2018年6月ACT回顧

2018 年 6 月 ACT 考題回顧:所有 4 篇閱讀文章!

過去這個週末學生考了 2018 年 6 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 6 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 6月 ACT 考試閱讀文章

Passage 1

his passage is adapted from the novel The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje (©2011 by Michael Ondaatje). 

The ship Oronsay is departing from Colombo, Ceylon (a city in

what Is today Sri Lanka), in the early 1950s.

        Michael was eleven years old that night when,

green as he could be about the world, he climbed

aboard the first and only ship of his life. It felt as if a

city had been added to the coast, better lit than any

 town or village. He went up the gangplank, watching

only the path of his feet—nothing ahead of him

existed—and continued till he faced the dark harbour

and sea. There were outlines of other ships farther out,

beginning to turn on lights. He stood alone, smelling

everything, then came back through the noise and the

crowd to the side that faced land. A yellow glow over

the city. Already it felt there was a wall between him

and what took place there. Stewards began handing out

food and cordials. He ate several sandwiches, and after

that he made his way down to his cabin, undressed, and

slipped into the narrow bunk. He’d never slept under a

blanket before, save once in Nuwara Eliya. He was

wide awake. The cabin was below the level of the

waves, so there was no porthole. He found a switch

beside the bed and when he pressed it his head and

pillow were suddenly lit by a cone of light.

        He did not go back up on deck for a last look, or to

wave at his relatives who had brought him to the harbour.

He could hear singing and imagined the slow and

then eager parting of families taking place in the

thrilling night air. I do not know, even now, why he

chose this solitude. Had whoever brought him onto the

Oronsay already left? In films people tear themselves

away from one another weeping, and the ship separates

from land while the departed hold on to those disappearing

faces until all distinction is lost.

        I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Per-

haps a sense of self is not even there in his nervous

stillness in the narrow bunk, in this green grasshopper

or little cricket, as if he has been smuggled away accidentally,

with no knowledge of the act, into the future. 

        What had there been before such a ship in my life?

A dugout canoe on a river journey? A launch in Trincomalee

harbour? There were always fishing boats on our

horizon. But I could never have imagined the grandeur

of this castle that was to cross the sea. The longest jour-

neys I had made were car rides to Nuwara Eliya and

Horton Plains, or the train to Jaffna, which we boarded

at seven a.m. and disembarked from in the late after-

 noon. We made that journey with our egg sandwiches, a

pack of cards, and a small Boy’s Own adventure.

        But now it had been arranged I would be travelling

to England by ship, and that I would be making the

journey alone. No mention was made that this might be

an unusual experience or that it could be exciting or

dangerous, so I did not approach it with any joy or fear.

I was not forewarned that the ship would have seven

levels, hold more than six hundred people including a

captain, nine cooks, engineers, a veterinarian, and that

 it would contain a ‘small jail and chlorinated pools that

would actually sail with us over two oceans. The departure

date was marked casually on the calendar by my

aunt, who had notified the school that I would be leav-

ing at the end of the term. The fact of my being at sea

for twenty-one days was spoken of as having not much

significance, so I was surprised my relatives were even

bothering to accompany me to the harbour. I had

assumed I would be taking a bus by myself and then

change onto another at Borella Junction.

        There had been just one attempt to introduce me to

the situation of the journey. A lady named Flavia Prins,

whose husband knew my uncle, turned out to be making

the same journey and was invited to tea one afternoon

to meet with me. She would be travelling in First Class

but promised to keep an eye on me. I shook her hand

carefully, as it was covered with rings and bangles, and

she then turned away to continue the conversation I had

interrupted. I spent most of the hour listening to a few

uncles and counting how many of the trimmed

sandwiches they ate.

        On my last day, I found an empty school examination

booklet, a pencil, a pencil sharpener, a traced map

of the world, and put them into my small suitcase.

         As I got into the car, it was explained to me that

after I’d crossed the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea

and the Red Sea, and gone through the Suez Canal into

the Mediterranean, I would arrive one morning on a

small pier in England and my mother would meet me

there. It was not the magic or the scale of the journey

that was of concern to me, but that detail of how my

mother could know when exactly I would arrive in that

other country. 

        And if she would be there.


