2018年12月ACT回顧

2018 年 12 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 12 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 12 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 12月 ACT 考試閱讀文章

Passage 1

This passage is adapted from the book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (©2013 by Robin Wall Kimmerer).

        Even now, after more than fifty Strawberry Moons,

finding a patch of wild strawberries still touches me

with a sensation of surprise, a feeling of unworthiness

and gratitude for the generosity and kindness that

comes with an unexpected gift all wrapped in red and

green. “Really? For me? Oh, you shouldn’t have.” After

fifty years they still raise the question of  how  to

respond to their gene rosity: Sometimes it feels like a

silly question with a very simple answer: eat them.

        But I know that someone else has wondered these

same things. In our Creation stories the origin of straw­-

berries is important. Skywoman’s beautiful daughter,

whom she carried in her womb from Skyworld, grew on

the good green earth, loving and loved by all the other

beings.  But tragedy  befell her when she died giving

birth to her twins, Flint and Sapling. Heartbroken, Sky­-

woman buried her beloved daughter in th earth. Her

final gifts, our most revered plants, grew from her body.

The strawberry arose from her heart. In Potawatomi, the

strawberry is ode min, the heart berry. We recognize

them as the leaders of the berries, the first to bear fruit.

        Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full

of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to

you through no action of your own, free, having moved

toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward;

you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it.

And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed

and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and

mystery—as with random acts of kindness, we do not

know their source.

        Those fields of my childhood showered us with

strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, hickory nuts in

the fall, bouquets of wildflowers brought to my mom,

and family walks on Sunday afternoon. They were our

playground, retret, wildlife sanctuary, and ecology

classroom. All for free. Or so I thought.

        I experienced the world in that time as a gift econ­omy,

“goods and services” not purchased but received

as  gifts  from  the earth.  Of  course  I  was  blissfully

unaware of how my parents must have struggled  to

make ends meet in the wage economy raging far from

this field.

        In our family, the presents we gave one another

were almost always homemade. I thought that was the

definition of a gift: something you made for someone

else . We made all our Christmas gifts: piggy banks

from old bottles of bleach, hot pads from broken

clothespins, and puppets from retired socks. My mother

says it was because we had no money for store-bought

presents. It didn’t seem like a hardship to me; it was

something special.

        My father loves wild strawberries, so for Father’s Day

my mother would almost always make him straw­-

berry shortcake. She baked the crusty shortcakes and

whipped the heavy cream, but we kids were responsible

for the berries. We each got an old jar or two and spent

the Saturday before the celebration out in the fields,

taking forever to fill them as more and more berries

ended up in our mouths. Finally, we returned home and

poured  them out on the kitchen table to sort out the

bugs. I’m sure we missed some, but Dad never

men­tioned the extra protein.

        In fact, he thought wild strawberry shortcake was

the best possible present, or so he had us convinced. It

was a gift that could never  be bought.  As children

raised by strawberries, we were probably unaware that

the gift of berries was from the fields themselves, not

from us. Our gift was time and attention and care and

red-stained fingers. Heart berries, indeed.

        Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a

 particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to

receive, and to reciprocate. The field gave to us, we

gave to my dad, and we tried to give back to the straw-

berries. When the berry season was done, the plants

would send out slender red runners to make new plants .

Because I was fascinated by the way they would travel

over the ground looking for goo place to take root, I

would weed out little patches of bare ground where the

runners touched down. Sure enough, tiny little roots

would emerge from the runner and by the end of the

season there were even more plants, ready to bloom

under the next Strawberry Moon. No person taught us

this—the strawberries showed us. Because they had

given us a gift, an ongoing relationship opened between us.

        Farmers around us grew a lot of strawberries and

frequently hired kids to pick for them. My siblings and

I would ride our bikes a long way to Cranda ll’s farm to

pick berries to earn spending money. A dime for every

quart we picked.


