonym Anne Frances Randall.

Woman is destined to pursue no path in which she does not find an enemy. If she is liberal, generous careless of wealth, friendly to the unfortunate, and bountiful to persecuted merit, she is deemed prodigal, and over much profuse, all the good she docs, every tear she steals from the downcast eye of modest worth, every sigh she converts into a throb of joy, in grateful bosoms, is, by the world, forgotten ; while the ingenuous liberality of her soul excites the imputation of folly and extravagance. If, on the contrary, she is wary, shrewd, thrifty, economical, and eager to procure and to preserve the advantages of independence; she is condemned as narrow-minded, mean, unfeeling, artful, mercenary, and base: in either case she is exposed to censure. If liberal, unpitied; if sordid, execrated! In a few words, a generous woman is termed a fool; a prudent one, a prodigal.

If WOMAN is not permitted to assert a majesty of mind, why fatigue her faculties with the labours of any species of education? Why give her books, if she is not to profit by the wisdom they inculcate? The parent, or the preceptress, who enlightened her understanding, like the dark lantern, to spread its rays internally only, puts into her grasp a weapon of defence against the perils of existence; and at the same moment commands her not to use it. Man says you may read, and you will think, but you shall not evince your knowledge, or employ your thoughts, beyond the boundaries which we have set up around you. Then wherefore burthen the young mind with a gaudy outline which man darkens with shades indelible? Why expand the female heart, merely to render it more conscious that it is, by the tyranny of custom, rendered vulnerable? Let man remember, that

“A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

Let him not hope for a luxurious mental harvest, where the sun of cultivation is obscured by impenetrable prejudice; that cloud which has too long spread over the mind of woman a desolating darkness. So situated, woman is taught to discriminate just sufficiently to know her own unhappiness. She, like Tantalus, is placed in a situation where the intellectual blessing she sighs for is within her view; but she is not permitted to attain it: she is conscious of possessing equally strong mental powers; but she is obliged to yield, as the weaker creature. Man says, “you shall be initiated in all the arts of pleasing; but you shall, in vain, hope that we will contribute to your happiness one iota beyond the principle which constitutes our own.” Sensual Egotists! Woman is absolutely necessary to your felicity; nay, even to your existence: yet she must not arrogate to herself the power to interest your actions. You idolize her personal attractions, as long as they influence your senses; when they begin to pall, the magick is dissolved; and prejudice is ever eager to condemn what passion has degraded….

Supposing women were to act upon the same principle of egotism, consulting their own inclinations, interest, and amusement only,(and there is no law of Nature which forbids them; none of any species but that which is framed by man;) what would be the consequences? The annihilation of all moral and religious order. So that every good which cements the bonds of civilized society, originates wholly in the forbearance, and conscientiousness of woman.

Passage 3

When exoplanet hunters announced in January of 2014 that they had found a tribe of “mini-Neptunes” and the lightest planet ever detected outside our solar system, they highlighted more than just the diversity of exoplanets. The results, announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, also show the power of an up-and-coming method of calculating the masses of alien worlds from the way they eclipse their stars.

The new technique, called transit timing variation (TTV), is enabling astronomers to fill out their picture of dozens of exoplanets detected by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. The eclipses, or “transits,” that Kepler detected reveal only a planet’s size and orbital period. To know whether it is rocky, gaseous, or some mixture of the two, astronomers also need its mass. Traditionally, they have resorted to ground-based telescopes to determine it, by measuring the wobble of the star as the planet tugs on it. But TTY can determine masses from transit data alone.

The technique was the brainchild of Matthew Holman, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, and others. If two or more planets happened to be orbiting a star in close proximity, they reasoned, their gravitational tugs on each other would alter their orbital periods. If one of them was a transiting planet—dimming the light of its parent star as it passed between the star and Earth—astronomers would see its transit timing vary over multiple orbits, betraying the presence of a companion planet. If both planets were transiting, astronomers could measure the perturbations in both their orbits and work out the planets’ masses.

Holman and a colleague published the idea in 2005, and Eric Agol of the University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues put forward a similar scheme almost simultaneously. For years afterward, however, astronomers failed to detect transit timing variations because almost all known exoplanets were gas giants spinning around their stars in tight orbits. Theorists think such planets formed farther from the star and later barreled inward, clearing away any potential wobble-inducing companions.