Passage 2

Passage A is adapted from “The Unified Theory of Gumbo” by Lolis Eric Elie (©2012 by Smithsonian Institution). Passage B is adapted from “The Borscht Belt” by Julia loffe (©2012 by Conde Nast).

Passage I

        As the Cajun craze had its  way with America  in

the 1980s, I began to hear tourists, visitors and trans­-

plants to New  Orleans praising this or  that gumbo for

its thickness and darkness. This was strange to me.

Gumbo was supposed to be neither thick nor dark. Even

more important, “dark” and “thick” were being used not

as adjectives, but as achievements. It was as if making a

dark gumbo was a culinary accomplishment on par with

making a featherlight biscuit or a perfectly  barbecued

beef brisket. Naturally, I viewed these developments

with suspicion and my suspicion focused on the kitchen

of Commander’s Palace and its celebrated chef, Paul

Prudhomme.

        Prudhomme  hails  from  Cajun  Country,  near
 Opelousas, Louisiana. He refers to his cooking not so

much as Cajun, but as “Louisiana cooking,” and thus

reflective of influences beyond his home parish. For

years I blamed him for the destruction of the gumbo

universe. Many of the chefs and cooks in New Orleans

restaurants learned under him or under his students.

Many of these cooks were not from Louisiana, and thus

had no homemade guide as to what good gumbo was

supposed to be. As I saw it then, these were young,

impressionable cooks who lacked the loving guidance

and discipline that only good home training can

provide.

        My reaction was admittedly nationalistic, since

New Orleans is my nation. The Cajun incursion in and

of itself didn’t bother me. We are all enriched immeasurably

when we encounter other people, other lan­guages,

other traditions, other tastes. What bothered me

was the tyrannical influence of the tourist trade. Tourist

trap restaurants, shops, cooking classes, and at times it

seemed the whole of the French Quarter, were given

over to providing visitors with what they expected to

find. There was no regard for whether the offerings

were authentic New Orleans food or culture. Suddenly

andouille sausage became the local standard even

though most  New Orlea nians  had never heard of it.

Chicken and andouille gumbo suddenly was on menus

all over town. This was the state of my city when I

moved back here in 1995.

Passage II

        As a self-appointed guardian of authentic Russian

fare. Maksim Symikov, who has spent the past two

decades studying traditional Russian cuisine. has a

problem: Russians don’t hold Russian food in particularly

high esteem. When they eat out they favor more

exotic cuisines, like Italian or Japanese. The tendency

to find foreign food more desirable is a prejudice that 

goes back centuries—to a time when the Russian aristocracy

spoke French, not Russian. Russian food is

pooh-poohed as unhealthy and unsophisticated.

         Among the many things that annoy Symikov is the

fact that a good number of the despised Russian dishes

aren’t even Russian. “I did an informal survey of

eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in Moscow and

St. Petersburg, and asked them. ‘Name some traditional

Russian dishes:” Symikov told me. “What they named

was horrible: borscht, which is Ukrainian. and potatoes.

which are an American plant. In the middle of the eigh-

teenth century. there were riots because people didn’t

want to grow potatoes.” He insists that real Russian

food contained no potatoes, no tomatoes, few beets, and

little meat. Instead, there were a lot of grains, fish, and

dairy, as well as honey, cucumbers, turnips, cabbage,

apples, and the produce of Russia’s vast forests—mush-

rooms and berries. Because of the climate, little of this

was eaten fresh; it was salted, pickled, or dried for the

long winter. Most of Russia ate this way until the

twentieth century.

        By exploring the Russian food that existed before

potatoes. Syrnikov hopes to help Russians reacquaint

themselves with the country’s agrarian roots, and to

convince them that their national cuisine can be just as

 flavorful as anything they might find in a sushi bar. He

spends his time travelling through the countryside in

search of old recipes. trying them himself. and blowing

about his experiences. Often, he is brought in as a con-

sultant on projects to make a restaurant authentically

Russian. Recently, he hatched a plan for a user-

generated database of folk recipes. “My idea is to send

out a call across all of Russia.” he told me. “If you have

a grandmother who makes shonishkr-disk-shaped

pastries—flake a picture of them, write down the

recipe. To me. it’s absolutely obvious that, if we don’t

wake up and find out from these old women and set it

down on paper. in twenty years we won’t have anyone

to ask. Russian culture will lose a very significant part

of itself.”


