2017 11月 SAT (美國/北美版) 考題回顧:所有 5 篇閱讀文章!

Also in: 简中 (简中)

過去這個週末學生考了 2017 年 11 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 2017 年 11 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 2017 年 11 月 (北美) SAT 考試閱讀文章

PASSAGE 1

This passage is adapted from George Eliot, Middlemarch. Originally published in 1871. Dorothea and her husband. Mr. Casaubon, a middle-aged scholar, are on their honeymoon in Rome. Will Ladislaw an artist, is Casaubon’s cousin.

“Yes,” said Dorothea, without pause; “show him into the salon. ” Her chief impressions about young Ladislaw were that when she had seen him at Lowick she had been made aware of Mr. Casaubon’s generosity towards him, and also that she had been interested in his own hesitation about his career. She was alive to anything that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy, and at this moment it seemed as if the visit had come to shake her out of her self-absorbed discontent—to remind her of her husband’s goodness, and make her feel that she had now the right to be his helpmate in all kind deeds. She waited a minute or two, but when she passed into the next room there were just signs enough that she had been crying to make her open face look more youthful and appealing than usual. She met Ladislaw with that exquisite smile of goodwill which is unmixed with vanity, and held out her hand to him. He was the elder by several years, but at that moment he looked much the younger, for his transparent complexion flushed suddenly, and he spoke with a shyness extremely unlike the ready indifference of his manner with his male companion at the museum, while Dorothea became all the calmer with a wondering desire to put him at ease.

“I was not aware that you and Mr. Casaubon were in Rome, until this morning, when I saw you in the Vatican Museum, “he said.” I knew you at once—but—I mean, that I concluded Mr. Casaubon’s address would be found at the Poste Restante, and I was anxious to pay my respects to him and you as early as possible.

“Pray sit down. He is not here now, but he will be glad to hear of you, I am sure, “said Dorothea, seating herself unthinkingly between the fire and the light of the tall window, and pointing to a chair opposite, with the quietude of a benignant matron. The signs of girlish sorrow in her face were only the more striking. “Mr. Casaubon is much engaged; but you will leave your address—will you not?—and he will write to you.”

“You are very good,” said Ladislaw, beginning to lose his diffidence in the interest with which he was observing the signs of weeping which had altered her face. “My address is on my card. But if you will allow me I will call again to-morrow at an hour when Mr. Casaubon is likely to be at home.” “He goes to read in the Library of the Vatican every day, and you can hardly see him except by an appointment. Especially now. We are about to leave Rome, and he is very busy. He is usually away almost from breakfast till dinner. But I am sure he will wish you to dine with us.” Will Ladislaw was struck mute for a few moments. He had never been fond of Mr. Casaubon, and if it had not been for the sense of obligation, would have laughed at him as a Bat of erudition. But the idea of this dried-up pedant, this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor’s back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust: he was divided between the impulse to laugh aloud and the equally unseasonable impulse to burst into scornful invective. For an instant he felt that the struggle was causing a queer contortion of his mobile features, but with a good effort he resolved it into nothing more offensive than a merry smile.

Dorothea wondered; but the smile was irresistible, and shone back from her face too. Will Ladislaw’s smile was delightful, unless you were angry with him beforehand it was a gush of inward light illuminating the transparent skin as well as the eyes, and playing about every curve and line as if some Ariel were touching them with a new charm, and banishing for ever the traces of moodiness. The reflection of that smile could not but have a little merriment in it too. even under dark eyelashes still moist, as Dorothea said inquiringly, “Something amuses you?”

“Yes. “said Will, quick in finding resources.

PASSAGE 2

Passage 1 is adapted from Shirley Chisholm, “Address to the United States House of Representatives, 21 May 1969.” Passage 2 is adapted from Phyllis Schlafly, What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women? 01972 by Phyllis Schlafly. The Equal Rights Amendment was a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution intended to prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender. Chisholm was a member of Congress when she made her address.

Passage 1

More than half of the population of the United States is female. But women occupy only 2 percent of the managerial positions. They have not even reached the level of tokenism yet. No women sit on the AFL-CIO council or Supreme Court. There have been only two women who have held Cabinet rank, and at present there are none. Only two women now hold ambassadorial rank in the diplomatic corps. In Congress, we are down to one Senator and 10 Representatives.

