2018 年 4 月 ACT 考題回顧：所有 4 篇閱讀文章！ - Ivy-Way留學部落格

過去這個週末學生考了 2018 年 4 月的 ACT 考試。如果這是你最後一次考 ACT，恭喜你完成了一個艱難的任務！

我們整理了 2018 年 4 月 ACT 考試當中的 4 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 ACT 考試中出現，但是透過真正的 ACT 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 ACT 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。閱讀更多來自這些地方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。ACT 的閱讀文章包含這五種類型：

社會研究：人類學，考古學，傳記，商業，經濟，教育，地理，歷史，政治學，心理學和社會學。
自然科學：解剖學，天文學，生物學，植物學，化學，生態學，地質學，醫學，氣象學，微生物學，自然史，生理學，物理學，技術和動物學。
散文小說：短篇小說或短篇小說的摘錄。
人文：回憶錄和個人散文，以及建築，藝術，舞蹈，倫理，電影，語言，文學批評，音樂，哲學，廣播，電視和戲劇等內容領域。

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 2018 年 4 月 ACT 考試閱讀文章

Passage 1

“Holland” and “the Netherlands” refer to the same country.

I woke up at 5 a.m. and stared at the ceiling of my

Amsterdam hotel room. Outside, the canal boats, which

were rented to rowdy college students, had just gone

quiet. This was a city of late risers. I got dressed and

walked gingerly through the lobby, not wanting to wake

the innkeeper who slept on the ground floor, and

stepped into the dark, empty streets. The fact is that if

you want to go see someone in the flower trade, this is

the hour at which you must rise. Even then, when you

finally show up at 6 or 7 a.m., blinking in the sudden

daylight and trying to remember why you scheduled the

meeting in the first place, the person you’ve gone to

meet will look impatient, as though half the day is

wasted already.

I was on my way to Aalsmeer to see the famous

Dutch flower auction. It’s known around the world as a

remarkably high-tech, high-speed way to sell flowers.

but it had modest beginnings: In a café outside of Amsterdam

in 1911 some growers came up with the idea of

holding an auction to give them more control over how

their flowers were priced and sold. They called their

auction Bloemenlust. It was not long before a competing

auction sprang up nearby—the history of flower

markets everywhere is that as soon as there is one, there

are two—and each day as the auctions ended, flowers

were piled onto bicycles and boats to be delivered along

Holland’s narrow canals and even narrower streets. This

arrangement continued until 1968. the two auctions

thriving nearly side by side, until they finally merged

and became what is known today as Bloemenveiling

Aalsmeer, the largest of a handful of major flower

auctions going on year-round in the Netherlands.

The bus to Aalsmeer took me through the shuttered

streets of Amsterdam and headed south, past the

airport. The world seemed to be coming to life at last,

and on the road we passed dozens of trucks—some of

them plastered with the same grower and wholesaler

logos you’d see in Miami—carrying flowers to and

from the auction. This next phase of a flower’s life.

after it leaves the grower and before it settles into a

vase on someone’s hall table, is remarkable for both its

duration and its complexity. A flower can spend a week

making its way through a maze of warehouses, airports,

auctions, and wholesale markets, and it will emerge

from this exhausting journey looking almost as fresh as

the day it was picked.

The existence of this auction highlights one major

difference between flowers destined for the European

market and those sold in the United States. The flowers

that I saw arriving in Miami were headed in every

direction at once: they were going by truck, rail, and

plane to wholesale markets, distribution centers. bouquet

makers, retailers, and even directly to customers.

There is not a single. the centralized market for flowers in

the United States. But the flowers that come into

Schiphol Airport outside of Amsterdam. the major port

of entry for European flowers, are almost all going to

Aalsmeer. This is the very center of the flower trade,

handling most of the flowers sold on the European

market and some of the goods going to Russia, China.

Japan, and even the United States. The flowers going up

for auction come from Kenya, Zimbabwe. Israel,

Colombia, Ecuador. and European countries, making

this a sort of global stopping-off point for most of the

industry. Every flower market around the world

watches the Dutch auction, which acts as a sort of

engine for the trade, setting prices and standards world-

wide. If you want to follow a flower to market, you’ll

end up here eventually.

