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過去這個週末學生考了 2018 年 5 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 5 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 5 月 (北美) SAT 考試閱讀文章
PASSAGE 1
This passage is adapted from Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie. Originally published in 1900.
It was not often that she came to the play stirred to her heart’s core by actualities. To-day a low song of longing had been set singing in her heart by the finery, the merriment, the beauty she had seen. Oh, these women who had passed her by, hundreds and hundreds strong, who were they? Whence came the rich, elegant dresses, the astonishingly coloured buttons, the knick-knacks of silver and gold? Where were these lovely creatures housed? Amid what elegancies of carved furniture, decorated walls, elaborate tapestries did they move? Where were their rich apartments, loaded with all that money could provide? In what stables champed these sleek, nervous horses and rested the gorgeous carriages? Where lounged the richly groomed footmen? Oh, the mansions, the lights, the perfume, the loaded boudoirs and tables! New York must be filled with such bowers, or the beautiful, insolent, supercilious creatures could not be. Some hothouses held them. It ached her’to know that she was not one of them—that, alas, she had dreamed a dream and it had not come true. She wondered at her own solitude these two years past—her indifference to the fact that she had never achieved what she had expected.
The play was one of those drawing-room concoctions in which charmingly overdressed ladies and gentlemen suffer the pangs of love and jealousy amid gilded surroundings. Such bon-mots are ever enticing to those who have all their days longed for such material surroundings and have never had them gratified. They have the charm of showing suffering under ideal conditions. Who would not grieve upon a gilded chair? Who would not suffer amid perfumed tapestries, cushioned furniture, and liveried servants? Grief under such circumstances becomes an enticing thing. Carrie longed to be of it. She wanted to take her sufferings, whatever they were, in such a world, or failing that, at least to simulate them under such charming conditions upon the stage. So affected was her mind by what she had seen, that the play now seemed an extraordinarily beautiful thing. She was soon lost in the world it represented, and wished that she might never return. Between the acts she studied the galaxy of matinee attendants in front rows and boxes, and conceived a new idea of the possibilities of New York. She was sure she had not seen it all—that the city was one whirl of pleasure and delight.
Going out, the same Broadway taught her a sharper lesson. The scene she had witnessed coming down was now augmented and at its height. Such a crush of finery and folly she had never seen. It clinched her convictions concerning her state. She had not lived, could not lay claim to having lived, until something of this had come into her own life. Women were spending money like water; she could see that in every elegant shop she passed. Flowers, candy, jewelry, seemed the principal things in which the elegant dames were interested. And she—she had scarcely enough pin money to indulge in such 1 outings as this a few times a month.
That night the pretty little flat seemed a commonplace thing. It was not what the rest of the world was enjoying. She saw the servant working at dinner with an indifferent eye. In her mind were running scenes of the play. Particularly she remembered one beautiful actress—the sweetheart who had been wooed and won. The grace of this woman had won Carrie’s heart. Her dresses had been all that art could suggest, her sufferings had been so real. The anguish which she had portrayed Carrie could feel. It was done as she was sure she could do it. There were places in which she could even do better. Hence she repeated the lines to herself. Oh, if she could only have such a part, how broad would be her life! She, too, could act appealingly.
PASSAGE 2
This passage and accompanying figures are adapted from Giovanni Frazzetto, Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love: What Neuroscience Can—and Can’t—Tell Us about How We Feel. 02013 by Giovanni Frazzetto.
Dr. Anna Abraham wanted to find out whether the brain operates by different mechanisms when it is exposed to a situation that is real as opposed to one that is entirely fictional. So she designed an interesting fMRI-basedl experiment that explored the brain’s reactions to situations that involved either real or fictional characters.
Participants were shown one-sentence written scenarios in which a real person named Peter was involved in situations that included George Bush or Cinderella. In one set of situations, Peter simply received information about both characters. The other set of situations involved direct interactions with the characters. What participants had to do was simple. They had to decide whether the scenarios portrayed were possible or not—that is, if they could indeed.happen in the physical reality of the world we live in.