Passage 2

This passage is adapted from The Air­ plane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings by Jay Spenser (©2008 by Jay Spenser)

        The invention of the airplane was a battleground

for two warring paradigms about what the airplane

would be like. Paradigms are mind-sets created by what

we think we know. Depending on how closely they

match the actuality, these mental models either can help

us succeed or can place blinders over our eyes that keep

us from perceiving  what we later realize was obvious

all along.         
        Working under the right paradigm helped Ameri-

 cans Orville and Wilbur Wright to succeed even as a

wrong one sabotaged the hopes of Europe’s many

experimenters . If not for this situation, the French—

­ who felt they had invented flight because of the success—

of the Montgolfiers’  hot-air balloons in 1783—might

well have been first. If so, the airplane, like the automo­-

bile before it, would have been a European invention.

        What led Europe’s aerial experimenters astray? It

was William Samuel Henson . Or more accurately, it

was the powerful sway of Henson’s persuasive vision of

what aviation would be.

        First published in the early 1840s, the engraved

illustrations   of   the  Henson   Aerial  Steam   Carriage

(a passenger-carrying airplane) continued to appear off

and on in newspapers, magazines, and books for more

than a half century. More thrilling artwork of heavier­-

than -air flying machines was hard to imagine, and the

very sight of this aerial stagecoach spurred Europe’s

aerial experimenters to redouble their efforts . Unfortu­nately,

however, it also handed them a lot of incorrect notions.

        The concept of an aerial carriage brought with it a

concomitant expectation that people would drive air­-

planes around the.sky making flat turns as they did in

horse-drawn vehicles. This unquestioned assumption

shaped how France’s early experimentation approached

airplane design, and it cost them dearly.

        Part of Henson’s paradigm worked. For example,

airplanes would indeed pitch their noses up or down to

climb or descend. This was intuitive because horsedrawn

carriages do just that when traversing hilly countryside.

But carriages don’t tilt sideways, or at least not

very far, because that leads to a catastrophic upset.
        Henson’s vision told Europe’s early experimenters

that their airplanes must not be permitted to tilt side to

side or else catastrophe would ensue. To ensure that this

never happened, some experimenters used strongly

upward-angled wings so that the airplane would be self­-

righting in flight. Others placed vertical fore-and-aft

fabric panels between_the wings of  their biplanes to

prevent sideslips. Both these features suggest that

Europe’s pioneers were terrified of banking, or drop­-

ping a wing in flight.
 
        Another place where Henson’s Aerial Steam Car­-

riage paradigm misled people was the vital issue of

controllability. Controlling horse-drawn vehicles does

not require constant active involvement on the driver’s

part. The horses are set in motion and the reins are not

used again until the horses need further instruction .

        Consequently,  Europe’s   “early   birds”   were

remarkably cavalier about controllability. To them, all

one needed to do was create an inherently stable craft

whose wings never dropped to either side. After nosing

this vehicle aloft, one would simply “drive” it around

the sky.

        A wealthy Brazilian named Alberto Santos-

Dumont performed Europe’s first heavier-than-air

flights late in 1906. His 14-bis was largely uncontrol­-

lable, but that didn’t bother him; his goal was simply to

get into the air. This disregard for a key requirement of

flight was then sci pervasive that more than  a year

would pass before any European figured out how to

actually land where he had taken off.

        Wilbur and Orville worked under a different mind­-

set. They too had seen Henson’s artwork,  but it didn’ t

sing to them because they were bicyclists. Their inti­-

mate association with this vehicle, its operation, and its

manufacture led them to approach  flight development

in a different way than their European counterparts .

        Wilbur and Orville were not in the least scared of

tilting to one side or the other in flight. Banking  in

flight seemed natural to them because a bicyclist leans

into turns. What’s more, they understood from  the

outset that the airplane needed to be  controllable

around all three axes and that the pilot had to be intimately

involved with this process while aloft . These

two insights were intuitive because the bicyclist must

constantly direct his two-wheeled vehicle  by means of a

combination of active balance and coordinated use of

handlebar s, acceleration, and braking. If  the bicyclist

doesn’t stay on top of these things every minute, he’s in

for a spill.