By the time the bus pulled into the large circular

driveway at the public entrance to the auction, the day

really was half over. Flowers and plants had been arriving

since midnight, and bidding started before dawn. I

stepped off the bus into a kind of floral rush hour:

trucks roaring past, people racing from one end of the

complex to another, the morning sun glaring down. This

place is a behemoth in the small town of Aalsmeer. It

employs ten thousand people in a town of just twenty

thousand and occupies almost 450 acres, an area larger

than Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom and Epcot

theme parks combined. In fact, the auction is like a city

in itself, one that runs twenty-four hours a day. All the

major growers and wholesalers keep an office, and

maybe a warehouse and a loading dock, at Aalsmeer. A

full 20 percent of the cut flowers in the world are sold

at this very spot, and about half of the world’s cut-

flower supply moves through the Dutch auction system.

Passage 2

On February 4, 1789, the 69 members of the Electoral College

made George Washington the only president to be unanimousy

elected. but Congress was unable to meet until April to

make the choice official.

The Congressional delay in certifying George

Washington’s election as president only allowed more

time for his doubts to fester as he considered the herculean

task ahead. He savored his wait as a welcome

“reprieve.” he told his former comrade in arms and

future Secretary of War Henry Knox, adding that his

“movements to the chair of government will be accompanied

with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is

going to the place of his execution.” His “peaceful

abode” at Mount Vernon, his fears that he lacked the

requisite skills for the presidency, the “ocean of difficulties”

facing the country—all gave him pause on the

eve of his momentous trip to New York. In a letter to

his friend Edward Rutledge. he claimed that, in accept-

ing the presidency, he had given up “all expectations of

private happiness in this world.”

The day after Congress counted the electoral

votes, declaring Washington the first president. it dis-

patched Charles Thomson. the secretary of Congress. to

bear the official announcement to Mount Vernon. The

legislators had chosen a line emissary. A well-rounded

man, known for his work in astronomy and mathematics,

the Irish-born Thomson couldn’t have relished the

trying journey to Virginia. which was “much impeded

by tempestuous weather, bad roads, and the many large

rivers I had to cross.” Yet he rejoiced that the new president

would be Washington, whom he venerated as

someone singled out by Providence to be “the savior

and father” of the country. Having known Thomson

since the Continental Congress. Washington esteemed

him as a faithful public servant and exemplary patriot.

Around noon on April 14, 1789. Washington flung

open the door at Mount Vernon and greeted his visitor

with a cordial embrace. Once in the privacy of the mansion,

he and Thomson conducted a stiff verbal minuet,

each man reading from a prepared statement. Thomson

began by declaring, “I am honored with the commands

of the Senate to wait upon your Excellency with the

information of your being elected to the office of Presi-

dent of the United Stales of America” by a unanimous

vote. Ile read aloud a letter from Senator John Langdon

of New Hampshire. the president pro tempore. “Suffer

me, sir, to indulge the hope that so auspicious a mark of

public confidence will meet your approbation and be

considered as a sure pledge of the affection and support

you are to expect from a free and enlightened people.”

There was something deferential, even slightly servile,

in Langdon’s tone, as if he feared that Washington

might renege on his promise and refuse to take the job.

Thus was greatness once again thrust upon George

Washington.
Any student of Washington’s life might have predicted

that he would acknowledge his election in a short,

self-effacing speech full of disclaimers. “While I

realize the arduous nature of the task which is conferred

on me and feel my inability to perform he replied to

Thomson. “I wish there may not be reason for regret-

ting the choice. All I can promise is only that which can

be accomplished by an honest zeal.” This sentiment of

modesty jibed so perfectly with Washington’s private

letters that it could not have been feigned; he wondered

whether he was lit for the post, so unlike anything he

had ever done. The hopes for republican government,

he knew, rested in his hands. As commander in chief of

the Continental Army. he had been able to wrap himself

in a self-protective silence, but the presidency would

leave him with no place to hide and expose him to

public censure as nothing before.

Because the vote counting had been long delayed,

Washington. 57,felt the crush of upcoming public business

and decided to set out promptly for New York on

April 16. accompanied in his elegant carriage by

Thomson and aide David Humphreys. His diary entry

conveys a sense of foreboding: “About ten o’clock. I

bade adieu to Mount Vernon. to private life, and to

domestic felicity and, with a mind oppressed with more

anxious and painful sensations than I have words to

express, set out for New York … with the hest dispositions

to render service to my country in obedience to its

call, but with less hope of answering its expectations.”