How does the brain operate when assessing these two different types of scenarios? The results were intriguing. Common to both types of situation was some level of mental activity in parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, that are at work when we in general recall facts or events. Such activity was detectable regardless of the nature of the scenario—that is, whether the scenario was informative (when Peter only heard about the characters) or interactive (when he actually met the characters). However, there were a few striking finer distinctions in activity relative to the two scenarios and these depended on the type of character involved.
When exposed to scenarios featuring George Bush—a famous real person—the brain involved the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (amPFC) and the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). The amPFC and the PCC are medial parts of the brain that are involved in autobiographical memory retrieval as well as self-referential thinking.
When fictional characters were featured, the brain responded somewhat differently. Parts of the lateral frontal lobe, such as the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), were more active. The IFG is thought to provide mirroring capacities, but is also involved in high-level language processing. The fact that George Bush was linked to personal memory retrieval but Cinderella was not led the researchers to think that a crucial difference when assessing real or fictional scenarios might lie not so much in the degree of realness of the character involved, but in their relevance to our reality. To test this hypothesis, they peered into the brain of nineteen new volunteers who, as in the previous study, were asked to assess the possibility that a real protagonist could either imagine, hear or dream about or actually interact with a set of characters. However, this time the characters involved in the scenarios were ranked in three categories with differing degrees of personal relevance for the participants: their friends or family (high personal relevance), famous people (medium relevance) and fictional characters (low personal relevance). As predicted, the activation in the amPFC and PCC was indeed proportionally modulated by the degree of relevance of the characters described. It was highest in the case of friends and family members and lowest in the case of fictional characters.
The researchers gave the following explanation. When you encounter real characters, even if you have never met them, they will integrate into a wide, comprehensive and intricately connected structure in the conceptual storage of your mind. You are familiar with their basic behavioural features as human beings. You know more or less how they think, what kind of opinions they may produce. You are aware of the range of emotions that you can expect from them. By contrast, your mind is not equally familiar with fictional characters. No matter how much we know about the world of a fictional character there will still be something alien and inscrutable to us about that world. You may have read all the books about a fictional character, but the amount of information you have gathered about that character is still definitely limited compared with the wealth of information that is available to you about members of your family, friends, or famous real people who are part of your immediate and past experience. Basically, in order to understand a fictional character, you need to dig deeper into your imagination, because he or she is bound up to fewer nodes of reference in your network than are real, or relevant, people in your life.
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from David Grimm, ‘The Genes That Turned Wildcats into Kitty Cats.” 02014 by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Place a housecat next to its direct ancestor, the Near Eastern wildcat, and it may take you a minute to spot the difference. They’re about the same size and shape, and, well, they both look like cats. But the wildcat is fierce and feral, whereas the housecat, thanks to nearly 10,000 years of domestication, is tame and adaptable enough to have become the world’s most popular pet. Now scientists have begun to pinpoint the genetic changes that drove this to remarkable transformation. The findings, based on the first high-quality sequence of the cat genome, could shed light on how other creatures become tame.
“This is the closest thing to a smoking gun we’ve ever had,” says Greger Larson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom who has studied the domestication of pigs, dogs, and other animals. “We’re much closer to understanding the nitty-gritty of domestication than we were a decade ago.”
Cats first entered human society about 9,500 years ago, not long after people first took up farming in the Middle East. Drawn to rodents that had invaded grain stores, wildcats slunk out of the deserts and into villages. There, many scientists suspect, they mostly domesticated themselves, with the friendliest ones able to take advantage of human table scraps and protection. Over thousands of years, cats shrank slightly in size, acquired a panoply of coat colors and patterns, and (largely) shed the antisocial tendencies of their past. Domestic animals from cows to dogs have undergone similar transformations, yet scientists know relatively little about the genes involved.
Researchers led by Michael Montague, a postdoc at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, have now pinpointed some of them. The scientists started with the genome of a domestic cat—a female Abyssinian—that had been published 9 in draft form in 2007, then filled in missing sequences and identified genes. They compared the resulting genome with those of cows, tigers, dogs, and humans.