Passage 3

This passage is adapted from the article “An lnt rvie with C. E. Morgan” by Thomas Fabisiak (©2010 by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill).

All the Living is C. E. Morgan’s debut novel. Set in rural Ken-

Unity In the 1980s. her novel follows a young couple’s struggles

as they take responsibility for a family farm.

Thomas Fabisiak: In what way does the fact that your

descriptive work in All the Living focuses on landscape

make it a political act?

C. FL Morgan: I think it’s akin to the moral force that’s

there in fiction in the presentation of character. Fiction

asks us to bring sustained attention to the Other: when a

reader chooses to continue reading a novel, regardless

of the likability of a character, the sustained attention to

that character has moral ramifications. Landscape writ-

ing—most especially when it’s done at length and in a

style that deviates from prose norms, so that it’s very

presentation is interruptive or “estranging” as the for-

malists might have said—encourages the reader to stop,

reread, listen, imagine, reconsider, admire, appreciate

with new eyes. The reader might complain that this

kind of writing draws attention to itself, but this kind of

writing doesn’t merely draw attention to its own aesthetic

strategies—it also draws attention to land. The

land is imperilled; we know that. Land is always imperilled

wherever the human puts his or her foot. The attention

paid to landscape in a narrative is. I believe,

attention that’s paid to land itself, not just to marks on a

page. Deep appreciation can result from an engagement

with that kind of beauty, and that can manifest in

action. That is how it might be seen as a political act to

do this kind of writing (particularly about a region,

such as this one, rural Kentucky, that is continuously

being ravaged by corporations that consumers unwit-

tingly feed).

Thomas Fabisiak: In addition to landscape. though, All

the Living also involves a sustained focus on work, and

specifically on work on the land, fanning, taking care

of animals, etc. Together these suggest an overarching

pastoral quality. Without wanting you to interpret All

the Living for readers, because you’ve told me that you

hate imposing yourself into people’s encounters with

the book, I’m wondering if you could say something

about your focus on work, and whether and to what

extent it is related to the focus on landscape more generally.

One thing that occurred to me repeatedly as I

was reading the book was that, as a writer, you work

very meticulously, and take “your work” as seriously,

perhaps, as “the work” itself in the sense of the finished

book, etc. Would I be wrong to think that there may be

a latent ethical, if not political, component to this

aspect of your writing as well, both in your own commitment

to hard work and in the ongoing presence of

the theme of work in the novel? 

C. E. Morgan: Well, while there are many novels I

admire that depict working-class labor (Anna Karenina

and In the Skin of the Lion and Germinal are the first

that spring to mind), the presence of work-agrarian or

domestic—in All the Living was not a self-conscious

choice. For that matter, even though I conceptualize

landscape writing as overtly political, that doesn’t mean

I self-consciously insert it in a text where it doesn’t

belong. With All the Living, I don’t feel I made choices

in the first draft of the novel. It felt like the book just

came, and it came with an inborn temperament, tenor,

and set of characters and concerns. I obeyed the book.

Or perhaps, because a text is not a willful or sentient

being (though it sometimes feels like it!), it might be

more accurate to say I obeyed the hazy, deepest part of

the brain, which bypasses the intellect as it constructs

meaning via image, myth, poetry: our essential

languages.

        For myself, though you’re right that I work intensely on

any project when I have one, I don’t think of my writ-

ing as a job. I think of it as a vocation. and as such,

there’s a huge gulf between what I do and capitalist

notions of productivity, though the work is disseminated

in the marketplace through a capitalist frame-

work. I’m very wary of rigorous work ethic for the sake

of rigorous work ethic—this idea that a writer should

produce a novel every year or two years, that they

should be punching a clock somehow. A lot of people

seem to buy into that; it’s hard not to in this culture.

But I don’t want to produce just to produce. I don’t

want to write just to write, or publish just to get a pay-

check. I see no value in that. Frankly. the world doesn’t

need more books; it needs better books. Vocation is tied

up with notions of service, and as an artist you serve

people by giving them your best, the work you produce

that you truly believe to be of value, not just what

you’re capable of producing if you work ten hours a

day every day for forty years.


