2017 10月 SAT (亞洲/國際版) 考題回顧：所有 5 篇閱讀文章！ - Ivy-Way留學部落格

過去這個週末學生考了 2017 年 10 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 10 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 10 月 (亞洲) SAT 考試閱讀文章

PASSAGE 1

This passage is adapted from Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior. © 2012 by Barbara Kingsolver. Dellarobia is taking her son Preston to see a large population of monarch butterflies that has settled in a forest near their house.

They neared the fir forest and found the air above the path alive with butterflies.

“Let’s get off and walk from here,” she said, relieved to cut the noisy engine and go on foot. She wanted to watch his upturned face. Despite the wet hair stuck to his forehead and raindrops stippling his wire-framed glasses, Preston was in heaven. “There-goes-King-Billy, there-goes-King-Billy!” he cried again and again, rolling the sentence out in the rapid-fire manner he used for yelling “Five-four-three-two-one-blastoff!” prior to launching flying objects. Soon there were too many kings for each one to get his own announcement, but Preston’s mouth still moved silently.

Today there were not so many flying around as before. Not a river of motion, but stragglers adrift. Careening down the trail, they looked a little drunk or crazed, somehow.

“They’re probably hungry too,” Preston said. “What do they eat?”

“I have no idea,” she confessed. He was right, they would surely need to eat, after hunkering in the rain for days without cease. She was embarrassed that her five-year-old was asking questions that had not occurred to her. But she refused to be first in the long line of people who would shrug him off. “We’ll have to look that up.”

“Look it up where?”

“Google it, I guess.”

“Okay,” he said.

Googling a butterfly. It sounded comical, like tickling a catfish, but she knew it wouldn’t sound that way to Preston. He would clamber up to the computer and punch the keys, finding what he needed in there. Having children was not like people said. Forget training them in your footsteps; the minute they put down the teething ring and found the Internet, you were useless as a source of anything but shoes and a winter coat. But Preston still asked her questions. That touched her, that they were a team. Here in the looming forest he gripped her hand tightly, as if crossing a street, as they approached the trees where the butterflies hung in their droves. Wings littered the ground. “Look up, she said, pointing at the brown clusters drooping from the branches. These trees were completely filled now. Even the tree trunks wore butterfly pelts, all the way up, like the bristling hairy legs of giants. It was a whole butterfly forest, magically draped with dark, pendulous clusters masquerading as witchy tresses or dead foliage. She only knew what they really were because her eyes had learned the secret. Preston’s had not. It all waited for him, perfectly still and active. She watched his dark pupils dart up and around, puzzling this out, looking without yet seeing. Mine, ours, her heartbeat thumped, making promises from the inside. This was better than Christmas. She couldn’t wait to give him his present: sight.

“What is it?” he asked.

“That’s the King Billies too. I know it looks weird, how they’re all hanging down. But the whole thing is butterflies.”

“Gaaa!” he cried, breaking free of her grip. He ran toward a monstrous bouquet that reached nearly to the ground from above, some thirty feet long, dwarfing a tiny boy. Before she could warn him against it, he reached up to stroke it with his hand, causing it to writhe and awaken. Wings ) opened and jockeyed within the clump. The lowest piece of the bristly string dropped off, landing with a plop on the ground. In slow motion, it exploded, individual butterflies flapping, lifting, dispersing.

Preston looked back at her, expecting a reprimand. “It’s okay. You can check them out. Just be gentle, I guess.”

She walked closer so she could see this as her son was seeing it. She hadn’t examined the clumps at close range, and even now it was hard to ) understand how they were constructed. The butterflies didn’t seem smashed or struck to the wings of other butterflies, not like a hundred-car pileup, it was so simple. They seemed to be holding on by their needle-thin front legs to some part of the tree itself, bark or branch or needle, out to the very tips. The tree’s basic shape was still visible underneath, the column of trunk and broomlike sweep of the branches, but all enlarged and exaggerated by the hangers-on. Only at the ends of ) the dangling clusters 90 did butterflies seem to be clinging to the legs of other butterflies. The insecure and the desperate, she thought. No world can be without them.

