2018 3月 SAT (美国/北美版) 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 3 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 3 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 3 月 (北美) SAT 考试阅读文章

PASSAGE 1

This passage is adapted from Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. ©2007 by Dinaw Mengestu. Naomi, an eleven-year-old on a school break, is visiting the narrator, a family friend from Ethiopia, at the store he manages. They have made a plan to read the novel The Brothers Karamazov together.

I read forty or fifty pages that first day. Naomi read none. After I read the first page I waited for her to pick up where I had left off, but she insisted, in a voice that bordered on pleading, that I continue.

“One more,” she said at first. And when that page had been completed, she added another “one more” to that, until eventually there were so many “pleases” and “pretty pleases” and “come on, pleases” that I was left utterly defenseless.

I looked up every couple of pages to see if Naomi was still paying attention, and of course she was. Her attention, in fact, never seemed to waver. I felt her staring at me sometimes when my eyes were focused on the page, and I realized she was taking it all in, not just the words, but me, and the scene that we had created together. I tried not to notice too much, to simply just live, but that was impossible. Every time I looked at her I became aware of just how seemingly perfect this time was. I thought about how years from now I would remember this with a crushing, heartbreaking nostalgia, because of course I knew even then that I would eventually find myself standing here alone. And just as that knowledge would threaten to destroy the scene, Naomi would do something small, like turn the page too early or shift in her chair, and I would be happy once again.

I had more customers then, and I treated each interruption to our reading as an assault on my privacy. When someone I didn’t know entered the store, Naomi would mark where I had left off so that I could keep my eyes on the person wandering around the aisles. She would take the book out of my hand, put her finger on the exact word or sentence I had just concluded, and hold it there until I returned. I kept one man, who came to the I counter with a single roll of toilet paper under his arm, waiting for more than a minute while I finished reading a page I had just started. At first he smiled and was charmed by what he saw. The charm wore off when I refused to acknowledge him. He responded by slamming the roll on the counter, inches from my face, and storming out. Naomi and I read on.

I slipped into the characters as I read. I grumbled and bellowed, slammed my fist onto the counter, and threw my arms wide open. I knew this was exactly what my father would have done had he been the one reading. He would have made the story an event, as grand and real as life. He must have told me hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of stories, not just at night, but throughout the course of any given day, over breakfast, during lunch, in the middle of a conversation he might have been carrying on with my mother or friends. There was no wrong time with him, or if there was, he didn’t live long enough for me to see it.

The stories he invented himself he told with particular delight. They all began the same way, with the same lighthearted tone, with a small wave of the hand, as if the world were being brushed to the side, which I suppose for him it actually was.

“Ah, that reminds me. Did I tell you about—
The farmer who was too lazy to plow his fields
The hyena who laughed himself to death
The lion who tried to steal the monkey’s dinner
The monkey who tried to steal the lion’s dinner?”

If I had heard the story before, I let him tell it to me again. His performance was that good, his love of a story that obvious. When Fyodor Karamazov spoke, I waved my hands wildly in the air. I grumbled in a deep baritone and tried as hard as I could to do my father proud.

“Ah, you fools,” I shouted out, and Naomi smiled in delight. Naomi found each of the characters as real as anyone she met in the street.

“Oooh, I hate him,” she would cry out after a particularly cruel antic on the part of the elder Karamazov. When it came to Alyosha, though, the youngest and gentlest of the Karamazov brothers, she was willing to fall completely in love.

PASSAGE 2

Perhaps the first experiment ever conducted in the field of social psychology suggests that humans are often faster and stronger when they test their speed and strength in the company of other people, rather than alone.

That study, conducted at Indiana University in the late 1890s, was the brainchild of Norman Triplett, a cycling enthusiast and a sports aficionado. In dozens of experiments he pushed cyclists to ride as fast as they could on stationary bikes. Across his observations, Triplett noticed that the cyclists tended to ride faster when other cyclists rode nearby. One cyclist rode a mile in 2 minutes 49 seconds when alone, but managed to ride the same mile in 2 minutes 37 seconds in the company of four pacing cyclists; similarly he rode ten miles in 33 minutes 17 seconds while riding alone, but rode the same distance two minutes faster when riding with several pacers. Triplett acknowledged that his observations were far from rigorous, so he conducted an experiment to show that the effect persisted in a tightly controlled lab study.

