2018 12月 SAT (美國/北美版) 考題回顧：所有 5 篇閱讀文章！ - Ivy-Way留學部落格

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 (北美) SAT 考試閱讀文章

PASSAGE 1

Not quite three weeks after leaving Hong Kong, Emma changed into a cotton cheongsam and finally set foot on Pier 19 in San Francisco. The late-afternoon sun felt much cooler than she expected. By the time she said a tearful good-bye to the other passengers, then found her luggage waiting on the dock, Emma felt scared and alone. Sister Madeleine from the college had promised in her last letter to have someone waiting for her, but no one appeared. The air smelled salty and metallic. The sunlight had given way to shade. Emma waited as the passengers disembarked and the crowd dissipated. What would become of her? Alone on the pier, she listened for the voices of Mah-mee and Auntie Go telling her what to do, but they seemed lost across the ocean. Emma took a deep breath and thought of her sister Joan’s advice: What would Lauren Bacall do? She decided to take a taxi to Lone Mountain College.

A sympathetic cabdriver, himself an immigrant from Russia, was kind and helpful. “You’re a smart one, taking taxi. These docks is no good at night,” he said, his thick, bushy mustache moving up and down as he talked. “Don’t worry, Sergei is getting you to your school nice and safe.”

Emma watched as he boded her luggage into the trunk, then opened the rear door and waited for her to step in. He was short and heavyset, yet light and quick on his feet. His hair was longer than any other man’s she’d ever seen before, having in uneven strands below the back collar of his plaid shirt. She wrapped her sweater closer against the cold wind, happy to be in the safe confines of the cab.

Sergei turned around and looked over his shoulder. “We’ll take scenic route. I want to be first one to show you this great city!”

Emma felt suddenly warm. “No, I have to …”

“Don’t worry. No extra cost for you. Sit back! Enjoy!” He winked and started the car with a great roar of the engine.

Emma’s fear quickly disappeared as Sergei drove along the Embarcadero toward the bright lights of a place he called Fisherman’s Wharf. Emma fixed her gaze out the window at the large buildings and the big cars parked along the wide, open streets—so clean and uncluttered.

“This is where you can eat best crabs in all the world!” Sergei boasted.

When the cab turned down a narrow street toward the harbor, Emma had a full view of the small fishing boats docked in the crowded marina, and she smiled at the hopeful names painted on their bows—The Lucky Star, Mary’s Dream, The Full Catch, A Pot of Gold. She sat forward and rolled down her window, inhaling the distinct aromas of fresh fish and crabs. In the narrow street, Emma could almost reach out the window to touch the crabs that scrabbled over each other in boxes, waiting to be boiled in a large black pot.

From the crowded wharf, Sergei turned onto a street he called Columbus. “Like the explorer,” he said, slowing down as he peeked at her in his rearview mirror. “And this is North Beach, where all the Italians live and eat.”

Emma looked away from the mirror. “From Italy?”

He nodded. “At one time.”

“And where do all the Russians live and eat?”

“Wherever we can,” Sergei answered with laugh.

He drove several blocks, then turned right. “This is Washington Street. Just remember, the first American president.” Then he made another right turn onto Grant Avenue. “We are now in heart of Chinatown!” His thick eyebrows flashed upward as he again caught her eyes in the mirror.

Emma’s pulse raced. Chinatown appeared much smaller than she had expected. Restaurants and storefronts painted red, green, and gold were crowded together into several blocks. She turned from window to window, soaking in all she could, seeking echoes of the life she’d left behind. Preoccupied faces she might have seen in Wanchai, or down in Causeway Bay, rushed down the bustling Grant Avenue. Names of streets flashed by—Jackson, Pacific, and back to Broadway. As if he knew what she was thinking, Sergei circled and drove through Chinatown again. Emma smiled, finding comfort in the Chinese characters written on signs and windows: The Forbidden City Nightclub, Golden Harvest, Kuo Wah Restaurant, The Great Wall of China … As different as this was from Hong Kong, San Francisco’s Chinatown held the most familiar sights she’d seen in weeks.

Emma leaned forward and whispered to Sergei, “You are very kind.”

He quickly turned back with a smile, his warm breath touching her cheek. “I know how it feels.”

