2018 12月 SAT (亚洲/国际版) 考题回顾：所有 5 篇阅读文章！ - Ivy-Way留學部落格

过去这个周末学生考了 2018 年 12 月的 SAT 考试。如果这是你最后一次考 SAT，恭喜你完成了一个艰难的任务！

这里，我们整理了 2018 年 12 月 SAT 考试当中的 5 篇阅读文章，帮助学生准备未来的考试。

这些阅读文章可以如何的帮助你？

1. 这些文章可以让你知道你的英文程度以及准备考试的程度

首先，读这些文章。你觉得他们读起来很简单还是很难？里面有没有很多生字，尤其是那些会影响你理解整篇文章的生字？如果有的话，虽然你可能是在美国读书或读国际学校、也知道 “如何读跟写英文”，但你还没有足够的生字基础让你 “达到下一个阶段” （也就是大学的阶段）。查一下这一些字，然后把它们背起来。这些生字不见得会在下一个 SAT 考试中出现，但是透过真正的 SAT 阅读文章去认识及学习这些生字可以大大的减低考试中出现不会的生字的机率。

2. 这些文章会告诉你平时应该要读哪些文章帮你准备阅读考试

在我们的 Ivy-Way Reading Workbook（Ivy-Way 阅读技巧书）的第一章节里，我们教学生在阅读文章之前要先读文章最上面的开头介绍。虽然你的 SAT 考试不会刚好考这几篇文章，但你还是可以透过这些文章找到它们的来源，然后从来源阅读更多相关的文章。举例来说，如果你看第二篇文章 “The Problem with Fair Trade Coffee”，你会看到文章是来自 Stanford Social Innovation Review。阅读更多来自 Stanford Social Innovation Review 的文章会帮助你习惯阅读这种风格的文章。

3. 这些文章会帮助你发掘阅读单元的技巧（如果阅读单元对你来说不是特别简单的话）

如果你觉得阅读单元很简单，或是你在做完之后还有剩几分钟可以检查，那么这个技巧可能就对你来说没有特别大的帮助。但是，如果你觉得阅读很难，或者你常常不够时间做题，一个很好的技巧是先理解那一种的文章对你来说比较难，然后最后做这一篇文章。SAT 的阅读文章包含这五种类型：

文学 (literature)：1 篇经典或现代的文学文章（通常来自美国）
历史 (History)：1 篇跟美国独立/创立相关的文章，或者一篇受到美国独立 / 创立影响的国际文章（像是美国宪法或者马丁路德金恩 (Martin Luther King Jr.) 的演说）
人文 (Humanities)：1 篇经济、心理学、社会学、或社会科学的文章
科学 (Sciences)：1-2 篇地理、生物、化学、或物理的文章
双篇文 (Dual-Passages)：0-1 篇含有两篇同主题的文章

举例来说，假设你觉得跟美国独立相关的文章是你在做连续的时候觉得最难的种类，那你在考试的时候可以考虑使用的技巧之一是把这篇文章留到最后再做。这样一来，如果你在考试到最后时间不够了，你还是可以从其他比较简单文章中尽量拿分。

所有 2018 年 12 月 (亚洲) SAT 考试阅读文章

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 (亚洲) SAT 考试阅读题目

Ivy-Way 学生在上课的过程就会做到2018年4月以及其他的官方历年考题。除此之外，我们也有让学生来我们的教室或在家做模考的服务让学生评估自己的学习进度并看到成绩。如果你想预约时间来我们的教室或在家做模考，请联系我们！

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