Triplett recruited forty children, ages eight to thirteen, to complete his study in 1897. He measured how quickly the students could wind a fishing reel so that a small flag attached to the line traveled a distance of sixteen meters. The task was simple but novel, and none of the children had played with fishing rods before the experiment. They performed the task both alone and in the presence of other children, and Triplett noticed that they wound the reels faster in the presence of others. He concluded that an audience enables people to “liberate latent energy” not normally available when they perform alone.

Science doesn’t always tell simple stories, and other researchers challenged Triplett’s groundbreaking results well into the twentieth century. While some researchers replicated Triplett’s effect—now known as the social facilitation effect—others found the opposite effect, known as social inhibition. Joseph Pessin and Richard Husband asked participants in their study to learn a simple maze either blindfolded alone or blindfolded in the presence of other people. The blindfolded participants traced their fingers along the maze, and reversed each time they encountered one of ten dead ends. Instead of performing better in front of an audience, Pessin and Husband’s participants completed the maze more quickly when they were alone.

Inconsistencies like these persisted for years, until social psychologist Bob Zajonc proposed a solution: it all depends on the nature of the task. Audiences accentuate our instinctive responses and make it more difficult to override those responses in favor of more carefully considered alternatives. The children in Triplett’s experiment devoted little thought and attention to frantically winding the experimental fishing reel. In contrast, learning a maze is difficult, and it requires concentration. Pessin and Husband’s maze learners were probably distracted by the knowledge that they were being watched, and feared making a mistake in front of an audience.

Zajonc avoided experimenting with humans at first, choosing to observe the behavior of seventy-two cockroaches instead. With a small team of researchers, he devised two small athletic tasks that required the cockroaches to scuttle from a brightly lit area in a small box to a more appealing darker compartment. Some of the cockroaches completed a simpler task, in which they ran along a straight runway from the glare of the box to the darkened goal compartment. The remaining cockroaches completed a more difficult task, traversing a more complex maze before they could escape the light. Some of the cockroaches completed these tasks alone, but the researchers also built a small audience box to force some of the athletic cockroaches to compete in front of an audience of roach spectators. Just as the researchers predicted, the cockroaches were much quicker to cover the straight runway when watched by an audience, reaching the darkened goal compartment an average of twenty-three seconds more quickly when they were performing before a crowd. But the cockroach athletes responded very differently to an audience when they were faced with the complex maze, reaching the goal seventy-six seconds more quickly when they were alone. The same audience that pushed the cockroaches to perform the simpler task more quickly also delayed them when the task was more complex.

Passage 3

Passage 1 is adapted from Christine DeII’Amore, “Why Do Zebras Have Stripes? New Study Offers Strong Evidence.” ©2014 by National Geographic Society. Passage 2 is adapted from Laura Poppick, “Why Do Zebras Have Stripes? It’s Not for Camouflage.” ©2015 by Purch.

Passage 1

The question of why zebras have stripes has puzzled scientists—including Darwin—for over a century, leading to five main hypotheses: that the stripes repel insects, provide camouflage, confuse predators, reduce body temperature, or help the animals interact socially.

For the first time, scientists played all of these theories against each other in a statistical model—and the result was pretty much, well, black and white.

“We found again and again and again [that] the only factor which is highly associated with striping is to ban biting flies,” said study leader Tim Caro, a biologist at the University of California, Davis.

For the study, Caro and colleagues collected data from a vast range of sources, including museum collections and historical maps.

First, the team looked at variations in striping patterns across the seven living species of the equid group—which includes horses, asses, and zebras—and their 20 subspecies. Most have some sort of striping somewhere on their bodies.

They also noted where the stripes occurred on the body—for instance, the face, belly, or rump.