Considering that there are about 3 1/2 million more women in the United States than men, this situation is outrageous….

It is for this reason that I wish to introduce today a proposal that has been before every Congress for the last 40 years and that sooner or later must become part of the basic law of the land—the equal rights amendment.

Let me note and try to refute two of the commonest arguments that are offered against this amendment. One is that women are already protected under the law and do not need legislation. Existing laws are not adequate to secure equal rights for women. Sufficient proof of this is the concentration of women in lower paying, menial, unrewarding jobs and their incredible scarcity in the upper level jobs. If women are already equal, why is it such an event whenever one happens to be elected to Congress?…

A second argument often heard against the equal rights amendment is that it would eliminate legislation that many States and the Federal Government have enacted giving special protection to women and that it would throw the marriage and divorce laws into chaos.

As for the marriage laws, they are due for a sweeping reform, and an excellent beginning would

be to wipe the existing ones off the books. Regarding special protection for working women, I cannot understand why it should be needed. Women need no protection that men do not need. What we need are laws to protect working people to guarantee them fair pay. safe working conditions. protection against sickness and layoffs, and provision for dignified, comfortable retirement. Men and women need these things equally. That one sex needs protection more than the other is a male supremacist myth as ridiculous and unworthy of respect as the white supremacist myths that society is trying to cute itself of at this time.

Passage 2

In the last couple of years, a noisy movement has sprung up agitating for “women’s rights.” Suddenly everywhere we are afflicted aggressive females on television talk shows yapping about how mistreated American women are, suggesting that marriage has put us in some kind of “slavery, “that housework is menial and degrading, and—perish the thought—that women are discriminated against. New “women’s liberation” organizations are popping up, agitating and demonstrating, serving demands on public officials, getting wide press coverage always, and purporting to speak for some 100,000,000 American women.

It’s time to set the record straight. The claim American women are downtrodden and unfairly treated is the fraud of the century. The truth is that American women never had it so good. Why should we lower ourselves to “equal rights” when we already have the status of special privilege?

The proposed Equal Rights Amendment states 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,” So what’s wrong with that? Well, here are a few examples of what’s wrong with it. This Amendment will absolutely and positively make women subject to the draft. Why any woman would support such a ridiculous and un-American as this is beyond comprehension….

Another bad effect of the Equal Rights Amendment is that it will abolish a woman’ right to child support and alimony, and substitute what the women’s libbers think is a more “equal” policy, that “such decisions should be within the discretion of Court and should be made on the economic situation and need of the parties in the case.”

Under present American laws, the man is always required to support his wife and each child he caused to be bought into the world. Why should women abandon these good laws—-by trading them for something so nebulous and uncertain as the “discretion of the Court”?

Passage 3

This passage is adapted from “Even Birdbrains Learn from Experience.”02013 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific: Research Society.

Figaro was only a birdbrain: a captive cockatoo (Cacatua goffini). But when Alice Auersperg, cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna, spied him wielding 10 tools he had spontaneously invented from twigs and splinters, she was amazed. Such innovative tool use was known to exist only in primates and New Caledonian crows.

Auersperg first saw Figaro make, shorten, and bend stick tools to rake in a small stone he had dropped through a mesh partition. She replaced the stone with a series of cashew nuts and observed Figaro repeat his performance. Auersperg’s observations culminated in a study showing that cockatoos can solve elaborate multistep lock puzzles, without intermediate behavioral reinforcements, and immediately transfer their new knowledge to a novel challenge.

Figaro shows that cockatoos can “plan interventions in the physical world well ahead of being reinforced,” says Auersperg’s coauthor, Alex Kacelnik, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Oxford. Figaro’s achievement raised the question, To what extent can cockatoos plan ahead, completing a series of actions toward a mentally represented distant goal—-without support? Auersperg and colleagues reasoned that if a cockatoo must complete a chain of actions to receive a substantial reward at the end, and if each action leads only to the possibility of achieving the next action, then the bird could be unlikely to attain the final goal by mere distance. Randomly attempting the actions in the long order, for example, would lead to failure.