Passage 3

Passage A is adapted from the biography Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout (©2013 by Terry Teachout). Passage B is adapted from the biography I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, The Staples  Singers,  and  the March Up Freedom’s Highway by Greg Kot (©2014 by Greg Kot)

Passage I

        What Duke Ellington sought and got from his

“accumulation of personalities” was a loose, festive

ensemble sound far removed  from the clean  precision

of Benny Goodman’s band. He had no interest in the

smoothly blended playing that leaders like Goodman,

Jimmie Lunceford, and Artie Shaw demanded  from

their groups. He preferred to hire musicians with home­-

made techniques that were different to the point of

apparent incompatibility, then juxtapose their idiosyncratic

sounds as a pointillist painter ·might place dots of

red and green side by side on his canvas, finding inspi­-

ration in their technical limitations (“With a musician

who plays the full compass of his instrument as fast or

as slow  as  possible,  there seems,  paradoxically, less

opportunity to create”). That is why his charts never

sound quite right when performed by other groups,

however accomplished the individual players may be. It

is also why a keen-eared virtuoso like Jack Teagarden,

the greatest jazz trombonist of his generation, found it

impossible to enjoy the Ellington  band. “I  never did

like anything Ellington  ever did,” he said. “He never

had a band all in tune, always had a bad  tone quality

and bad blend.” What Teagarden meant, whether he

knew it or not, was that the band had an unconventional

tone quality, one that had little in  common  with

received ideas about how a big band ought to sound.

Asked why he hired Al Hibbler when he already had a

singer on the payroll, Ellington replied, “My ear makes

my decision.” To him, no other ear mattered.

        Billy Strayhorn, who saw Ellington ‘ s working

methods up close and understood them best, gave them

a name in a 1952 article about his mentor: “Ellington

plays the piano, but his real instrument  is the band.

Each member of his band is to him a distinctive tone

color and set of emotions, which he mixes with others

equally distinctive to produce a third thing, which I call

the Ellington Effect.” Sometimes he worked “on” his

players as a choreographer makes a ballet “on” his

dancers, passing out or dictating scraps of music, then

shaping and reshaping them on the spot into a piece that

 would later be reduced to written form. Even a work

that had already been notated was subject in the heat of

the moment to total transformation motivated solely by

the whim of the composer. The goal, he explained, was

“to mold the music around the man,” and  the men

around whom his music was so tightly molded rarely

sounded more themselves than when they ‘were playing

it.

Passage II

        In a six-member male gospel group calling them-

selves the  Trumpet  Ju bilees ,  Pops  was  third  lead,

singing mostly in a falsetto voice, and managed the

group, booking their appearances and scheduling the

rehearsals. He was a stickler for punctuality and preci­sion,

for looking and sounding sharp, for taking the job

seriously. But not everyone in the group shared his

commitment; his exasperation mou_nted  until one day he

quit. Pops decided to devote his time to a singing group

that he could run from top to bottom, that would show

up  on  time  at  every  rehearsal,  no  questions  asked.

Mostly, he wanted to sing because it was a crucial part

of his identity; since boyhood all he could remember

was the pleasure singing brought him and his older

brothers and sisters. When singing in the Trumpet

Jubilees became a chore, he turned to his family.

        “One night he came home early because the guys

in the Trumpet Jubilees didn’t show up for rehearsal,”

Mavis says. “He was disgusted. He went into the closet

in the living room and got a little guitar he had brought

home from the pawnshop. It didn’t have more than

three or four strings on it, but it was enough to get us

started.”

        Mavis, Pervls, Cleotha, and Yvonne sat in a semi­-

circle in front of their father on the beige carpet in their

living room at 506 East 33rd Street. Pops hunched over

his $7 guitar and plucked a series of notes, assigning

one to each of his children.

        “People always ask, ‘How do we get the sound we

have?’ And that came from  my  father—the sound  he

had with his family in Mississippi when they sang on

the gallery after dinner. He gave us [an E chord] and the

parts his brothers and sisters would sing. He would hit ,a

note on his guitar and would say, ‘Now, Mavis go here,’

a baritone part, because even then I had the deepest

voice. Pervis was second lead behind Pops because he

had the most experience, and he could hit those high

notes like Michael Jackson later could . Cleedi had the

high harmony. The first song he taught us was ‘Will the

Circle Be Unbroken.”‘


Passage 4

This passage is adapted from the article “Tales from the Pit” by Andrew Curry (©2014 by Smithsonian Institution).

The Messel Pit, located in central Germany, is known for its

fossils of mammals from the Eocene epoch.