PASSAGE 2

On July 22, 1944, as allied troops were racing across Normandy to liberate Paris, representatives of 44 nations meeting at the Mount Washington resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, created a financial and monetary system for the postwar Wold War II era. It had taken three weeks of exhausting diplomacy. At the closing banquet, the assembled delegates rose and sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” The fellow in question was John Maynard Keynes, leader of the British delegation and intellectual inspiration of the Bretton Woods design. Lord Keynes, the worlds most celebrated economist, was playing a tricky dual role. He had proposed a radical new monetary system to free the world from the deflationary pressures that had caused and prolonged the Great Depression. Bretton Woods, he hoped, would be the international anchor for the suite of domestic measures that came to be known as Keynesian—the use of public spending to cure depression and the regulation of financial markets to prevent downturns caused by failed private financial speculation.

Keynes was also hoping to restore Britain’s prewar position as a leading industrial and financial power. His two roles overlapped, but far from perfectly. The Americans shared the British desire to restore world growth, but not to preserve Britain empire or its protectionist system of preferential trade deals for nations that settled their accounts in pounds sterling. Writing to a colleague after the conference ended, Keynes professed to be pleased. He wrote that in the new International Monetary Fund, “we have in truth got both in substance and in phrasing all that we could reasonably hope for.” The new World Bank, Keynes declared, offered “grand possibilities. … The Americans are virtually pledging themselves to quite gigantic untied loans for reconstruction and development.” Yet in many respects, Bretton Woods was a rout for Keynes and the British. America today is often described as the sole surviving superpower, but in 1944 U.S. supremacy was towering. Germany and Japan were on the verge of ruin. Britain had gone massively into debt to prosecute the war, sacrificing more than a quarter of its national wealth. The Russians had lost tens of millions of soldiers and civilians. America was unscathed, its casualties were modest by comparison, it held most of the world’s financial reserves, and its industrial plant was mightier than ever.

Though Keynes inspired Bretton Woods, the Americans won the day. As leverage, Keynes had only his own brilliance and a fast-fading appeal to Anglo-American wartime solidarity. In most matters, a rival design by Keyness American counterpart, Harry Dexter White, prevailed. White, a left-wing New Dealer serving as No. 2 man at the Treasury, shared Keyness basic views on money. But the White plan provided a far more modest fund and bank. Instead of the generous extension of wartime lend-lease aid that Keynes was promoting, the British had to settle for an American loan, to be repaid with interest.

The Bretton Woods system was hailed as a vast improvement over both the rigid gold standard of pre-1914 and the monetary anarchy of the interwar period. For a quarter-century, Bretton Woods undergirded a rare period of steady growth, full employment, and financial stability. But in many respects, the vaunted role of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Bretton Woods rules specifying fixed exchange rates was a convenient mirage. The systems true anchor was the United States—the U.S. dollar as de facto global currency; the U.S. economy as the residual consumer market for other nations exports; and U.S. recovery aid in the form of the Marshall Plan, which dwarfed the outlays of the World Bank.

In the early 1970s, the Bretton Woods system came crashing down when domestic inflation forced the United States to devalue its own currency and cease playing the hegemonic role. Monetary instability and slower growth followed. By the 1980s, laissez-faire was enjoying renewed prestige.

Passage 3

Money may not grow on trees, but gold does—or at least it accumulates inside of them. Scientists have found that trees growing over deeply buried deposits of gold ore sport leaves with higher-than-normal concentrations of the glittering element. The finding provides an inexpensive, excavation-free way to narrow the search for ore deposits.