To test cockatoos’ planning and mechanical capacities, Auersperg designed a box housing a visable cashew nut blocked by five interlocking devices. The locks were concatenated so that the bird would have to solve the lock puzzle farthest from the reward before gaining access to the next, and so on. The team made each lock unique so that the knowledge required to open it would be novel. Auersperg’s team began by testing the cockatoos’ learning process to discern whether and to what extent the 10 birds in their study could solve all five puzzles without intermittent rewards or observation of bird already trained. The researchers had no precedent for predicting how much time and support the cockatoos would require. In the end, only one bird, named Pipin, solved all five locks within the number of sessions, number of trials, and amount of time that Auersperg used to define success. But Pipin completed the entire puzzle, utterly unassisted, in only 100 minutes—-a “rapid route to perfection,” Auersperg notes. The team supported the other nine birds with reinforcement until they opened the five locks. (you many also go to www.teachai.cn for more test papers.)

The team then subjected all 10 birds to an experiment designed to reveal the nature of their newly acquired knowledge: whether it was rote, or it indicated understanding of mechanical functions. The scientists removed or resequenced parts of the original puzzle. In response, “the birds immediately approached the now most relevant piece of equipment downstream from the goal,” says Kacelnik. Instead of rigidly adhering to the original lock sequence, in other words, they strategized according to the various functions of the interlocking mechanisms.

The cockatoos explored the locks playfully, using their bills, tongues, and feet; individuals differed in how they opened the locks. However, all 10 birds progressed logically: Once they had solved a lock, they spent no time on that lock in future sessions, but focused on the next challenge in the chain. This stepwise approach to the complex sequence shows that cockatoos can, without reinforcement, work backward from a distant goal.

Passage 4

This passage is adapted from Ben Branstetter, ‘Every Time You Send Someone an Emoji, a Little Part of Language Dies.” ©2015 by Daily Dot Media. Emoji are small images that are generally used in text messaging.

Language—what you’re reading right now—is entirely made up of symbols. The words you’re reading are translated by your literate mind and given the meaning you’ve been taught they have. Even the letters themselves, though seemingly abstract now, once relied on literal translations. The letter “H,” for example, ,comes from the Egyptian hieroglyph for “fence.” In fact, a row of Hs—HHHHHH—certainly drags this millennia-old meaning out.

The English language is the product of thousands and thousands of years of such symbolic layering—literal images forming single symbols forming words like “heart,” “hearth,” and “hearthstone.” The more separated it has become from the objects and actions of the physical world, the more it has enabled us to communicate the full complexity of life as we know it.

And while language is always evolving—change can often look a lot like deterioration—there has been a recent return to the literal symbolism of the hieroglyphs of old. Emoji are certainly symbols, and they have the meaning we give them and nothing else—just like letters and logos. But their reliance on physical imagery—on smiley faces, devil horns—means they limit us from leaving the physical world. The abstraction of language is a necessary tactic to further develop our understanding of things we cannot see. Emoji make this mission all the more difficult.

A recent study done by Match.com would seem to contradict me. The dating site analyzed the texting behavior of 5,600 single Americans and found emoji use is not replacing language as much as it is replacing inflection. Led by Rutgers anthropologist Helen Fisher, the study found texting “jeopardizes your ability to express your emotion “and emoji have filled this hole as” another way to express emotion.” Fifty percent of the study’s subjects found emoji to show “personality” and 35 percent felt it made “expressing feelings” easier. Easier than language? Easier than the infinite combinations and words in front of you? Easier than the way you actually process thoughts in your mind, to the point some scientists believe we don t actually have thoughts until we develop language? While sarcasm might be a bit difficult over text, I’ve never struggled with getting my meaning through text to the point of needing pre-ordained cartoons to make my feelings understood.

Of course, the emoji pool is always growing. Currently, the Unicode Consortium recognizes 722 distinct emoji, an astonishing amount. However, even this impressive number of symbols is limited by its very method of production. Whereas a language is built and altered by all who speak it, emoji is controlled by the elites of the technology world.

