2018 10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 10 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 10 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 10 月 (北美) SAT 考試閱讀文章

PASSAGE 1

Miss Grace Spivey arrived in Threestep, Georgia, in August 1938. She stepped off the train wearing a pair of thick-soled boots suitable for hiking, a navy blue dress, and a little white tam that rode the waves of her red hair at a gravity-defying angle. August was a hellish month to step off the train in Georgia, although it was nothing, she said, compared to the 119 degrees that greeted her when she arrived one time in Timbuktu, which, she assured us, was a real 1 place in Africa. I believe her remark irritated some of the people gathered to welcome her on the burned grass alongside the tracks. When folks are sweating through their shorts, they don’t like to hear that this is nothing compared to someplace else. Irritated or not, the majority of those present were inclined to see the arrival of the new schoolteacher in a positive light. Hard times were still upon us in 1938, but, like my momma said, “We weren’t no poorer than we’d ever been,” and the citizens of Threestep were in the 1 mood for a little excitement.

Miss Spivey looked like just the right person to give it to them. She was, by almost anyone’s standards, a woman of the world. She’d gone to boarding schools since she was six years old; she’d studied French in Paris and drama in London; and during what she called a “fruitful intermission” in her formal education, she had traveled extensively in the Near East and Africa with a friend of her grandmother’s, one Janet Miller, who was a medical doctor from Nashville, Tennessee. After her travels with Dr. Miller, Miss Spivey continued her education by attending Barnard College in New York City. She told us all that at school the first day. When my little brother Ralphord asked what did she study at Barnyard College, Miss Spivey explained that Barnard, which she wrote on the blackboard, was the sister school of Columbia University, of which, she expected, we all had heard.

It was there, she told us, in the midst of trying to find her true mission in life, that she wandered one afternoon into a lecture by the famous John Dewey, who was talking about his famous book, Democracy and Education. Professor Dewey was in his seventies by then, Miss Spivey said, but he still liked to chat with students after a lecture—especially female students, she added—sometimes over coffee, and see in their eyes the fire his words could kindle.

It was after this lecture and subsequent coffee that Miss Spivey had marched to the Teacher’s College and signed up, all aflame. Two years later, she told a cheery blue-suited woman from the WPA1 that she wanted to bring democracy and education to the poorest, darkest, most remote and forgotten corner of America.

They sent her to Threestep, Georgia.

Miss Spivey paused there for questions, avoiding my brother Ralphord’s eye.

What we really wanted to know about—all twenty-six of us across seven grade levels in the one room—was the pearly white button hanging on a string in front of the blackboard behind the teacher’s desk up front. That button on a string was something new. When Mavis Davis (the only bona fide seventh grader, at age thirteen) asked what it was for, Miss Spivey gave the string a tug, and to our astonishment, the whole world—or at least a wrinkled map of it—unfolded before our eyes. Her predecessor, Miss Chandler, had never once made use of that map, which was older than our fathers, and until that moment, not a one of us knew it was there.

Miss Spivey showed us on the map how she and Dr. Janet Miller had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and past the Rock of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea. Using the end of a ruler, she gently tapped such places as Morocco and Tunis and Algiers to mark their route along the top of Africa. They spent twenty hours on the train to Baghdad, she said, swathed in veils against the sand that crept in every crack and crevice.

“And can you guess what we saw from the train?” Miss Spivey asked. We could not. “Camels!” she said. “We saw a whole caravan of camels.” She looked around the room, waiting for us to be amazed and delighted at the thought.

We all hung there for a minute, thinking hard, until Mavis Davis spoke up.

“She means like the three kings rode to Bethlehem,” Mavis said, and she folded her hands smugly on her seventh-grade desk in the back of the room.

Miss Spivey made a mistake right then. Instead of beaming upon Mavis the kind of congratulatory smile that old Miss Chandler would have bestowed on her for having enlightened the rest of us, Miss Spivey simply said, “That’s right.”