The team then mapped where current and extinct equid species live, where biting flies are found, the ranges of predators like lions and hyenas, distribution of forests, and other environmental factors that could influence the evolution of stripes. The data was then entered into a statistical model to find out which variable best explains striping.

The results showed that the range of striped species overlaps with where biting flies are most active—regardless of species and where the stripes occur on the body, according to the study. Brenda Larison, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies stripes in plains zebras, said the new study’s approach is “broad brush,” and that more specific research may be needed.

That’s why “the story is likely to be much more complex, and this is unlikely to be the last word on the subject,” said Larison.

Passage 2

Researchers based at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have produced one of the most comprehensive zebra stripe studies yet by examining how 29 different environmental variables influence the stripe styles of plains zebras at 16 different sites from south to central Africa.

The scientists found that the definition of stripes along a zebra’s back most closely correlated with temperature and precipitation in a zebra’s environment, and did not correlate with the prevalence of lions or tsetse flies in the region. These findings suggest that torso stripes may do more to help zebras regulate their body temperature than to avoid predators and tsetse flies.

“This wall we kept hitting up against was, ‘Well, why do zebra have to have stripes for predation? Other animals have predators, and they don’t have stripes,— said study co-author Brenda Larison. “And other animals get bitten by flies, and they don’t have stripes, either.”

Other animals also need to regulate body temperature, or thermoregulate, Larison pointed out, but zebras may especially benefit from an extra cooling system because they digest food much less efficiently than other grazers in Africa. As such, zebras need to spend longer periods of time out in the heat of the midday sun, eating more food.

The team found that the plains zebras with the most-defined torso stripes generally lived in the Northern, equatorial region of their range, whereas those with less-defined torso stripes were more common in the Southern, cooler regions of the range—a finding that supports the thermoregulation explanation.

Still, the researchers have not experimentally tested the theory that black and white stripes may generate small-scale breezes over a zebra’s body, and some researchers don’t think stripes can actually create this effect.

“I don’t think that you would want to have a lot of black hairs along the top of your back if you wanted to try to keep cool,” said Tim Caro, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of California, Davis, who studies zebra stripes but was not involved in the new study. “It’s kind of the last color that you would want.”

Caro said regions with warmer, wetter climates are particularly susceptible to several species of disease-carrying flies other than the tsetse flies that the team considered in their study, and that the relationship the researchers found may actually be a function of fly avoidance, not thermoregulation.

Passage 4

This passage is from Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation. Originally published in 1842. After spending six months traveling in North America, British novelist Charles Dickens wrote an account of his travels and of the people he encountered.

But I may be pardoned, if on such a theme as the general character of the American people, and the general character of their social system, as presented to a stranger’s eyes, I desire to express my own opinions in a few words, before I bring these volumes to a close.

They are, by nature, frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate. Cultivation and refinement seem but to enhance their warmth of heart and ardent enthusiasm; and it is the possession of these latter qualities in a most remarkable degree, which renders an educated American one of the most endearing and most generous of friends. I never was so won upon, as by this class; never yielded up my full confidence and esteem so readily and pleasurably, as to them; never can make again, in half a year, so many friends for whom I seem to entertain the regard of half a life.

These qualities are natural, I implicitly believe, to the whole people. That they are, however, sadly sapped and blighted in their growth among the mass; and that there are influences at work which endanger them still more, and give but little present promise of their healthy restoration; is a truth that ought to be told.

It is an essential part of every national character to pique’ itself mightily upon its faults, and to deduce tokens of its virtue or its wisdom from their very exaggeration. One great blemish in the popular mind of America, and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust. Yet the American citizen plumes2 himself upon this spirit, even when he is sufficiently dispassionate to perceive the ruin it works; and will often adduce it, in spite of his own reason, as an instance of the great sagacity and acuteness of the people, and their superior shrewdness and independence.

