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！