2018 12月 SAT (亞洲/國際版) 考題回顧：所有 5 篇閱讀文章！

過去這個週末學生考了 2018 年 12 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 2018 年 12 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 2018 年 12 月 (亞洲) SAT 考試閱讀文章

PASSAGE 1

This passage is adapted from R.K Narayan, The Edge”. (01994 by R.K. Narayan.

When pressed to state his age, Ranga would generally reply, “Fifty, sixty or eighty.” You might change your tactics and inquire, “How long have you been at this job?”

“Which job?”

“Carrying that grinding wheel around and sharpening knives.”

“Not only knives, but also scythes, clippers and every kind of peeler and cutter in your kitchen, also bread knives, even butcher’s hatchets in those days when I carried the big grindstone; in those days I could even sharpen a maharaja’s sword” (a favorite fantasy of his was that if armies employed swords he could become a millionaire). You might interrupt his loquaciousness and repeat your question, “How long have you been a sharpener of knives and other things?” “Ever since a line of moustache began to appear here,” he would say, drawing a finger over his lip. You would not get any further by studying his chin now overlaid with patchy tufts of discolored hair. Apparently he never looked at a calendar, watch, almanac or even a mirror. In such a blissful state, dad in a dhoti, khaki shirt and turban, his was a familiar figure in the streets of Malgudi as he slowly passed in front of homes, offering his service in a high-pitched, sonorous cry, “Knives and scissors sharpened.”

He stuck his arm through the frame of a portable grinding apparatus; an uncomplicated contraption operated by an old cycle wheel connected to a foot-pedal. At the Market Road he dodged the traffic and paused in front of tailor’s and barber’s shops, offering his services. But those were an erratic and unreliable lot, encouraging him by word but always suggesting another time for business. If they were not busy cutting hair or clothes (tailors, particularly, never seemed to have a free moment, always stitching away on overdue orders), they locked up and sneaked away, and Ranga had to be watchful and adopt all kinds of strategies in order to catch them. Getting people to see the importance of keeping their edges sharp was indeed a tiresome mission. People’s reluctance and lethargy had, initially, to be overcome. At first sight everyone dismissed him with, “Go away, we have nothing to grind,” but if he persisted and dallied, some member of the family was bound to produce a rusty knife, and others would follow, vying with one another, presently, to ferret out long-forgotten junk and clamor for immediate attention. But it generally involved much canvassing, coaxing and even aggressiveness on Ranga’s part; occasionally he would warn, “If you do not sharpen your articles now, you may not have another chance, since I am going away on a pilgrimage.”

“Makes no difference, we will call in the other fellow,” someone would say, referring to a competitor, a miserable fellow who operated a hand grinder, collected his cash and disappeared, never giving a second look to his handiwork. He was a fellow without a social standing, and no one knew his name, no spark ever came out of his wheel, while Ranga created a regular pyrotechnic display and passing children stood transfixed by the spectacle. “All right,” Ranga would retort, “I do not grudge the poor fellow his luck, but he will impart to your knife the sharpness of an egg; after that I won’t be able to do anything for you. You must not think that anyone and everyone could handle steel. Most of these fellows don’t know the difference between a knife blade and a hammerhead.”

Ranga’s customers loved his banter and appreciated his work, which he always guaranteed for sixty days. “If it gets dull before then, you may call me.” If he were to be assailed for defective execution, he could always turn round and retort that so much depended upon the quality of metal, and the action of sun and rain, and above all the care in handling, but he never argued with his customers; he just sharpened the knives free of cost on his next round. Customers always liked to feel that they had won a point, and Ranga would say to himself, “After all, it costs nothing, only a few more turns of the wheel and a couple of sparks off the stone to please the eye.”

PASSAGE 2

This passage is adapted from Walt Whitman’s open letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, August 1856. The full letter was published with Leaves of Grass, a collection of Whitman’s poetry.