The technique became practical thanks to the Kepler spacecraft, which until 2013 was monitoring the brightness of 160,000 nearby stars for the telltale dimming due to transiting planets. Kepler began delivering data on dozens of planetary systems, many of them consisting of multiple planets. In 2010, astronomers began making TTV detections. Their expertise has been growing ever since.

David Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues came across K01-314c while combing Kepler data for TTV signatures due to exomoons, which should cause transiting exoplanets to wobble and change their transit timing. But the transits seen around the star K01-314, a red dwarf some 200 light-years from Earth, pointed instead to the presence of two planets. Their transit times were varying in lockstep: when one planet slowed down in its orbit around the star, the other would speed up, and vice versa. “We saw the same TTV signature, just in opposite phase to each other,” Kipping says. “It was obvious that these two planets must be interacting.”

By simulating the dance on a computer, the researchers worked out the masses of the two planets. They found that the outer, K01-314c, which orbits the star every 23 days, has the same mass as Earth, although it is about 60% larger than Earth in radius. Kipping and his colleagues infer that the planet—the lightest exoplanet so far discovered—has a rocky core and a thick, gaseous atmosphere. The inner planet, K01-314c, is similar in size but about four times as massive.

Meanwhile, researchers led by Yoram Lithwick, an astronomer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, were looking at the TTV signatures of 163 exoplanets found by Kepler. The team determined that about 60 of them occupy a mass range between Earth and Neptune and are larger than expected for a rocky planet of that mass, suggesting they are blanketed by thick, extended atmospheres. They also found a pattem as the planets grew bigger in radius, their density declined.”If you make something twice as big, it becomes four times less dense,” Lithwick says. “So from going from a less than two Earth radii to four Earth radii, the density goes from rock-like all the way to gas.” Lithwick predicts the surprising finding “will have big implications for understanding planet formation.”

Passage 4

This passage is adapted from Michael Baiter, “Farming Conquered Europe at Least Twice.” C2011 by American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The rise of agriculture in the Middle East, nearly 11,000 years ago, was a momentous event in human prehistory. But just how farming spread from there into Europe has been a matter of intense research. A new study of ancient DNA from 5,000-year-old skeletons found in a French cave suggests that early farmers entered the European continent by at least two different routes and reveals new details about the social structures and dairying practices of some of their societies.

Scientists studying the spread of farming into Europe have numerous questions : Was agriculture brought in primarily by Middle Eastern farmers who replaced the resident hunter-gatherers? Or did agriculture advance through the spread of technology and ideas rather than people? And was there just one wave of farming into the continent or multiple waves and routes?

Until recently, researchers had to rely on the genetic profiles of modern-day Europeans and Middle Easterners for clues. Numerous such studies, especially of Y chromosomes, which are transmitted via the paternal line, suggest that actual farmers, not just their ideas, spread westward over the millennia, eventually reaching the British Isles. Yet other studies, based on mitochondria! DNA (mtDNA), which is inherited maternally, have come to the opposite conclusion, suggesting that farmers had local European ancestry.

In recent years, studies have begun to resolve these issues by sequencing the DNA of the prehistoric farmers themselves. Some of this research, most notably in Germany, suggests that male farmers entering central Europe mated with local female hunter-gatherers—thus possibly resolving the contradiction between the Y chromosome and mtDNA results.

The new study backs up that idea. A team led by molecular anthropologist Marie Lacan reports work on ancient DNA — both mitochondria! and Y-chromosomal—from more than two dozen skeletons found in the 1930s in a cave called Treilles in southern France. Archaeologists think Treilles is a communal grave site because the bones add up to 149 individuals. The team took DNA in such a way as to ensure that each individual was sampled only once (using teeth that were still attached to a lower jaw) and was able to obtain ancient DNA from 29 people.

The team found that the female and male lineages seemed to have different origins. The mtDNA showed genetic markers previously identified as having deep roots in ancient European hunter-gatherer populations, but the Y chromosomes showed the closest affinities to Europeans currently living along the Mediterranean regions of southern Europe, such as Turkey, Cyprus, Portugal, and Italy. The team concludes that, in addition to the spread of farming into central Europe suggested by the German studies, there appears to have been at least one additional route via southern Europe.