Waving goodbye was Martha Washington. who

wouldn’t join hint until mid-May. She watched her husband

of 30 years depart with a mixture of bittersweet

sensations, wondering “when or whether he will ever

come home again.” She had long doubted the wisdom

of this final act in his public life. “I think it was much

too late for him to go into public life again.” she told

her nephew. “but it was not to be avoided.”

Passage 3

Passage A is adapted from the article “A Million Little Pieces” by Andrea K. Scott (©2012 by Condo Nast Publications). Passage B is adapted from the article “Everything in Its Right Place” by Karen Rosenberg (©2011 by The New York Times).

Passage I

The artist Sarah Sze stood in the foyer on the

second floor of the Asia Society, on the Upper East

Side. amid dozens of crates, plastic storage bins, plastic

tubs, and plastic bags. It was a late afternoon in December,

and she and six assistants were completing the

installation of eight new sculptures. The process was so

labor-intensive that it had taken more than three weeks.

Sze arranges everyday objects into sculptural

installations of astonishing intricacy. She joins things

manufactured to help build other things (ladders, levels,

winches, extension cords) with hundreds of commonplace

items (cotton swabs, push-pins, birthday candles,

aspirin tablets), creating elaborate compositions that

extend from gallery walls, creep into corners, and

surge toward ceilings. Duchamp paved the way for

Sze’s work when he made a sculpture by mounting a

bicycle wheel on a wooden stool. But her virtuosic

creations are equally indebted to the explosive energy

of Bernini’s Baroque masterpiece “The Ecstasy of

St. Teresa,” a marble statue that seems to ripple with

movement.

Sze’s show was about the relationships between

landscape and architecture, and sculpture and line. She

walked from the foyer into the galleries, and stood by a

floor-to-ceiling window that had been concealed by a

wall for a decade—the museum had uncovered it at her

request. She began to confer with her studio manager,

Mike Barnett. Sze was wondering about a branch that

she had placed in the installation by the window, after

pruning it from her roof-top garden, in downtown Manhattan.

It rose from the floor like a sapling emerging

from a crack in the sidewalk. Twilight had turned the

window into a mirror, but in daylight the branch would

compete with a view of Park Avenue median greenery,

traffic, and apartment buildings.

“There’s a nighttime view and a daytime view.”

she said to Barnett. “I want that to be a plus, not a

minus. Is this getting lost?”

Barnett said, “I think it works.”

There was a pause so long that it should have been

awkward. Sze finally said, “Even if it’s a loose end, that

could be interesting. I like that it looks like a fragment

—like it could just drift away.”

Passage II

“Infinite Line,” Sarah Sze’s midcareer solo show at

Asia Society Museum, promised a new angle on

Ms. Sze’s mesmerizing, minutely detailed installations.

And it delivers one, though the an-much of it made

for the occasion—doesn’t always rise to the challenge.

The show makes the case that Ms. Sze. who is

Chinese-American. has been profoundly influenced by

many forms of Asian art. It also emphasizes her draw-

ings, which have rarely been exhibited, and encourages

you to see her three-dimensional artworks as drawings

in space.

Implicitly, it de-emphasizes the prosaic nature of

her art materials: the cotton swabs, toothpicks, bottle

caps and other throwaway objects that she fashions,

with gee-whiz structural ingenuity, into rambling land-

scapes and galactic spirals. Over the years viewers

(myself included) have had a tendency to focus on all of

this stuff—to see Ms. Sze’s art as embodying a quintes-

sentially American consumerism.

“Infinite Line” presents a more nuanced, intellectual

and worldly artist: one who talks about space like

an architect and vision like an ophthalmologist, who

rhapsodizes about the shifting perspective in Chinese

painting and makes her own Asian-inspired drawings

on long scrolls of paper.

But while Ms. Sze says some fascinating things in

a catalog interview, she’s not at her best in these galleries.

Nothing here is quite up to the level of her solo

at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery last year. which used

cantilevered shelves laden with rocks, plants and office

supplies to evoke a topsy-turvy green house or curiosity

cabinet.
That’s especially true of the works on paper, which

are installed in a separate room and look physically and

spiritually cut off from Ms. Sze’s signature installa-

tions. Most of them find her in doodle mode, drawing

clusters of architecture and tiny figures that can be

expanded or contracted to suit any scale or purpose.