Swiftly, on limitless foundations, the United States … are founding a literature. It is all as well done, in my opinion, as could be practicable. Each element here is in condition. Every day I go among the people of Manhattan Island, Brooklyn, and other cities, and among the young men, to discover the spirit of them, and to refresh myself. These are to be attended to; I am myself more drawn here than to those authors, publishers, importations, reprints, and so forth. I pass coolly through those, understanding them perfectly well, and that they do the indispensable service, outside of men like me, which nothing else could do. In poems, the young men of The States shall be represented, for they out-rival the best of the rest of the earth.

The lists of ready-made literature which America inherits by the mighty inheritance of the English language—all the rich repertoire of traditions, poems, histories, metaphysics, plays, classics, translations, have made, and still continue, magnificent preparations for that other plainly signified literature, to be our own, to be electric, fresh, lusty, to express the full-sized body, male and female—to give the modern meanings of things, to grow up beautiful, lasting, commensurate with America, with all the passions of home, with the inimitable sympathies of having been boys and girls together, and of parents who were with our parents.

What else can happen The States, even in their own despite? That huge English flow, so sweet, so undeniable, has done incalculable good here, and is to be spoken of for its own sake with generous praise and with gratitude. Yet the price The States have had to lie under for the same has not been a small price. Payment prevails; a nation can never take the issues of the needs of other nations for nothing. America, grandest of lands in the theory of its politics, in popular reading, in hospitality, breadth, animal beauty, cities, ships, machines, money, credit, collapses quick as lightning at the repeated, admonishing, stern words, Where are any mental expressions from you, beyond what you have copied or stolen? Where the born throngs of poets, literats, orators, you promised? Will you but tag after other nations? They struggled long for their literature, painfully working their way, some with deficient languages, some with priest-craft, some in the endeavor just to live—yet achieved for their times, works, poems, perhaps the only solid consolation left to them through ages afterward of shame and decay. You are young, have the perfectest of dialects, a free press, a free government, the world forwarding its best to be with you. As justice has been strictly done to you, from this hour do strict justice to yourself. Strangle the singers who will not sing you loud and strong. Open the doors of The West. Call for new great masters to comprehend new arts, new perfections, new wants. Submit to the most robust bard till he remedy your barrenness. Then you will not need to adopt the heirs of others; you will have true heirs, begotten of yourself, blooded with your own blood.

Passage 3

The coffee-berry borer is a pesky beetle. It is thought to destroy $500 million worth of unpicked coffee beans a year, thus diminishing the incomes of some 20 million farmers. The borer spends most of its life as a larva, buried inside a coffee berry, feeding on the beans within. To do so, it has to defy the toxic effects of caffeine. This is a substance which, though pleasing to people, is fatal to insects—except, for reasons hitherto unknown, to the coffee-berry borer. But those reasons are unknown no longer. A team of researchers led by Eoin Brodie of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Fernando Vega of the United States Department of Agriculture had a suspicion the answer lay not with the beetle itself, but with the bacteria in its gut. As they outline in a recent article, that suspicion has proved correct.

The team’s hypothesis was that the borer’s gut bacteria are shielding it by eating any caffeine it has ingested before the poison can be absorbed through the insect’s gut wall. Experiments on a laboratory-reared strain of the borer suggested this hypothesis was probably true. Initially, the larvae’s droppings were caffeine-free. When the lab-reared insects were dosed with antibiotics, this changed. Caffeine started appearing in their droppings, and the animals themselves began, as it were, dropping off the perch. Over the course of an experiment lasting 44 days after their guts had been sterilized (a period that let the insects complete an entire life cycle of egg, larva, pupa and adult), the population of the experimental colonies fell by 95%—and even those larvae that did not die had trouble pupating. Clearly, immunity to caffeine was being conferred by bacteria. The question was, which ones?

To answer that, Dr. Brodie and Dr. Vega turned to wild beetles. They collected samples from seven coffee-growing countries and combed through the insects’ gut floras, looking for features in common. By constructing what was, in effect, a Venn diagram of microbes from these populations, and also those from their lab-bred strain, they were able to focus on the bacterial species found in all of them.

