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過去這個週末學生考了 2018 年 11 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 11 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 11 月 (北美) SAT 考試閱讀文章
PASSAGE 1
This passage is adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri , The Lowland. 02013 by Jhumpa Lahiri. Udayan and Subhash are two brothers who live in Calcutta, India. Pother Panchali (1955) is an award-winning India film.
When they were old enough, when they were permitted to leave the house, they were told not to lose sight of one another. Together they wandered down the winding lanes of the enclave, behind the 5 ponds and across the lowland, to the Playing field where they sometimes met up with other boys. They went to the mosque at the corner, to sit on the cool of its marble steps, sometimes listening to a football game on someone’s radio the guardian of the mosque never minding.
Eventually they were allowed to leave the enclave, and to enter the greater city. To walk as far as their legs would carry them, to board trams and busses by themselves. Still the mosque on the corner, a place of worship for those of a separate faith, oriented their daily comings and goings.
At one point, because Udayan suggested it, they began to linger outside Technicians’ Studio, where Satyajit Ray had shot Pather Panchali, where Bengali 1 cinema stars spent their days. Now and then, because someone who knew them was employed on the shoot, they were ushered in amid the tangle of cables and wires, the glaring lights. After the call for silence, after the board was clapped, they watched the
director and his crew taking and retaking a single scene, perfecting a handful of lines. A day’s work, devoted to a moment’s entertainment.
They caught sight of beautiful actresses as they :emerged from, their dressing rooms, shielded by sunglasses, stepping into waiting cars. Udayan was the one brave•enough to ask them for autographs. He was blind to self-constraints, like an animal incapable of perceiving certain colors. But Subhash strove to minimize his existence, as other animals merged with bark or blades of grass.
In spite of their differences one was perpetually confused with the other, so that when either name was called both were conditioned to answer. And sometimes it was difficult to know who had answered, given that their voices were nearly indistinguishable. Sitting over the chessboard they were mirror images: one leg bent, the other splayed out, chins propped on their knees.
They were similar enough in build to draw from a single pile of clothes. Their complexions, a light coppery compound derived from their parents, were identical. Their double-jointed fingers, the sharp cut of their features, the wavy texture of their hair.
Subhash wondered if his placid nature was regarded as a lack of inventiveness, perhaps even a failing, in his parents’ eyes. His parents did not have to worry about him and yet they did not favor him. It became his mission to obey them, given that it wasn’t possible to surprise or impress them. That was what Udayan did.
In the courtyard of their family’s house was the most enduring legacy of Udayan’s transgressions. A trail of his footprints, created the day the dirt surface was paved. A day they’d been instructed to remain ) indoors until it had set.
All morning they’d watched the mason preparing the concrete in a wheelbarrow, spreading and smoothing the wet mixture with his tools. Twenty-four hours, the mason had warned them, before leaving.
Subhash had listened. He had watched through the window, he had not gone out. But when their mother’s back was turned, Udayan ran down the long wooden plank temporarily set up to get from ) the door to the street.
Halfway across the plank he lost his balance, the evidence of his path forming impressions of the soles of his feet, tapering like an hourglass at the center, the pads of the toes disconnected.
The following day the mason was called back. By 4 then the surface had dried, and the impressions left by Udayan’s feet were permanent. The only way to repair the flaw was to apply another layer. Subhash wondered whether this time his brother had gone ) too far.
But to the mason their father said Leave it be. Not’ for the expense or effort involved, but because he believed it was wrong to erase steps that his son had taken.
And so the imperfection became a mark of distinction about their home. Something visitors noticed, the first family anecdote that was told.
PASSAGE 2
Passage 1 is adapted from a speech delivered in 1980 by Thrugood Marshall, ‘Remarks Made at the Second Circuit Judicial Conference’, Passage 2 is adapted from Steven Maize, “Playing Favourites- © 2014 by the Economist Newspaper Limited.
Passage 1
In the courts,… impartiality is required, and political compromise has no role at all. Judges are supposed to be reflective, considering the controversy before them in light of the broader legal schemes, Constitutional and otherwise, which guide the country. Decisions traditionally are justified by opinions announcing reasoning derived from earlier cases and established principles; raw political power is never a sufficient justification for any judicial decision. Constitutional rights should never be compromised by the courts in the name of expediency.