Passage 4

his passage is adapted from Free Radi­cals by Michael Brooks (©2011 by Michael Brooks).
 

        As the twentieth century began, Robert Milliken

was fast approaching forty. All around him, physics was

at its most exhilarating, yet Milliken bad done practically

nothing. So he decided to measure e. the charge

on the electron. 

        Millikan’s idea was simple. A droplet of water that

had been given an electric charge would be attracted to

a metal plate which carried an opposite charge. He

arranged his apparatus so that the electrical attraction

pulled the droplet up, while gravity pulled it down. This

gave him a way to measure e. First he would find the

mass of the droplet. Then he would measure the voltage

needed for the attraction to the metal plate to cancel out

the downward pull of gravity. From those two pieces of

information he could get a measure of the charge on the

droplet.

        The experiment was far from simple to carry out.

however. Finding that the water droplets tended to

evaporate before any measurements could be made,

Milliken set to the task of trying the same trick with oil

droplets.

         In 1910, at the age of forty-two, he finally published

a value for e. It was meant to be his career-

defining publication. Eventually, it was—but Milliken

still had years of difficult and dirty work ahead of him.

        The Austrian physicist Felix Ehrenhaft refuted

Millikan’s results with a similar set of experiments that

seemed to show that electrical charge can be infinitely

small. There is no fundamental, minimum unit of

charge, Ehrenhaft said; there is no ‘electron’. The series

of experiments the desperate Milliken then performed

were to cast a lasting shadow over his scientific

integrity.

        According to biologist Richard Lewontin, Milliken

‘went out of his way to hide the existence of inconvenient

data’. David Goodstein, a physics professor, says

Milliken ‘certainly did not commit scientific fraud’. So

where does the truth lie? 

        The debate hangs on a phrase in Millikan’s 1913

paper refuting Ehrenhaft and showing that every measurement

of electric charge gives a value of e or an integer

multiple of e. In his 1913 paper, Milliken says that

his data table ‘contains a complete summary of the

results obtained on all of the 58 different drops upon

which complete series of observations were made’. The

statement is written in italics, as if to give it special

weight. The notebooks for the 1913 paper show that

Milliken actually took data on 100 oil droplets. Did

Milliken cherry-pick the data in order to confirm his

original result and crush Ehrenhaft underfoot?

        He certainly had motive. In Millikan’s 1910 paper

he had made the ‘mistake’ of full disclosure with statements

such as, ‘Although all of these observations gave

values of e within 2 percent of the final mean, the

uncertainties of the observations were such that … I

felt obliged to discard them’. This admirable honesty

about the selection of data points had given Ehrenhaft

ammunition that he used enthusiastically in his long

feud with Milliken. Perhaps, with the italicised state-

ment, Milliken was making sure that he gave his foe no

more.

        That would certainly explain something that is

otherwise inexplicable. Milliken aborted the experimental

run on twenty-five of the droplets in the work

reported in the 1913 paper. According to Goodstein.

Milliken preferred to use droplets that showed a change

in charge, gaining or losing an electron (as he saw it)

during the measurement. Milliken may also have

judged some droplets to be too small or too large to

yield reliable data, Goodstein says. If they were too

large, they would fall too rapidly to be reliably

observed. Too small, and their fall (and thus the charge

result) would be affected by random collisions with air

molecules. Goodstein interprets the italicised statement

as an assertion that there were only fifty-eight ‘complete

enough’ sets of data.

        But Goodstein undoes his defence by stating that

in order to make the `too large’ or ‘too small’ distinction,

 all the data would need to have been taken in the

first place.

        Milliken certainly did not convince his peers

straight away. The arguments with Ehrenhaft rumbled

on long enough for Millikan’s Nobel Prize to be

delayed for three years—it eventually came in 1923.

        But here’s the point: Milliken was right about the

electron and its charge.•Few laboratories managed to

replicate Ehrenhaft’s results. but students now replicate

Millikan’s results all across the world. No one now

believes that the fundamental unit of charge is anything

other than Millikan’s e. 

        To get his Nobel Prize, Milliken had to play hard

and fast with what we might call ‘accepted practice’.


2018 年 6 月 ACT 考試閱讀題目

Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到 2018 年 6 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!


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