Scientists have long had clues that trees and other vegetation pulled gold from the soil and transported it to their leaves, but the evidence wasn’t clear. The gold particles could have stuck to the leaves after being blown there as dust, for example. To bolster the case that the gold came from soil beneath the trees, researchers conducted a series of field studies and lab tests. At one site in Western Australia, the scientists gathered leaves, twigs, and bark from eucalyptus trees growing above a known gold deposit. The deposit is about the size of a football field and lies 30 meters or more below ground, but at todays gold prices its too small and sparse to be worth excavating. The team gathered the same parts from trees growing 200 meters away from the ore_ Although background concentrations of gold in vegetation are typically less than 2 parts per billion (ppb), dried leaves from the trees growing above the ore deposit—but not those 200 meters away—had gold levels up to 80 ppb, says team member Mel Lintern, a geochemist in Kensington, Australia.

Likewise, field tests by Lintern’s group at a site in southern Australia showed that eucalyptus trees growing above a deposit lying 35 meters underground had 20 times more gold in the gummy substances coating their leaves than did trees that grew 800 meters away. Previous studies had noted anomalous concentrations of gold in the leaf-coating substances, Lintern says, but researchers couldn’t discount the possibility that the tiny particles of the metal had stuck to the leaves after being carried there by winds.

That’s where the teams new study gleams. By growing seedlings in greenhouses insulated from airborne dust and watering them with gold-laced solutions, the researchers demonstrated that trees actually pick up the metal from soil and deposit it within their leaves.

The new research provides “a conclusive set of evidence… from a very nicely constructed set of experiments, ” says Clifford Stanley, a geochemist at Acadia University in Wolfville, Canada. “The tree is a conveyor belt bringing gold to the surface,” he notes. Like other such elements in the earth, gold gets sucked up by the plant as it absorbs nutrients in the soil. Then, as a dissolved mineral, it gets transported throughout the tree, although the highest concentrations are typically found in leaves. “When you see the 1 particles of gold inside the plants,” Stanley says, “all doubt goes away.”

Don’t think about mining trees, however. Average concentrations of gold in the leaves are much higher than normal, but individual particles of the metal are still very small, few, and far between. Even the largest particles—which Lintern and his team have jokingly dubbed “phytonuggets” —were no more than 8 micrometers across, about half the diameter of the finest human hair. The trees don’t have a biological need for the element, Lintern says; indeed, it may be toxic to them. “To the trees, gold may be just another heavy metal to be got rid of.” Though the phytonuggets are too small to be collected and mined, they can serve as a sign that gold deposits may lie within the reach of a trees roots.

Passage 4

Passage 1 is adapted from Frederick Douglass, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” delivered in 1876 at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument, Lincoln Park, Washington DC. Passage 2 is adapted from Booker T. Washington, “An Abraham Lincoln Memorial Address in Philadelphia.”. delivered in 1899.

Passage 1

Truth is proper and beautiful at all times and in all places, and it is never more proper and beautiful in any case than when speaking of a great public man whose example is likely to be commended for honor and imitation long after his departure to the solemn shades, the silent continents of eternity. It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham 0 Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.

He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his 0 education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed constitutional guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states… Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a pre-eminence in this worship at once full and supreme. First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity. To you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory, to multiply his statues, to Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity. To you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory, to multiply his statues, to hang his pictures high upon your walls, and commend his example…But while in the abundance of your wealth, and in the fullness of your just and patriotic devotion, you do all this, we entreat you to despise not the humble offering we this day unveil to view; for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.

Passage 2

You ask one whom the Great Emancipator found a piece of property and left an American citizen to speak of Abraham Lincoln. My first acquaintance with our hero and benefactor is this: Night after night, before the dawn of day, on an old slave plantation in Virginia, I recall the form of my sainted mother, bending over a batch ofrags 1 that enveloped my body, on a dirt floor, breathing a fervent prayer to Heaven that “Marsa Lincoln” might succeed, and that one day she and I might be free; and so, on your invitation, I come here tonight to celebrate with you the answer to those prayers. But be it far from me to revive the bitter memories of the past, nor would I narrow the work of Abraham Lincoln to the black race of this county; rather would I call him the Emancipator of America—the liberator of the white man North, of the white man South; the one who, in unshackling the chains I of the Negro, has turned loose the enslaved forces of nature in the South, and has knit all sections of our country together by the indissoluble bonds of commerce. To the man in the North who cherished hatred against the South, Lincoln brought freedom. To the white man who landed at Jamestown years ago, with hopes as bright and prospects as cheering as those who stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock, Lincoln, for the first time, gave an opportunity to breathe the air of unfettered freedom—a freedom from dependence on others’ labor to the I independence of self-labor; freedom to transform unused and dwarfed hands into skilled and productive hands; to change labor from drudgery into that which is dignified and glorified; to change local commerce into trade with the world; to change the Negro from an ignorant man into an intelligent man; to change sympathies that were local and narrow into love and good-will for all mankind; freedom to change stagnation into growth, weakness into power; yea, to us all, your race and mine, Lincoln has been a great emancipator.