The judiciary operates under a premise of neutrality rather than partisanship. Federal judges are insulated, as much as possible, from political pressure which might interfere with principled decision making. (Federal] judges have life tenure and are free from threats of economic retaliation for . unpopular decisions. In addition, we cannot have a personal stake in the outcome of any case before us, and the Code of Judicial Conduct cautions to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.
The reason for this strict requirement of impartiality is that the judiciary stand as the referee whenever the individual citizen and his government conflict Such’an arbiter must be independent and neutral. The whole purpose of the separation of powers, is to establish an equal branch of the government which can check the er branches when their political compromises an generalized,focus result in unfairness to the individual. If the government acts unfairly, the court stands as.a guardian, forcing the other branches to recognize that basic principles have been violated and that certain persons have been denied their fundamental right ‘equal treatment under law. It can never be the greatest good for the greatest number to deny the equal moral worth of a fellow human being Similarly, when the interests of individuals dash, there cannot be any danger of predisposition by the court if each litigant is to be confident that he has received equal treatment Before the bar, all men and women must stand equal, with their claims resolved solely on the strength of legal principles.
Passage 2
Jerome Frank, a mid-20th-century legal thinker, is said to have claimed that justice is a function of what the judge had for breakfast Don’t let their black robes, serious miens and pledges of fealty to the fool you, Mr. Frank warned: judicial decisions are not cool applications of objective Rather, they are manifestations of personal predilections and biases. Mr. Frank’s observation seems to apply all too well to today’s Supreme Court When ruling big, controversial cases, the justices split fairly reliably along party lines dedicated by their appointing presidents. It wasn’t always this way. Until 1937, … party simply wasn’t factor in high court decisions. Only in recent decades, have party politics infiltrated the marble halls of the Supreme Court, and only in the past few-years have they become the best -predictor of its major ruling. The Supreme Court has never divided along partisan lines as neatly as it does today.
A high court that splits into ideological camps while purporting to provide “equal justice under law” calls into question its very legitimacy. It makes a mockery of Chief Justice John Roberts’s hoary claim that a justice’s job is to “call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat”. It gives one the sense that when the Chief Justice asserts he has “no agenda,” he’s protesting a bit too much. Indeed, new research by three political scientists shows just how avidly the justices go to bat for causes they identify with. In their paper, Lee Epstein of the University of Southern California and two colleagues examined 4,519 votes in 516 Supreme Court free-speech cases from 1953 to 2010 to determine whether “justices defend the speech they hate.” The answer rarely. Contrary to stereotypes about the relative friendliness of conservatives or liberals to free-speech claims generally, Ms Epstein and her co-authors found that the justices are “opportunistic free speechers.” Some principle might be found to account for the suspicious patterns in their votes, but the evidence looks pretty [clear]. Justices’ votes “are neither reflexively pro- or anti-the first amendment”; they are, instead, for or against “the speaker’s ideological enclave.”
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from Elizabeth Preston,’ Found: The Ideal Fattness for Elephant Seals7C2014 by Kalmbach publishing CO.
Northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) spend 9 to 10 months of the year at sea. Twice annually, the animals haul their enormous bodies ashore. In the winter, they gather on beaches in Mexico and Southern California for breeding and mating. While on land, the seals fast. Then they go back to the ocean. In the spring, the seals return to the same beaches to molt, shedding their fur and even some skin before spending the rest of the year in the ocean.
During their travels, northern elephant seals may migrate as far as Alaska. They make dives almost half a mile deep, pursuing squid, fish, and other animals unfortunate enough to be in their paths. But to regain the body mass that they lost while fasting on land, they have to bank their calories. Energy that they save while swimming can be spent on longer dives. Energy gained from a stomach full of squid can be used to hunt some more.
Taiki Adachi, a graduate student in,the polar science department at Tokyo’s Graduate’University* for Advanced Studies, wanted to learn their,a migrating seal’s increasing blubberiness affects its swimming. Does a fatter, more buoyant seal need to spend less energy on swimming and diving? And is this beneficial overall?
He and his colleagues developed a new type accelerometer to find out When worn by an elephant seal, the device can monitor cyclic patterns in speed and count each surge forward as one stoke of the flippers. By also tracking depth and swimming the device can constantly Measure the seal’s rate of strokes per distance traveled. Seals that make more strokes are working harder.