They tried growing each of these on a medium whose only source of carbon and nitrogen for metabolism was caffeine. Some of the bugs were able to survive on this diet, others were not. Of the survivors, the most abundant in beetle guts was Pseudomonas fulva. This species, a genetic analysis showed, is blessed with an enzyme called caffeine demethylase, which converts caffeine into something that can be dealt with by normal metabolic enzymes.

Kill P. fulva, then, and you would probably kill the borer. But that is easier said than done. Even if spraying coffee plantations with antibiotics were feasible and would do the job (by no means certain, for the larvae would have to ingest sufficient antibiotic for the purpose), it would be undesirable. The profligate use of antibiotics encourages resistance, thus making them less effective for saving human lives.

There might, though, be another way of getting at P. fulva. This would be to craft a type of virus, known as a bacteriophage, specific to the bug—an approach already being investigated for the treatment of human illness caused by a different species of Pseudomonas.

In practice, more than one type of phage would probably be needed, for if P. fulva were knocked out, another caffeine-consuming bacterium in the beetle’s gut might end up replacing it. But, regardless of the details, this study has introduced a novel way of thinking about pest control.

Passage 4

The conference where US Supreme Court justices start deciding a case is purposely structured. “In the conference, we go around the table in order of seniority, from the chief justice down to the most recent appointment,” Justices Stephen Breyer explained, “and everybody speaks once before anybody speaks twice.” This ensures that every opinion is represented. “Each person might spend five minutes per case…They’re trying to explain their reasons for which direction they’re leaning. And everybody writes down what everybody else says. And then there’ll be some discussion back and forth afterwards. And on the basis of that discussion—which is a preliminary discussion—it’s fairly clear how the Court is likely to break down.”

The group dynamic that the conference unintentionally avoids was first empirically studied by Solomon Asch in a landmark psychology experiment. This study not only illuminates what goes on in the Supreme Court, but also explains how the role played by a single individual can shift an entire group’s opinion.

In Asch’s study each participant was placed in a room with several other people. The participants were told they would be tested for visual acuity. The task seemed simple enough: the group was shown three straight lines of varying lengths, and each person was asked to determine which of the three lines matched a fourth line. It was pretty straightforward; the lengths were so glaringly different that you certainly didn’t need a magnifying glass or a ruler. But what the participant didn’t know was that the other “subjects” in the room were really actors, and all of them had been instructed to give the same wrong answer. As the actors called out their erroneous answers one by one, the real participant was bewildered. But something strange happened: rather than stick to their guns, most participants began to doubt themselves and their lone dissenting opinion. What if I misunderstood something, or what if I’ve been looking at the lines from a weird angle? Time and again, they figured that it was best to go along with the group—and save themselves the embarrassment of being odd man out. Indeed, 75 percent of subjects joined the group in giving the wrong answer in at least one round.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss the study participants as being too easily manipulated. But regardless of how independent-minded and steadfast we may think we are, we’re all tempted at times to align ourselves with a group. We may worry that if we voice an unpopular viewpoint others will doubt our intelligence, taste, or competence. Or we may just not want to make waves. The challenge is to know when to speak up.

Breyer explained that even when the thought “Oh, I’m the only one” arises, he’ll speak up, saying something like, “I actually don’t agree, but I’ll swallow it because there’s no point writing a dissent in this. I don’t feel that strongly about it.” He added, “If I’m all by myself, I have to feel pretty strongly before I write a dissent.” This reasoning makes perfect sense. If justices were to write a formal dissent every time they disagreed on a small point, the Court would come to a standstill. But the fact that a dissenter speaks up can make all the difference.

As Asch found, although the sway of group conformity is incredibly strong, it depends on unanimity for its power. In a variation of the line study, Asch ran the experiment exactly as before (an unsuspecting participant, a room full of actors giving the wrong answer), but this time he added a single actor who gave the right answer. This lone dissenting voice was enough to break the spell, as it “gave permission” to the real participant to break ranks with the other members of the group.