PASSAGE 2

“We are in a world that’s painted black and white,” says agricultural economist Matin Qaim. “In Europe in particular, people are deeply convinced that genetically modified (GM) crops are bad for the world. If you say anything in favor of GM crops, you are talking in favor of evil.”

That designation of evil is one of the two prevailing narratives concerning genetically engineered foods. Opponents of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) tell the story that “Franken” organisms are a new technology that poses known and unknowable dangers to human health, the environment, and society at large. On the other side, proponents argue that GMOs are a harmless and necessary tool for saving a world threatened by overpopulation and a changing climate. The loudest voices on the proponent side are typically cast as shills for Big Agriculture (some of them are), while the loudest on the anti-GMO side are typically cast as fear-mongering luddites (some of them are).

The broad brush is problematic for several reasons, Qaim and others argue. The term GMO itself is a catchall that encompasses a wide range of products developed through a variety of means, each with its own risks and benefits. There are GMOs that have led to large reductions in the use of pesticides, for example, and there are GMOs that have made herbicide use skyrocket. The broad brush also fails when labeling the developers of GM technology: Commercial giants of the agrochemical pesticide industry have developed GMOs, but so have academic scientists funded by nonprofits or the public sector.

“A technology like GM crops is neither good nor bad,” Qaim says. “Talking about the impact of GMOs is way too broad.”

The diversity of engineering processes and the products that result will probably continue to grow. For example, the relatively new CRISPR technology, which allows for superprecise gene editing, may soon become a GMO tool of choice. But generally speaking, the technologies behind GMOs are decades old. And despite fears of unknown risks, GMOs have been studied extensively.

The picture drawn from decades of research is out of sync with many common public perceptions. While unforeseeable health issues are often at the forefront of public concern, foods containing GMOs have been on grocery shelves for more than 20 years. Piles of evidence suggest that eating GMOs is no riskier than eating conventional foods. Effects on the environment are more mixed. Some of the problems that have arisen, such as the uptick in the use of certain herbicides, are more about farming practices than about dangers inherent to GM technology; the same problems arise with conventional, non-GM crops.

The environmental consequences of engineered genes escaping into the wild are less clear. But while fallout can be hard to predict, the odds of such escapes actually happening can often be evaluated. With the Food and Drug Administration’s recent approval of GM salmon, for example, scientists agree that there is a slim possibility that escapees could harm native fish populations; that risk could be curtailed, however, with strict oversight about where and how such fish are farmed.

There’s also a lot of unrealized promise. GMOs are often touted as a way to boost the nutrient content of foods to fight malnutrition. Yet GMOs that are on the market have largely benefited those producing them—companies and farmers—rather than consumers. There are many health-boosting GMOs in development, including bananas with increased iron, plants that make omega-3 fish oils, and rice, sorghum and cassava enriched with vitamin A. New crops, such as those engineered to tolerate drought or excess salt in the soil, could play a crucial role.

Passage 3

This passage is adapted from “Fascinating Rhythm: Light Pulses Illuminate Rare Black Hole”02014 by The University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences.

Nearly all black holes fall into one of two classes: big, and colossal. Astronomers know that black holes ranging from about 10 times to 100 times the mass of our sun are the remnants of dying stars, and that supermassive black holes, more than a million times the mass of the sun, inhabit the centers of most galaxies.

But scattered across the universe like oases in a desert are a few apparent black holes of a more mysterious type. Ranging from a hundred times to a few hundred thousand times the sun’s mass, these intermediate-mass black holes are so hard to measure that even their existence is sometimes disputed. Little is known about how they form. And some astronomers question whether they behave like other black holes.

Now a team of astronomers has succeeded in accurately measuring—and thus confirming the existence of—a black hole about 400 times the mass of our sun in a galaxy 12 million light years from Earth. The finding, by University of Maryland astronomy graduate student Dheeraj Pasham and two colleagues, was published online in the journal Nature.

Co-author Richard Mushotzky, a UMD astronomy professor, says the black hole in question is a just-right-sized version of this class of astral objects.

“Objects in this range are the least expected of all black holes,” says Mushotzky. “Astronomers have been asking, do these objects exist or do they not exist? What are their properties? Until now we have not had the data to answer these questions.” While the intermediate-mass black hole that the team studied is not the first one measured, it is the first one so precisely measured, Mushotzky says, “establishing it as a compelling example of this class of black holes”

A black hole is a region in space containing a mass so dense that not even light can escape its gravity. Black holes are invisible, but astronomers can find them by tracking their gravitational pull on other objects. Matter being pulled into a black hole gathers around it like storm debris circling a tornado’s center. As this cosmic stuff rubs together it produces friction and light, making black holes among the universes brightest objects.