PASSAGE 2

Building good transit isn’t a bad idea, but it can actually backfire if the new trains and buses merely clear space on highway lanes for those who would prefer to drive—a group that, historically, has included almost everyone with access to a car. To have environmental value, new transit has to replace and eliminate driving on a scale sufficient to cut energy consumption overall. That means that a new transit system has to be backed up by something that impels complementary reductions in car use—say, the physical elimination of traffic lanes or the conversion of existing roadways into bike or bus lanes, ideally in combination with higher fuel taxes, parking fees, and tolls. Needless to say, those ideas are not popular. But they’re necessary, because you can’t make people drive less, in the long run, by taking steps that make driving more pleasant, economical, and productive.

One of the few forces with a proven ability to slow the growth of suburban sprawl has been the ultimately finite tolerance of commuters for long, annoying commutes. That tolerance has grown in recent decades, and not just in the United States, but it isn’t unlimited, and even people who don’t seem to mind spending half their day in a car eventually reach a point where, finally, enough is enough. That means that traffic congestion can have environmental value, since it lengthens commuting times and, by doing so, discourages the proliferation of still more energy-hungry subdivisions—unless we made the congestion go away. If, in a misguided effort to do something of environmental value, municipalities take steps that make long-distance car commuting faster or more convenient—by adding lanes, building bypasses, employing traffic-control measures that make it possible for existing roads to accommodate more cars with fewer delays, replacing tollbooths with radio-based systems that don’t require drivers even to slow down—we actually make the sprawl problem worse, by indirectly encouraging people to live still farther from their jobs, stores, schools, and doctors’ offices, and by forcing municipalities to further extend road networks, power grids, water lines, and other civic infrastructure. If you cut commuting time by 10 percent, people who now drive fifty miles each way to work can justify moving five miles farther out, because their travel time won’t change. This is how metropolitan areas metastasize. It’s the history of suburban expansion.

Traffic congestion isn’t an environmental problem; traffic is. Relieving congestion without doing anything to reduce the total volume of cars can only make the real problem worse. Highway engineers have known for a long time that building new car lanes reduces congestion only temporarily, because the new lanes foster additional driving—a phenomenon called induced traffic. Widening roads makes traffic move faster in the short term, but the improved conditions eventually attract additional drivers and entice current drivers to drive more, and congestion reappears, but with more cars—and that gets people thinking about widening roads again. Moving drivers out of cars and into other forms of transportation can have the same effect, if existing traffic lanes are kept in service: road space begets road use.

One of the arguments that cities inevitably make in promoting transit plans is that the new system, by relieving automobile congestion, will improve the lives of those who continue to drive. No one ever promotes a transit scheme by arguing that it would make traveling less convenient—even though, from an environmental perspective, inconvenient travel is a worthy goal.

Passage 3

This passage is adapted from Sabrina Richards, “Pleasant to the Touch.” 02012 by The Scientist.

In the early 1990s, textbooks acknowledged that humans had slow-conducting nerves, but asserted that those nerves only responded to two types of stimuli: pain and temperature. Sensations of pressure and vibration were believed to travel only along myelinated, fast-signaling nerve fibers, which also give information about location. Experiments blocking nerve fibers supported this notion. Preventing fast fibers from firing (either by clamping the relevant nerve or by injecting the local anesthetic lidocaine) seemed to eliminate the sensation of pressure altogether, but blocking slow fibers only seemed to reduce sensitivity to warmth or a small painful shock.

Hakan Olausson and his Gothenburg University colleagues Ake Vallbo and Johan Wessberg wondered if slow fibers responsive to gentle pressure might be active in humans as well as in other mammals. In 1993, they corralled 28 young volunteers and recorded nerve signals while gently brushing the subjects’ arms with their fingertips. Using a technique called microneurography, in which a fine filament is inserted into a single nerve to capture its electrical impulses, the scientists were able to measure how quickly—or slowly—the nerves fired. They showed that soft stroking prompted two different signals, one immediate and one delayed. The delay, Olausson explains, means that the signal from a gentle touch on the forearm will I reach the brain about a half second later. This delay identified nerve impulses traveling at speeds characteristic of slow, unmyelinated fibers—about 1 meter/second—confirming the presence of these fibers in human hairy skin. (In contrast, fast-conducting fibers, already known to respond to touch, signal at a rate between 35 and 75 m/s.)

Then, in 1999, the group looked more closely at the characteristics of the slow fibers. They named these “low-threshold” nerves “C-tactile,” or CT, I fibers, said Olausson, because of their “exquisite sensitivity” to slow, gentle tactile stimulation, but unresponsiveness to noxious stimuli like pinpricks.