Passage 5

This passage is adapted from Eric Hand, “Seafloor Record grooves’ on ocean floor document Earth’s ice ages” @2015 by Science Inc.

With a little training, it’s easy to see how ice age glaciers sculpted the land, scouring valleys and heaping up debris. This week, researchers revealed that the ancient cycles of ice also left their mark on the sea floor, thousands of meters below the ocean surface.

The evidence comes from seafloor spreading centers: sites throughout the ocean where plates of ocean crust move apart and magma erupts in between, building new crust onto the plates’ trailing edges. I Parallel to these spreading centers are “abyssal hills”: long, 100-meter-high ridges on the diverging plates, separated by valleys. On bathymetric maps of seafloor topography, they look like grooves on a record. These grooves, it now turns out, play the tune of Earth’s 15 ice ages.

During ice ages, which are mainly driven by rhythmic variations in Earth’s orbit and spin that alter sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere, growing ice caps and glaciers trap so much frozen water on land that sea I levels can drop a hundred meters or more. As the pressure on the ocean floor eases, magma erupts more readily at the spreading centers, thickening the plates and creating the abyssal hills, say the authors of two new studies, “Step back and think about this: Small variations in the orbital parameters of the Earth—tilt and eccentricity and wobble—are recorded on the sea floor,” says Richard Katz, a geodynamicist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and a co-author of the Science paper. “It kind of blows my I mind.” Outside scientists are also impressed. “Their data provides evidence that the link is real,” says David Lund, a paleoceanographer at the University of Connecticut, Avery Point “I’m very excited about it.”

The studies suggest that the bursts of seafloor volcanism could in turn affect climate—and even play a role in bringing each ice age to an abrupt end. They may also change some minds about the origin of the abyssal hills. Ever since scientists discovered the hills more than half a century ago, many thought they I resulted from cracks in Earth’s crust, or faults. As new oceanic crust is made in the spreading centers (the story went), it cools, fractures, and slips along faults, creating downward-dropped blocks that could be responsible for the ridge-and-valley topography. Scientists still agree that faults play a role in shaping the seafloor topography, but the new work emphasizes the importance of volcanism in creating the hills in the first place, Lund says. “Faulting could be a secondary process as opposed to the primary one,” he says. The study in Science was based on fresh ocean- floor data gathered by a Korean icebreaker ship during 2011 and 2013 surveys across the Australian-Antarctic ridge, a spreading center south of Tasmania. In a transect representing more than a million years of seafloor spreading, the researchers found topographic highs and lows that seemed to have formed in synchrony with all three of Earth’s astronomical cycles, which have periods of 23,000,41,000, and 100,000 years.

Wondering whether the climate cycles might somehow be boosting seafloor volcanism at regular intervals, the researchers created a computer model to test the idea. When sea level drops during ice ages, they found, the decreased pressure on the mantle through the thin ocean floor would increase the rate of mantle melting. That would boost the delivery of magma to the seafloor surface by just enough to explain the bands of thicker crust that form the abyssal hills. Paul Asimow, an igneous petrologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, says the model is physically plausible. “It’s additional confirmation that the basic [sea level] signal is felt by the mantle,” he says.

2017年 10月 (亞洲) SAT 考試閱讀題目

Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到2016年4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)