“You carry,”S says the stranger, ‘this jealousy and distrust into every transaction of public life. By repelling worthy men from your legislative assemblies, it has bred up a class of candidates for the suffrage, who, in their very act, disgrace your Institutions and your people’s choice. It has rendered you so fickle, and so given to change, that your inconstancy has passed into a proverb; for you no sooner set up an idol firmly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments: and this, because directly you reward a benefactor, or a public servant, you distrust him, merely because he is rewarded; and immediately apply yourselves to find out, either that you have been too bountiful in your acknowledgments, or he remiss in his deserts. Any man who attains a high place among you, from the President downwards, may date his downfall from that moment; for any printed lie that any notorious villain pens, although it militate directly against the character and conduct of a life, appeals at once to your distrust, and is believed. You will strain at a gnat in the way of trustfulness and confidence, however fairly won and well deserved; but you will swallow a whole caravan of camels, if they be laden with unworthy doubts and mean suspicions. Is this well, think you, or likely to elevate the character of the governors or the governed, among you?’

The answer is invariably the same: ‘There’s freedom of opinion here, you know. Every man thinks for himself, and we are not to be easily overreached. That’s how our people come to be suspicious.’

Passage 5

Every year, some unlucky people get the flu even though they’ve had their seasonal shot. One reason, according to a new study, might be their gut bacteria. Researchers have shown that, at least in mice, a strong immune response to the flu vaccine relies in part on signals from intestinal microbes. The findings could help explain variation in the response to the vaccine and suggest ways to maximize its effectiveness.

The new evidence came out of a curious observation that researchers revealed in a 2011 paper. Bali Pulendran, an immunologist at Emory University in Atlanta, and colleagues were looking for genetic signatures in the blood of people injected with the trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine—a mixture of three flu strains. They wanted to know whether the expression of specific genes in the immune system’s white blood cells correlated with the amount of vaccine-specific antibodies in the blood—which indicates how strongly a person’s immune system responds to the shot, and how much protection that person will gain against future infections. In a long list of genes associated with strong vaccine response, the researchers found an unexpected one: the gene that codes for a protein called toll-like receptor 5 (TLR5).

“We thought this must just be a coincidence,” Pulendran says. TLR5 is a sensor of flagellin, a protein that makes up the appendages of bacteria. Why would a receptor that interacts with bacteria in the gut have anything to do with the body’s response to a virus injected into muscle? Maybe, the group thought, B cells—the white blood cells that produce antibodies—receive a signal from bacteria that boosts their activity.

To explore that possibility, the researchers designed a new study using mice. They gave the flu vaccine to three different groups: mice genetically engineered to lack the gene for TLR5, germ-free mice with no microorganisms in their bodies, and mice that had spent 4 weeks drinking water laced with antibiotics to obliterate most of their microbiome.

Seven days after vaccination, all three groups showed significantly reduced concentrations of vaccine-specific antibodies in their blood compared with vaccinated control mice. The reduction was less marked by day 28, as blood antibody levels appeared to rebound. But when the researchers observed the mice lacking T1r5 on the 85th day after vaccination, their antibodies seemed to have dipped again, suggesting that without this bacterial signaling, the effects of the flu vaccine wane more quickly.

The researchers saw similar results when they gave mice a polio vaccine, which, like the flu shot, uses an inactivated virus and doesn’t contain so-called adjuvants—additives that boost the body’s immune response. Pulendran and colleagues suggest that these weaker, adjuvant-lacking vaccines rely more heavily on bacterial signaling. (They didn’t see the same results with the live virus in the yellow fever vaccine, for example.)

No specific type of bacteria seemed more important than another in prompting the vaccine response. But further experiments showed a major role for macrophages—immune cells that display pieces of the virus to activate B cells and that can also recognize flagellin. Pulendran’s favored explanation is that flagellin manages to break through the lining of the intestines to circulate in the body and activate B cells and macrophages, amping up antibody production. But where and how the interaction happens “is a huge mystery,” he says. “We don’t have the full answer.”

2018年 3月 (北美) SAT 考试阅读题目

Ivy-Way 学生在上课的过程就会做到2018年3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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