But why exactly humans might have such fibers, which respond only to a narrow range of rather subtle stimuli, was initially mystifying. Unlike other types of sensory nerves, CT fibers could be found only in hairy human skin—such as the forearm and thigh. No amount of gentle stroking of hairless skin, such as the palms and soles of the feet, prompted similar activity signatures. Olausson and his colleagues decided that these fibers must be conveying a different dimension of sensory information than fast-conducting fibers.

Although microneurography can give information about how a single nerve responds to gentle brushing and pressure, it cannot tease out what aspect of sensation that fiber relays, says Olausson. He wanted to know if that same slow nerve can distinguish where the brush touches the arm, and whether it can discern the difference between a goat-hair brush and a feather. Most importantly, could that same fiber convey a pleasant sensation?

To address the question, Olausson’s group sought out a patient known as G.L. who had an unusual nerve defect. More than 2 decades earlier, she had developed numbness across many parts of her body after taking penicillin to treat a cough and fever. Testing showed that she had lost responsiveness to pressure, and a nerve biopsy confirmed that G.L.’s quick-conducting fibers were gone, resulting in an inability to sense any pokes, prods, or pinpricks below her nose. But she could still sense warmth, suggesting that her slow-conducting unmyelinated fibers were intact.

Upon recruiting G.L., Olausson tested her by brushing her arm gently at the speed of between 2-10 centimeters per second. She had more trouble distinguishing the direction or pressure of the brush strokes than most subjects, but reported feeling a pleasant sensation. When the researchers tried brushing her palm, where CT fibers are not found, she felt nothing.

Olausson used functional MRI studies to examine which areas of the brain lit up when G.L.’s arm was gently brushed to activate CT fibers. In normal subjects, both the somatosensory and insular cortices were activated, but only the insular cortex [which processes emotion] was active when researchers brushed G.L.’s arm. This solidified the notion that CT fibers convey a more emotional quality of touch, rather than the conscious aspect that helps us describe what we are sensing. CT fibers, it seemed, specifically provide pleasurable sensations.

Passage 4

Passage 1 is adapted from a speech delivered in 1898 by Albert J. Beveridge, “March of the Flag.” Passage 2 is adapted from a speech delivered in 1900 by William Jennings Bryan, “Imperialism.”

Passage 1

Fellow-Citizens: It is a noble land that God has given us; a land that can feed and clothe the world; a land whose coast lines would enclose half the countries of Europe; a land set like a sentinel between the two imperial oceans of the globe; a greater England with a nobler destiny. It is a mighty people that He has planted on this soil; a people sprung from the most masterful blood of history; a people perpetually revitalized by the virile … working-folk of all the earth; a people imperial by virtue of their power, by right of their institutions, by authority of their heaven-directed purposes—the propagandists and not the misers of liberty. It is a glorious history our God has bestowed upon His chosen people; a history whose keynote was struck by Liberty Bell; a history heroic with faith in our mission and our future; a history of statesmen, who flung the boundaries of the Republic out into unexplored lands … a history of soldiers, who carried the flag across blazing deserts and through the ranks of hostile mountains, even to the gates of sunset; a history of a multiplying people, who overran a continent in half a century … a history divinely logical, in the process of whose tremendous reasoning we find ourselves to-day. … Think of the thousands of Americans who will pour into Hawaii and Porto Rico when the Republic’s laws cover those islands with justice and safety!

Think of the tens of thousands of Americans who will invade … the Philippines when a liberal government … shall establish order and equity there! Think of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who will build a … civilization of energy and industry in Cuba, when a government of law replaces the double reign of anarchy and tyranny!—think of the prosperous millions that Empress of Islands will support when, obedient to the law of political gravitation, her people ask for the highest honor liberty can bestow, the sacred Order of the Stars and Stripes, the citizenship of the Great Republic!

Passage 2

If it is right for the United States to hold the Philippine Islands permanently and imitate European empires in the government of colonies, the Republican party ought to state its position and defend it, but it must expect the subject races to protest against such a policy and to resist to the extent of their ability.