Pure drawing, as a medium, does not seem to

excite Ms. Sze. It takes a hint of found objects, or a flirtation

with the third dimension, to bring out her imagination,

as in the collage “Guggenheim as a Ruin.”

which envisions a crumbling. entropic version of that

museum, or the pop-up drawing “Notepad,” whose

laser-cut and folded pages form a series of cascading

fire escapes.

Passage 4

That the earliest penguins have turned up in New

Zealand is probably no coincidence. Until humans

arrived, less than 1.000 years ago, the islands there

formed a temperate seabird paradise on the margins of

the South Pacific and Southern oceans. The region was

free of terrestrial predatory mammals and afforded

space for breeding colonies, with abundant food in the

surrounding seas.

Geologic evidence suggests that the area would

have been equally conducive to the seabird way of life

at the end of the Cretaceous. New Zealand today is the

largest exposed area of a submersed mini continent

known as Zealandia that broke off from the ancient

supercontinent of Gondwana perhaps 85 million years

ago. Thus liberated. Zealandia drifted northeast into the

Pacific. carrying plants and animals, including dinosaurs,

to its resting spot about halfway between the

South Pole and tropics. As Zealandia drifted, it cooled

and sank. Shallow seas flooded the land, and a broad

continental shelf formed around its perimeter. Despite

its isolation from other landmasses. Zealandia did not

emerge from the end-Cretaceous extinction unscathed.

Many of its marine and terrestrial organisms perished in

that die-off. Yet what was bad for those creatures was

good for penguins. With marine reptiles such as

mosasaurs and plesiosaurs out of the picture, early

penguins could swim the waters around Zealandia free

of competition or predation.

Having gotten their sea legs in Zealandia, penguins

soon expanded their domain dramatically, dispersing

across thousands of miles and into new climate

zones. Fossils of Perudypres deiriesi from Peru show

that penguins arrived close to the equator about 42 mil-

lion years ago, settling in one of the hottest places on

earth during one of the hottest times in the planet’s

history. By 37 million years ago the birds had spread

to almost every major landmass in the Southern

Hemisphere.

Yet why, after restricting themselves to Zealandia

for millions of years. did penguins suddenly start

spreading across the Southern Hemisphere around

50 million years ago? Recently Daniel T. Ksepka dis-

covered an important clue to this mystery: a long-

overlooked feature on the surface of fossil flipper

bones. The humerus bears a series of grooves that are

easy to miss among the markings associated with ten-

dons and muscles.

Those grooves form at the spot where a cluster of

arteries and veins presses against the humerus. These

blood vessels make up a countercurrent heat exchanger

called the humeral arterial plexus. which allows penguins

to limit heat loss through the flippers and to

maintain their core body temperature in cold water. In

live penguins. hot blood leaving the heart gets cooled

by the plexus before reaching the flipper tip. and cold

blood returning from the flipper gets warmed before

approaching the heart.

The identity of the grooves on the fossil flipper

bones shed some surprising light on the origin of

penguin thermoregulation. One of the most amazing

aspects of modern penguin biology is the birds’ ability

to tolerate extreme cold. One would logically assume

that the plexus evolved as an adaptation to frigid

environments. But fossils suggest otherwise. Penguins

such as the Delphinornis from Antarctica show that this

feature evolved at least 49 million years ago. The early

Wahnanu penguins from Zealandia show no hint of the

trait at 58 million years ago, however. The plexus there-

fore must have evolved in the intervening time. when

the earth was far warmer than it is today. Back then,

Antarctica lacked permanent ice sheets and instead

offered a temperate forested environment; Zealandia

was even toastier.

What use did early penguins have for a heat-

conserving plexus in this greenhouse world? Although

sea-surface temperatures were high. early penguins

probably foraged in cool upwelling regions, which are

rich in nutrients and thus support a bounty of prey,

including fish and squid. But because heat is lost more

quickly in water than air, a warm-blooded animal such

as the pensuin risks going into hypothermia even in

warm seas if the water is below core body temperature.

Reducing heat loss through the flipper would have

helped them conserve body heat on long foraging

swims in chilly waters.

The humeral plexus may have also allowed penguins

to survive the long open-water journeys by which

they initially dispersed from Zealandia to other continents.

Only much later would modem penguins co-opt

this mechanism to invade the sea ice shelves that

funned when the planet cooled.

2018 年 4 月 ACT 考試閱讀題目

Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到 2018 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！如果你想購買考題在家做，學生可以在Ivy-Way蝦皮商城、Ivy-Way臉書粉專、或 Line (ivyway) 直接購買喔！