This has shown itself nowhere as strongly as it has in reaction to the homogeneity of emoji faces. The demand for ethnic diversity among the characters urged the Consortium to release a veritable color palette of smiling, frowning, winking, and smirking faces. Whereas the Oxford English Dictionary responds to the growth of the English language, emoji must wait itself for the decisions of an unelected committee.

And the reliance of emoji upon already-filled language standards means it could actually serve as a stop sign for the development of language. Because it can only use images of physical items or actions—or pre-existing symbols like the dollar sign—emoji can never grow organically to help represent abstract concepts. All it can ever be is a direct translation of the languages we speak now.

Passage 5

This passage is adapted from Laura KieserInvasive Plants May Adapt to Climate Change Better than Native Species.”02014 by American Institute of Biological Sciences. (TOEFL 2015-2017 test articles: www.teachai.cn)

The purple loosestrife(Lythrum salicaria) an invasive wetlands plant that was introduced to North America some 50 years ago—has become the bane of conservationists who have struggled to keep it under control. The plant has crowded out cover species, such as cattails, and harmed native biodiversity in the United States and Canada.

Evolutionary biologist and University of Toronto professor Spencer Barrett wanted to challenge the assumption that invasive plants thrived in their new habitats without internally changing their characteristics. To accomplish this, he and postdoctoral fellow Robert Colautti, of the University of British Columbia, planted purple loosestrife in different regions in North America to determine whether and how the plants adapted to distinct climates. Specifically, they transplanted purple loosestrife from Virginia to Timmins, Ontario, and vice versa in what is known as a common garden experiment.

“The common garden experiment is an invaluable tool for understanding how the functioning of an organism’s genes is influenced by its environment and how this…interaction ultimately affects growth, development, survival, and reproduction in nature, says Colautti.

What Barrett and Colautti found was surprising: purple loosestrife tended to produce fewer fruits the further away it was from its original introduction site. That was not all. Compared with the plants transplanted to Timmins from the south, the local purple loosestrife in Timmins bloomed 20 days earlier in the spring and remained small and, in doing so, maximized seed production in the shorter growing season. These local plants also yielded up to 37 times as many fruits as the southern plant grown at the same location. In contrast, the northern Ontario plants that were grown in Virginia averaged only a quarter of the seeds of the locally adapted loosestrife because of their earlier flowering when they were still very small.

Barrett and Colautti concluded that the purple loosestrife’s adaptations to different climates through changes in size and flowering times were just as important as the lack of natural pests in determining their ability to thrive. In addition, the plant was found not only to have adapted to a drastically different climate as it migrated but to have evolved this ability in a matter of mere decades.

Colautti notes that the purple loosestrife found in North America contains far more genetic variability than the purple loosestrife indigenous to Europe, Asia, Africa, and parts of Australia, which suggests that there were multiple introductions of the plant from different continents to the eastern seaboard of the United States. This counters the idea of parallel introductions, which would suggest that the purple loosestrife plants that thrive in northern, Canada may have been introduced from a northern climate, such as in Scandinavia, whereas those in Virginia may have been introduced from a warmer climate. Instead, the populations likely reproduced with each other, thereby maximizing their genetic variability. Barrett believes that it is the plant’s identity as an outbreeder, or a plant that sexually reproduces with others in its species as opposed to cloning itself, that contributes to its resilience in new climates.

“Purple loosestrife plants are adapting because they have a lot of genetic variability,” says Barrett. “More genetic variation allows for more opportunities for natural selection, which enabled the plant’s northward migration.”

Elizabeth Wolkovich, assistant professor in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, has conducted research comparing different temperature-dependent shifts in invasive plants. She believes that Barrett and Colautti’s studies support the phenological flexibility model of plant invasions. This model suggests that species that can shift their phenologies (how they respond to cues in seasonal and climatic changes) will be very successful invaders as the climate changes.

“Species that tend to be moved around a lot may increase their genetic diversity at any particular site, which could make them more locally adapted…and, therefore, better able to exploit climate change and its earlier growing season than native species,” says Wolkovich.


2017年 11月 (北美) SAT 考試閱讀題目

Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到2017年11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!

Also in: 简中 (简中)

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