Passage 5

Passage 1 is adapted from David Quammen. The Fight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature. ©1998 by David Quammen. Passage 2 is adapted from Cecile LeBlanc, “Tiny Earthworms’ Big Impactf ©2011 by Society for Society for Science & the Public.

Passage 1

Charles Darwin was concerned with the collective and cumulative impact of earthworms in the wild. On this count, he made large claims for them. He knew they were numerous, powerful, and busy. A German scientist had recently come up with the figure 53,767 as the average earthworm population on each acre of the land he was studying, and to Darwin this sounded about right for his own turf in England too. Every one of those 53,767 worms, he realized, spent much of its time swallowing. It swallowed dead plant material for its sustenance, and it swallowed almost anything else in its path (including tiny rock particles) as it burrowed. The rock particles were smashed even finer in the worm’s gizzard, mixed with the plant material and the digestive juices in its gut, and passed out behind in the form of “castings”. The castings contained enough natural glue to give them a nice crumb structure, characteristic of good soil, and were also biochemically ideal for nurturing vegetation. Collectively, over years and decades and centuries, this process transformed dead leaves and fractured rock into the famous and all-important “vegetable mould.” But that wasn’t all.

At least some of those species of earthworm had the habit of depositing their castings above ground. A worm would back tail-first out of its burrow and unload a neat castellated pile around the entrance. As a result, Darwin recognized, soil from a foot or more underground was steadily being carried up to the surface. In many parts of England, he figured, the worm population swallowed and brought up ten tons of earth each year on each acre of land. Earthworms therefore were not only creating the planet’s thin layer of fertile soil; they were also constantly turning it inside out. They were burying old Roman ruins. They were causing the monoliths of Stenehenge to subside and topple. On sloping land, where rainwater and wind would sweep their castings away and down into valleys, they were making a huge contribution to erosion. No wonder Darwin concluded: “Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first suppose.”

Passage 2

In the 1990s, biologist Cindy Hale took a field trip to northern Minnesota. There she saw a changed landscape. Gone were forest floor plants like ferns and wildflowers and understory plants like bushes and tree saplings that make up the middle height of the forest. She and other ecologists on the field trip were given a surprising reason for the loss of the plants and the ecosystem they sustained: invasive earthworms.

To get an idea of the earthworm’s destruction, picture these forests before European settlers—and their earthworms—arrived in the Great Lakes region around 200 years ago. Leaves, twigs and other plant debris had accumulated on the forest floor over the years and created a thick layer of what is called duff. Fungi, bacteria and microscopic invertebrates such as mites slowly broke down this debris. The duff held moisture like a sponge, nurturing the growth of many understory plants like wildflowers, shrubs and tree seedlings. Small animals and birds nested and fed on the forest floor and in understory foliage.

When the first European earthworms arrived, they began doing what they always do: munching, mixing and moving. Some plant litter earthworms munched through the forest floor and its fungi and bacteria. Burrowing species, like the common nightcrawler, pulled leaf litter down into their holes to finish munching and mixing. Slowly, earthworms destroyed the duff on which wildflowers, understory shrubs and tree seedlings depended.

Before long, says forestry scientist Lee Frelich “Earthworms become the dominant living thing that influences the ecosystem. They influence the type of plants that can grow, the type of insects that can live there, the habitat for wildlife species and the structure of the soil.”

In one recent study, scientists looked at how invasive earthworms have affected a type of litter-dwelling mite. Mites help break down a forest floor’s duff and spread fungus spores, the tiny reproductive units similar to seeds that give rise to more fungi. Today, more than 100,000 mites of more than 100 species may occupy each square meter of northern forest soil. That may sound like a lot, but this study showed that in soil free of invasive earthworms, the mites seem to fare better. They were 1 between 72 and 1,210 times more abundant and the number of mite species was one to two times higher.

2018年 12月 (亞洲) SAT 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！

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