        At some point around 50 million years ago, under­-

ground water came into contact with a vein of molten

rock. High-pressure steam erupted, forming a crater

with steep sides. As water seeped in, it created a lake
shaped more like a drinking glass than a soup bowl.

Any animal that fell in sank quickly to the bottom.

        Still, that alone doesn’t explain why so many land

mammals—not to mention birds, bats and insects—per­-

ished . in  the  lake  that  became  the  Messel  Pit.  One

theory is that carbon dioxide periodically bubbled up

from deep beneath the lake bottom, smothering animals

near the shore. Another possibility is that some of the

summer algae blooms  were toxic, poisoning animals

that had chosen the wrong time and place to slake their

thirst. Or perhaps smaller animals died nearby and were

washed in by small floods or rushing streams.

        The lake was so deep that oxygen didn’t circulate

near the bottom, which meant that there were no bottom

feeders around to consume the dead and dying animals.

Year after year, algae scumming the lake surface

bloomed and died, and so layers of fine clay and dead

micro-organisms drifted to the bottom . Each layer was

as thick as a strand of hair. It took 250 years to build up

an inch of mud. Over millions and millions of years,

plants and animals were preserved like flowers pressed

between the pages of a book, and the algae and other

organic matter turned into oil shale.

        Among the thousands of fossils that paleontologists

have recovered at Messel Pit are specimens representing

nearly 45 different mammal species. Those

finds are critical to understanding how warmblooded

creatures evolved. Mammals and dinosaurs appeared at

nearly the same time around 200 million years ago. But

dinosaurs were so well suited to the environment that
they crowded out any competition. Mammals lived on

the margins, mostly tiny creatures eking out a living by

eating insects under the cover of darkness. “They just

tried to stay out of the way,” says Thomas Lehmann, a

Senckenberg Research Institute palaeontologist. And so

it went for nearly 150 million years.

        Then, in an instant, everything changed, appar­ently

when an asteroid or comet struck Earth 66 million

years ago and dramatically alte red the climate, eventually

 wiping out the giant reptiles.  The diversity of

species found among the Messel Pit fossils reveals that

mammals rushed to fill every empty ecological nook

and cranny they could find. “They really tried every­-

thing—flying,  jumping,  running,  tree-dwelling,  ant­-

eating,” says Lehmann. “From the point of view of

evolution, Messel is a fantastic laboratory to see what

life might have given us.”

        Might have, but in many cases d,didn’t. Messel’s

most fascinating specimens may be those species that

have no living relatives,  though they look jarringly

familiar. In the visitor center, kids crowd around to

watch as a conservator ai; med with toothbrushes, dental

picks and scalpels cleans layers of oil shale away from

a fossil unearthed just a few weeks earlier. To me, the

skeleton of  Ailuravus macrurus looks like that of  a

giant squirrel. It’s three feet long, including its bushy

tail. Near the ribs a black stain traces the creature’s fos­silized

digestive tract. Despite its tail, Ailuravus is no

squirrel ancestor. It’s an evolutionary dead end;

Ailuravus and all of its relatives died out more than

37 million years ago. Why? Maybe they fell victim to

climate changes, or a better-adapted competitor, or dis­

appearing food sources, or simple bad luck.
        Ailuravus’ resemblance to a modern squirrel is an

example of evolutionary convergence. Given enough

time, adaptations may lead to nearly identical solutions

—bushy tails, say, or powerful, kangaroo-like hind

legs—popping up in different species. “It’s like using

the same interlocking toy bricks to build different

forms,” says Lehmann.

        And there are forms aplenty at the Messel Pit. The

exquisitely preserved fossils have provided paleontolo­gists

with unprecedented insights into the adaptive

strategies-some successful, others not—adopted by

mammals for feeding, movement and even reproduction.

For instance, the contents of the tiny prehistoric

horse ‘s stomach—fossilized leaves and grape seeds­—

indicate that the animal was not a grazer but a browser,

eating what it found on the forest floor. The palaeontologists

also found eight fossilized specimens of pregnant

mares, each carrying a single foal. That discovery sug

gests that the early horses had already adopted herd

behavior, since joint care would be the best way to

guarantee the survival of small numbers of offspring.


2018 年 12 月 ACT 考試閱讀題目

Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到 2018 年 12 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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