The Filipinos do not need any encouragement from Americans now living. Our whole history has been an encouragement not only to the Filipinos, but to all who are denied a voice in their own government. If the Republicans are prepared to censure all who have used language calculated to make the Filipinos hate foreign domination, let them condemn the speech of Patrick Henry. When he uttered that passionate appeal, “Give me liberty or give me death,” he exprest a sentiment which still echoes in the hearts of men.

Let them censure Jefferson; of all the statesmen of history none have used words so offensive to those who would hold their fellows in political bondage. Let them censure Washington, who declared that the colonists must choose between liberty and slavery. Or, if the statute of limitations has run against the sins of Henry and Jefferson and Washington, let them censure Lincoln, whose Gettysburg speech will be quoted in defense of popular government when the present advocates of force and conquest are forgotten.

Some one has said that a truth once spoken can never be recalled. It goes on and on, and no one can set a limit to its ever-widening influence. But if it were possible to obliterate every word written or spoken in defense of the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence, a war of conquest would still leave its legacy of perpetual hatred, for it was God himself who placed in every human heart the love of liberty. He never made a race of people so low in the scale of civilization or intelligence that it would welcome a foreign master.

Those who would have this Nation enter upon a career of empire must consider, not only the effect of imperialism on the Filipinos, but they must also calculate its effects upon our own nation. We cannot repudiate the principle of self-government in the Philippines without weakening that principle here.

Passage 5

This passage is adapted from Peter A. Ensminger, Life Under the Sun. 02001 by Peter A. Ensminger.

Many millennia before the invention of herbicides, farmers simply plowed their fields to control weeds. Even today, plowing can constitute a valuable part of an integrated weed-management program. Although plowing kills standing weeds, farmers have long known that it often leads to the emergence of new weed seedlings in a few weeks.

Ecologists have shown that a farmer’s field can have 50,000 or more weed seeds per square meter buried beneath the soil surface. Plant physiologists have shown that seeds buried more than about one centimeter below the soil surface do not receive enough light to germinate. Do the blades of a plow, which can reach more than a foot beneath the soil surface, bring some of these buried seeds to the surface where their germination is induced by exposure to sunlight?

Two ecologists, Jonathan Sauer and Gwendolyn Struik, began to study this question in the 1960s. In a relatively simple experiment, they went to ten different habitats in Wisconsin during the night and collected pairs of soil samples. They stirred up the soil in one sample of each pair in the light and stirred up the other sample of each pair in the dark. They then exposed all ten pairs to natural sunlight in a greenhouse. For nine of the ten pairs of soil samples, weed growth was greater in the samples stirred up in light. They concluded that soil disturbance gives weed seeds a “light break,” and this stimulates their germination.

More recently, Karl Hartmann of Erlangen University in Germany reasoned that when farmers plowed their fields during the day, the buried weed seeds are briefly exposed to sunlight as the soil is turned over, and that this stimulates their germination. Although the light exposures from plowing may be less than one millisecond, that can be enough to induce seed germination. Thus the germination of weed seeds would be minimized if farmers simply plowed their fields during the night, when the photon fluence rate [the rate at which photons hit the surface] is below 1015 photons per square meter per second. Although even under these conditions hundreds of millions of photons strike each square millimeter of ground each second, this illumination is below the threshold needed to stimulate the germination of most seeds.

Hartmann says that he was very skeptical when he first came up with this idea because he assumed that such a simple method of weed control as plowing at nighttime must be ineffective or it would have been discovered long ago. But the subsequent experiments, first presented at a 1989 scientific meeting in Freiburg, Germany, clearly demonstrated that the method can be effective.

Hartmann tested his idea by plowing two agricultural strips near Altershausen, Germany. The farmer Karl Seydel cultivated one strip, repeated threefold, at around midday and the other strip at night. No crops were planted in these pilot experiments, to avoid possible competition with the emerging weeds. The results were dramatic. More than 80 percent of the surface of the field plowed in daylight was covered by weeds, whereas only about 2 percent of the field plowed at night was covered by weeds.

This method of weed control is currently being used by several farmers in Germany. Because many of the same weed species that invade farmers’ fields in Germany also invade fields elsewhere in the world, this method should be successful elsewhere. In fact, recent studies at universities in Nebraska, Oregon, Minnesota, Denmark, Sweden, and Argentina support this idea.

2018年 10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10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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