The communal grave also yielded additional intriguing details about these ancient Europeans. Most of the skeletons were males, and many appeared to be very closely related: At least two pairs of individuals were almost certainly father and son, and another pair were brothers. That suggests that the incoming male farmers established a so-called patrilocal society, in which the men stay put on their land but mate with women who come in from surrounding regions, the team concludes.

The study also showed that, in contrast to ancient DNA findings from central Europe, the people from Treilles lacked a key genetic variant that allows the body to digest lactose [a type of sugar found in milk] into adulthood. That’s consistent with other archaeological evidence that central European farmers herded dairy cows, whereas Mediterranean farmers herded sheep and goats and drank fermented milk, which has much lower lactose levels.

Passage 5

Passage 1 is adapted from Dana Blumenthal, “Interrelated Causes of Plant Invasion.” ©2005 by American Association for the Advancement of Science. Passage 2 relates to the information and ideas discussed in Passage 1.

Passage 1

An occasional stem of leafy spurge in the prairie would not threaten native species. Nor would it bother ranchers. But the millions of hectares of this Eurasian species that inhabit western North America have displaced native plant species and reduced forage for both wild and domestic animals, costing hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The problems caused by such invasive species are the direct result of their success in colonizing new habitats, and understanding why they are so successful is essential to controlling their spread. Although there are many competing ideas to explain invasion, it is possible that two of the most important are interrelated: The plant species that benefit the most from high resource availability may also gain the most from escaping enemies upon moving to a new range.

Due to the enormous variety of invasive plants, attempts to explain invasion have led to an array of partially overlapping hypotheses. Hypotheses explaining the exceptional success of exotic species are based upon ways in which a species’ new range differs from its native range: fewer insects and diseases, less competitive environments, and competitors that are more susceptible to chemicals produced by the invader. Hypotheses explaining colonization in general, irrespective of whether the colonizing species are native or exotic, rely on characteristics of the colonizer or the colonized plant community. For example, fast-growing species with high seed production make good colonizers. Plant communities with lots of disturbance, high resource availability, or reduced species diversity tend to be easily colonized.

Of primary interest are two mechanisms of invasion that are particularly well supported by existing studies of plant invasions: release from natural enemies and increased resource availability. The enemy release hypothesis attributes the success of exotic species to their escape from diseases and herbivores upon moving to a new range. This gives them an advantage when competing with native species still burdened by enemies. Not only are enemies missing in exotic species’ new ranges, but the absence of enemies is correlated with invasiveness. Enemy release provides the greatest benefit to exotic species that are highly susceptible enemies in their native range.

The resource hypothesis suggests that plant invasion is caused by availability of resources such light, water, and soil nutrients. Resources become available when resource supply increases, as with atmospheric nitrogen deposition, or when resource capture by other plants decreases, as with disturbances such as fire or plowing. High resource availability benefits fast-growing native or exotic species.

Passage 2

Erodium cicutarium, an invasive species commonly known as pinweed, has been slowly replacing the native species Erodium texanum, or heronbill, in North America’s Sonoran Desert. Biologist Sarah Kimball conducted a series of experiments to understand how pinweed plants are overtaking heronbill plants.

At the beginning of a growing season, Kimball located a region of the desert in which both pinweed and heronbill had established growth. She divided the region into sixteen control plots and sixteen experimental plots. The experimental plots were sprayed weekly with insecticides to eliminate insect that feed on plants, while control plots were left unsprayed. At the end of the growing season, Kimball determined, for each plot, the number of each species of plant, the number of fruits on each plant, and the mass of each plant. The results were not significantly different between the control and experimental plots, indicating that insects were not a determining factor in pinweed’s mechanism of invasion.

Additional studies by Kimball in the same region measured the growth rates of the two plant species during two growing seasons. She found that the growth rates of the two species were nearly the same in the season (2007-2008) with close to average annual rainfall but that the invasive pinweed plants exhibited a greater growth rate than did the native heronbill plants in the season (2004-2005) when there was much more rainfall than in a typical year. She also found that the invasive plants lost less water each day through the pores in their leaves than the native plants did regardless of the growing season. This water conservation along with the higher growth rate when water is abundant seems to account for the invasive plants’ ability to outcompete the native plants.

2017年 5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5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)