Since the 1970s astronomers have observed a few hundred objects that they thought were intermediate-mass black holes. But they couldn’t measure their mass, so they couldn’t be certain. “For reasons that are very hard to understand, these objects have resisted standard measurement techniques,” says Mushotzky.

Pasham focused on one object in Messier 82, a galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major. Messier 82 is our closest “starburst galaxy,” where young stars are forming. Beginning in 1999 a NASA satellite telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, detected X-rays in Messier 82 from a bright object prosaically dubbed M82 X-1. Astronomers, including Mushotzky and co-author Tod Strohmayer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, suspected for about a decade that the object was an intermediate-mass black hole, but estimates of its mass were not definitive enough to confirm that.

Between 2004 and 2010 NASA’s Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite telescope observed M82 X-1 about 800 times, recording individual X-ray particles emitted by the object. Pasham mapped the intensity and wavelength of X-rays in each sequence, then stitched the sequences together and analyzed the result.

Among the material circling the suspected black hole, he spotted two repeating flares of light. The flares showed a rhythmic pattern of light pulses, one occurring 5.1 times per second and the other 3.3 times per second—or a ratio of 3:2.

The two light oscillations were like two dust motes stuck in the grooves of a vinyl record spinning on a turntable, says Mushotzky. If the oscillations were musical beats, they would produce a specific syncopated rhythm like a Latin-inflected bossa nova.

In music, this is a 3:2 beat. Astronomers can use a 3:2 oscillation of light to measure a black hole’s mass. The technique has been used on smaller black holes, but it has never before been applied to intermediate-mass black holes.

Pasham used the oscillations to estimate that M82 X-1 is 428 times the mass of the sun, give or take 105 solar masses. He does not propose an explanation for how this class of black holes formed. “We needed to confirm their existence observationally first,” he says. “Now the theorists can get to work.”

Passage 4

Passage 1 is from a speech delivered in 1926 by Calvin Coolidge, “Address before the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Washington, aDC.” Passage 2 is adapted from Stuart Chase and F. J. Schlink, Your Money’s Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer’s Dollar. ©1927 by Stuart Chase and F. J. Schlink.

Passage 1

It is to be seen that advertising is not an economic waste. It ministers to the true development of trade. It is no doubt possible to waste money through wrong methods of advertising, as it can be wasted through wrong methods in any department of industry. But rightfully applied, it is the method by which the desire is created for better things. When that once exists, new ambition is developed for the creation and use of wealth. The uncivilized make little progress because they have few desires. The inhabitants of our country are stimulated to new wants in all directions. In order to satisfy their constantly increasing desires they necessarily expand their productive power. They create more wealth because it is only by that method that they can satisfy their wants. It is this constantly enlarging circle that represents the increasing progress of civilization.

A great power has been placed in the hands of those who direct the advertising policies of our country, and power is always coupled with responsibilities. No occupation is charged with greater obligations than that which partakes of the nature of education. Those engaged in that effort are changing the trend of human thought. They are molding the human mind. Those who write upon that tablet write for all eternity. There can be no permanent basis for advertising except a representation of the exact truth. Whenever deception, falsehood, and fraud creep in they undermine the whole structure. They damage the whole art. The efforts of the government to secure correct labels, fair trade practices, and equal opportunity for all our inhabitants is fundamentally an effort to get the truth into business.

The Government can do much in this direction by setting up correct standards but all its efforts will fail unless it has the loyal support of the business men of the Nation. If our commercial life is to be clean and wholesome and permanent in the last resort, it will be because those who are engaged in it are determined to make it so. The ultimate reformers of business must be the business men themselves. My conception of what advertising agencies want is a business world in which the standards are so high that it will only be necessary for them to tell the truth about it. It will never be possible to create a permanent desire for things which do not have a permanent worth.

Passage 2

The great bulk of the things which we consumers buy are not reviewed by any impartial testing body. Most of them advance upon us from behind a great smoke screen of advertising. Given time enough, and trial and error enough, quality will in many cases make itself felt. But consider the waste of this trial and error method as against a permanent source to which we might turn for the results of scientific tests and the setting of impartial standards.