The researcher captured 14 female Mirounga angustirostris and at-Led the accelerometers to their backs. They also Cratfitted each seal with radio and GPS transmitters. Half the seals were monitored during their “short migration,* the two months following breeding. The rest were tracked during the seven-month ‘long migration” that follows molting. Although the scientists were limited by the battery life of their instruments, they were able to collect data over the entire short migration, as well as the first 140 days or so of the long migration. The GPS
transmitters announced when the elephant seals had returned to their home beaches. There, scientists used radio signals and plain old binoculars to pick out tagged seals from the rest of the colony. After removing the loggers, they sent the seals basic their way.
For any point in time, the scientists could estimate a seal’s fatness by seeing how much it drifted down in the water when it wasn’t actively swimming. At the beginning of each migration, the starved seals had negative buoyancy.” In other words, they tended to sink. But as their roving fish binge progressed, the seals became more and more buoyant.
As the blubbery sees gained buoyancy became easier. They needed slightly mole flipper strokes to make their deep dives, but many fewer strokes to ascend. This mean that overall, fatter seals used fewer strokes to cover the same distance. The scientists had predicted that saving energy in swimming would allow the seals to spend more energy elsewhere, and this seemed to be true. As the ‘–.seals got fatter;:they doubled the amount of time they spent-at the bottom of their dives, from about 10 minutes to 20. (The bottom of the dive is where ) they find the most food.)
After two months at sea, all the seals were still negatively buoyant, though their blubber had notably increased their buoyancy. After about five months, when the loggers stopped gathering data for the long migration, 5 out of 7 seals had become ‘neutrally buoyant”—when drifting in the ocean, they didn’t sink or rise.
Fatter seals can spend less energy swimming and more time eating, which gives them even more ) energy. So do they keep gaining blubber indefinitely? “Yes, I think they get fatter to become positively buoyant,” Adachi says. If he could have monitored the seals all the way to the end of their long migration, he thinks he would have seen them gain i so much blubber that they tended to float. Other research has found that elephant seals become positively buoyant, he adds.
Adachi thinks the best state for elephant seals— the body type that keeps them swimming ) most efficiently—is neutral buoyancy. Yet the hungry animals, gearing up for their next fast, keep eating beyond that Adachi says that when elephant seals come to shore after their long migration, 40 percent of their body mass is fat. For them, it’s the perfect beach body.
Passage 4
This passage and accompanying figure are adapted from ‘ Free Exchange:A Mean Fear 02016 by The Economist Newspaper Limited.
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable,” John Kenneth Galbraith, an irreverent economist, once said. Since e economic output represents the aggregated activity 5 of billions of people, influenced by forces seen and unseen, it is a wonder forecasters ever get it right Yet economists cannot resist trying. As predictions for 2016 are unveiled, it is worth assessing the soothsayers’ records.
Forecasters usually rely on two different predictive approaches. One is theory-based, shaped by how economists believe economies behave. The other is data-based, shaped by how economies have behaved in the past. The simplest of the theoretical is bunch is the Solow growth model, named for Robert Solow, a Nobel-prize winning economist It posits that poorer countries should generally invest more and grow faster than rich ones. Central banks and other big economic institutions use far more e complicated formulas, often grouped under the bewildering label of “dynamic stochastic. general e. equilibrium” (DSGE) models. These.try anticipate-” the ups and downs of big economies by modelling the behaviour of individual households and firms.
The empirical approach is older; indeed, it was the workhorse of government casting in the 1940s and 1950s. Data-based model analyse the relationship between-hundreds or thousands of economic variables, from the price of potatoes to snowfall in January. They lien work out how zinc sales, for example, affect investment and growth in they ears that follow.
Both strategies have faced withering criticism. DSGE models, for all their complexity, are typically built around oversimplifications of how markets function and people behave. Data-based models suffer from the ‘shortcomings. In a paper published in 1995 Greg Mankiw of Harvard University argued that they face insurmountable statistical problems. Too many things tend to happen at once to isolate cause and effect liberalised trade might boost growth, or liberalisation might be the sort of thing that governments do when growth is rising, or both liberalisation and growth might follow from third factor. And there are too many potential influences on growth for economists to know whether a seemingly strong relationship between variables is real or would disappear if they factored in some other relevant titbit, such as the wages of Canadian lumberjacks.