The analysis, published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed 281 genes that show signs of rapid or numerous genetic changes—a hallmark of recent selections—in domestic cats. Some appear to be involved in hearing and vision, the senses that felines rely on most. Others play a role in fat metabolism and are likely an adaptation to cats’ highly carnivorous lifestyle.
But the most intriguing findings came when the team sequenced the genomes of 22 domestic cats—representing a wide variety of breeds and locations—and compared them with the genomes of two Near Eastern and two European wildcats. The researchers uncovered at least 13 genes that changed as cats morphed from feral to friendly. Some of these, based on previous studies of knockout mice [genetically engineered micel, seem to play a role in cognition, including fear responses and the ability to learn new behaviors when given food rewards. “That jibes with what we know about the domestication of cats,” Montague says, “because they would have needed to become less fearful of new locations and individuals, and the promise of food would have kept them sticking around.”
“This is my favorite part of the paper,” says Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, a leading comparative genomicist at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not involved in the work. She notes that a few of the genes the team identified code for glutamate receptors, which play a key role in learning and memory and may have been selected in humans as well. “We’re hitting on genes that allow our brains to develop and make us interact socially.”
The team also found five genes in domestic cats that influence the migration of neural crest cells, stem cells in the developing embryo that affect I everything from skull shape to coat color. This supports a recent proposal that such cells may be the master control switches of domestication, explaining why domestic animals share common traits, such as smaller brains and certain pigmentation patterns.
So why are cats still a bit wilder than our other favorite domesticate, the dog? Co-author William Murphy, a geneticist at Texas A&M University, College Station, says the cat genome appears to have undergone less intense and more recent evolutionary pressure than that of dogs; that’s not surprising, considering that dogs may have lived with us for up to 30,000 years. “Cats were not selected for a purpose like dogs and other domesticates,” Murphy speculates.
Passage 4
Passage 1 is adapted from a speech delivered in 1854 by Stephen Douglas, “Defense of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill.” In 1854, Douglas, a senator from Illinois, proposed a bill allowing voters in the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide whether slavery should be permitted there. When enacted, the bill would effectively repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited slavery in these territories. Passage 2 is adapted from a speech delivered in 1856 by Charles Sumner, “The Crime against Kansas.” Sumner was a senator from Massachusetts.
Passage 1
The argument of [my opponents] is predicated upon the assumption that the policy of the fathers of the republic was to prohibit slavery in all the territory ceded by the old states to the Union and made United States territory for the purpose of being organized into new states. I take issue upon that statement….
[Y]ou find upon the statute books under Washington and the early Presidents provisions of law showing that in the southwestern territories the right to hold slaves was clearly implied or recognized, while in the northwest territories it was prohibited. The only conclusion that can be fairly and honestly drawn from that legislation is that it was the policy of the fathers of the republic to prescribe a line of demarcation between free territories and slaveholding territories by a natural or a geographical line, being sure to make that line correspond, as near as might be, to the laws of climate, of production, and probably of all those other causes that would control the institution and make it either desirable or undesirable to the people inhabiting the respective territories….
Now I ask the friends and the opponents of this measure to look at it as it is. Is not the question involved the simple one, whether the people of the territories shall be allowed to do as they please upon the question of slavery, subject only to the limitations of the Constitution? That is all the bill provides; and it does so in clear, explicit, and unequivocal terms…. I do not wish to deal in any equivocal language. If the principle is right, let it be avowed and maintained. If it is wrong, let it be repudiated. Let all this quibbling about the Missouri Compromise, about the territory acquired from France, about the act of 1820, be cast behind you; for the simple question is—Will you allow the people to legislate for themselves upon the subject of slavery? Why should you not?
Passage 2
Dille Nebraska Bill was in every respect a swindle. It was a swindle by the South of the North. It was, on the part of those who had already completely enjoyed their share of the Missouri Compromise, a swindle of those whose share was yet absolutely untouched…. It was a swindle of a broad territory, thus cheated of protection against slavery. It was a swindle of a great cause, early espoused by Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, surrounded by the best fathers of the republic. Sir, it was a swindle of God-given inalienable rights. Turn it over; look at it on all sides, and it is everywhere a swindle; and, if the word I now employ has not the authority of classical usage, it has, on this occasion, the indubitable authority of fitness. No other word will adequately express the mingled meanness and wickedness of the cheat.