The United States Government has solved this problem some time since, for its own purposes, and provides a working model of how to do it, and what is to be gained from it. Each year the Government buys some $300,000,000 of supplies and equipment—ranging all the way from thumbtacks to dredging machines; from baseballs to battleships. Nearly every kind of thing the general consumer buys, the Government at Washington buys—though in not such great variety—foodstuffs, textiles, clothing, furniture, building materials, office supplies, sporting goods, toilet articles… everything. But in buying much of this material, the several [government] purchasing agents pay little attention to… magazine covers, nor yet to super-salesmen….They pay attention to technical advice from the Bureau of Standards. Half way between Washington [DC] and Chevy Chase [Maryland], these great laboratories rise. Skilled chemists, physicists, engineers, research workers, in a hundred fields are passing continually and relentlessly upon the relative quality of the goods which the purchasing agent proposes to buy. During the last fiscal year, the Bureau made no less than 180,000 tests. For an operating cost of $2,000,000, it is estimated that the Bureau of Standards saves the Government in the neighborhood of $100,000,000 every year—an investment which nets fifty-fold.

Why cannot this technique be extended to aid the consumer at large as it has aided the United States Government? If it has helped to secure better and cheaper gas masks and dreadnoughts, why should it not help to secure better and cheaper boots, vacuum cleaners, breakfast foods and houses?

Passage 5

One of the most important effects of the Pleistocene Ice Age is something that is difficult to observe visually but is quite predictable if you think about it a bit. It is the fact that there was a massive transfer of water from the oceans to the land during the glacial periods. It has been estimated that at the maximum of the most recent glacial period, about twenty thousand years ago, sea level was approximately 120 meters lower than it is at present. Along most shorelines, dry land extended far out into what is now quite deep water. A map of the world as it was then would look quite different from the one we are familiar with today.

One hundred and twenty meters over the entire ocean adds up to a very large amount of water, about 3 percent of the present ocean volume. All of this water, evaporated from the sea, was transported to the continents as water vapor in the atmosphere, fell as snow, and accumulated as the glaciers of the Ice Age. Where the ice was thick, as in parts of Canada and Scandinavia, for example, an enormous weight was placed on a relatively small area of the continental crust. Slowly but steadily, the crust actually sank down into the yielding rocks of the underlying mantle in response to this burden. When the ice melted, these same areas began to rebound, and they have been slowly rising for the past ten thousand years or more.

Just how do we know that the accumulation of Ice Age glaciers lowered sea level by 120 meters? Well, it would be possible to calculate the amount of ocean surface lowering if you knew exactly how much ice was on the land, but that too is a difficult question to answer. You would need to estimate how thick the ice was, and what area of the land it covered. What seems a simple problem suddenly looks quite complicated, and to solve it required a great deal of ingenuity. Evidence began accumulating when oceanographers, studying the nature of the seafloor close to the continents, found that many river channels continue underwater, uninterrupted, far beyond the present-day shoreline. A classic example is the Hudson River, which has a deep channel extending far across the continental shelf. However, it is well known that rivers can no longer erode a valley once they enter the sea—instead, they typically deposit sediments and build up a delta. It was immediately clear that the now-submerged channels had once been above sea level. But exactly when this erosion occurred was not known and the precise amount of sea-level lowering was also difficult to determine with certainty.

Enter Richard Fairbanks, a geochemist at Columbia University, who developed a program to recover drill cores from the coral reef platform surrounding the island of Barbados. The species of coral that Fairbanks was interested in grow only right at the sea surface, and as Ice Age glaciers melted and sea level rose, the coral had grown upward to keep pace. A piece of coral recovered from 50 meters down the drill core must have been at sea level when it grew, so by dating such a sample, Fairbanks could determine quite accurately the time when sea level was 50 meters lower than at present. Repeated analyses of this sort throughout the cores allowed him to plot the change in sea level over time. Twenty-thousand-year-old corals, he found, grew near an ocean surface that was almost 120 meters below present-day sea level. Fairbanks also found that the rate of sea-level rise since the time of maximum glaciation has been quite variable. Bursts of rapid increase alternated with periods of slower change, reflecting fluctuations in the amount of melting of the ice sheet, probably the result of irregular warming of the climate over the past twenty thousand years.

2018年 12月 (北美) SAT 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！

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