In practice, most forecasters combine the two approaches and inject, when necessary, a dose of common sense. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), for instance, relies on a global-model, hulk in part on economic theory and in part on data analysis. The global projections generated by that hybrid model are combined with country-specific details to produce country-level forecasts, The country forecasts are then checked for consistency against the global projections and adjusted when; necessary—to make sure, for example, that most countries do not show strong trade growth when the global projection heralds a decline in trade. A recent analysis of the International Monetary Fund’s forecasts by the organisation’s,Independent Evaluation Office concluded that their accuracy was “comparable to that of private-sector forecasts”. But how accurate is that?
Not very, Lani Pritchett and Larry Summers of Harvard University argued in 2014. Forecasters overestimate the extent to which the future will look like the recent past, they reckon. It is assumed that fast-growing countries will keep speeding along while the economic tortoises continue crawling. “Regression to the mean is perhaps the single most robust and empirically relevant fact about cross-national growth rates.” Say Messrs Pritchett and Summers. In other words, booming countries slow down and slumping ones speed up.
Passage 5
This passage is adapted from Patricia Waldron, The Herbivores Dilemma. 02016 by Boyce , Thompson institute
A recent study by professor Georg Jander’s group at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) finds that corn plants may make serious trade-offs when defending themselves against multiple types of insects. Some corn varieties make themselves more vulnerable to aphids after generating defensive compounds against nibbling caterpillars. The results may lead to the development of corn plants that are naturally more resistant to certain insects.
“It’s like a metabolic dilemma,” said Vered Tzin, a postdoctoral scientist in the Jander laboratory. “When caterpillars are feeding, there’s a change in the metabolic pathway that makes chemical defense compounds that protects the plants from caterpillars. But when we studied aphids, it seems like the same compounds that make the plants caterpillar-resistant, have the potential to make them aphid-susceptible.” Corn plants face an onslaught of different herbivorous insects that chew on leaves, pierce and suck out sap or plant cell fluids, bore into stems or consume the roots. Researchers estimate that insects consume 6-19 percent of the world corn crop each year, while also spreading bacteria and vircues between plants.
To defend against these-attacks, corn plants,have both physical and chemical defense mechanisms. To yard off aphids, plants make callose, a carbohydrate that can seal off openings between cells and stop ) aphids front drawing out the sap from the tissues through their need-like stylet. Callose formation is triggered-by a defensive compound called DIMBOA. In the event of a caterpillar attack, plants produce a compound called MBOA that deters their feeding. Both MBOA and DIMBOA are in the same metabolic pathway and come from a molecule called a benzoxazinoider.
Because both defensive compounds come from the same parent molecule, the researches suspected that feeding by one group of insects, such as chewing caterpillars, might affect the plant’s ability to fight off another group, like aphids.
To test this idea, the researchers grew corn seedlings of a common variety, called B73, and exposed some to caterpillars They then seeded them with aphids and counted the number of offspring that the aphids produced on pristine plants, compared to previously nibbled ones. The lids consistently produced more ring or that had been pre-chewed by caterpillars.
But when the researchers tested other corn varieties, individual results would vary. They repeated the experiment with 17 different lines of corn from around the world. Like B73, same varieties supported more aphid offspring after a caterpillar feeding, while the pre-feeding reduced the-number. of aphids or had no effect on other varieties. The variation they saw is likely due to the evolutionary history of a different corn varieties. Aphids ten o be more common in temperate areas, such as the Midwest, where they spread barely yellow dwarf virus and cereal yellow dwarf virus, while caterpillars are a larger problem in tropical areas. Different varieties likely arose from breeding programs aimed at fighting off the threats that corn faces in different environments.
To identify genes that may play a role in this interaction, the researchers bred B73 plants with another variety called Ky21, which hosted fewer aphid offspring after caterpillar feeding. Using a genetic approach, they identified three genome regions on chromosomes 1, 7 and 10 that appear to have a significant impact on a corn plant’s aphid susceptibility. By breeding for specific genetic variations that naturally reduce caterpillar and aphid damage, scientists can develop new crop varieties that will require fewer pesticide applications.
2018年 11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11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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