Its character was still further apparent in the general structure of the bill. Amid overflowing professions of regard for the sovereignty of the People in the Territory, they were despoiled of every essential privilege of sovereignty. They were not allowed to choose their governor, secretary, chief justice, associate justices, attorney, or marshal—all of whom are sent from Washington; nor were they allowed to regulate the salaries of any of these functionaries, or the daily allowance of the legislative body, or even the pay of the clerks and doorkeepers; but they were left free to adopt slavery.
And this was called popular sovereignty! Time does not allow, nor does the occasion require, that I should stop to dwell on this transparent device to cover a transcendent wrong. Suffice it to say that slavery is in itself an arrogant denial of human rights, and by no human reason can the power to establish such a wrong be placed among the attributes of any just sovereignty. In refusing it such a place, I do not deny popular rights, but uphold them; I do not restrain popular rights, but extend them. And, sir, to this conclusion you must yet come, unless deaf, not only to the admonitions of political justice, but also to the genius of our own Constitution, under which, when properly interpreted, no valid claim for slavery can be set up anywhere in the national territory.
Passage 5
This passage and accompanying figure are adapted from Sandra M. Faber et al., “Staring Back to Cosmic Dawn.” ©2014 by F+W Media, Inc.
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a time machine, staring not only billions of light-years into the depths of space but also billions of years back in time. With its extraordinarily sensitive detectors above Earth’s shrouding and blurring atmosphere, HST can witness the peak of star formation at cosmic high noon, which ended about 5 billion years after the Big Bang. And at the outer limits of its capabilities, we wondered if it could detect the faintest candles of creation: the earliest galaxies made of the earliest stars at cosmic dawn, when the universe was less than a billion years old.
Those were the hopes of two of us authors (Faber and Ferguson) after NASA astronauts installed HST’s Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in 2009, which enabled Hubble to survey the infrared sky about 30 times faster than before. Within a few months, Hubble pointed the new camera at the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF)—a tiny region in the constellation Fornax only a tenth the diameter of the full Moon—and took exposures totaling about three days. Those deep HUDF images revealed some of the most distant galaxies ever found, which look very different than nearby galaxies. But the HUDF represented just a pinprick poke at the universe.
So we began an ambitious program at visible and near-infrared wavelengths as a natural successor to HUDF: the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS), pronounced “candles.” We designed CANDELS primarily to document the first one-third of galaxy evolution. The program also would enable astronomers to search for the most distant Type Ia supernovae—exploding white dwarf stars that are the best-known standard candles for measuring the universe’s recent expansion rate. CANDELS could thus test whether Type Ia supernovae are also a valid yardstick for the early universe.
CANDELS became the largest observing program ever undertaken by Hubble. The telescope devoted 600 hours—fully 10% of its observing time—to CANDELS for three years, surveying an area of sky 60 times larger than the HUDF, albeit to brighter limiting magnitudes (about 27 for CANDELS compared to 30 for the HUDF). CANDELS targeted five patches of the northern and southern skies, each about one-fourth the angular size of the Orion Nebula (M42). Each patch has been well studied from radio to X rays, giving plenty of complementary ) data across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Because remote galaxies are so faint, the five target areas were away from our Milky Way’s star-studded plane. Much as pollsters and medical researchers learn about the human population as a ; whole by studying carefully selected samples of a small number of individuals, we chose the five target areas because they’re physically representative of the universe at large.
Depending on the field, CANDELS took multiple ) images with exposure times ranging from 40 minutes to roughly 3 hours through each of two or three infrared filters. Although CANDELS surveyed a total area only about that of the full Moon, the long exposures looked so deep into the cosmos that they recorded roughly a quarter-million ancient galaxies in enough detail to reveal their sizes, shapes, and even gross internal structures. Such a rich treasure trove provides powerful new data for statistical studies of galaxy growth and evolution.
Astrophysicists will continue to analyze the wealth of observations for years to come. The data have already led to new findings and mysteries about the early universe.
2018年 5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5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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