過去這個週末學生考了 2019 年 6 月的 ACT 考試。如果這是你最後一次考 ACT，恭喜你完成了一個艱難的任務！
我們整理了 2019 年 6 月 ACT 考試當中的 4 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 ACT 考試中出現，但是透過真正的 ACT 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 ACT 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。閱讀更多來自這些地方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。ACT 的閱讀文章包含這五種類型：
- 社會研究：人類學，考古學，傳記，商業，經濟，教育，地理，歷史，政治學，心理學和社會學。
- 自然科學：解剖學，天文學，生物學，植物學，化學，生態學，地質學，醫學，氣象學，微生物學，自然史，生理學，物理學，技術和動物學。
- 散文小說：短篇小說或短篇小說的摘錄。
- 人文：回憶錄和個人散文，以及建築，藝術，舞蹈，倫理，電影，語言，文學批評，音樂，哲學，廣播，電視和戲劇等內容領域。
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 2019 年 6月 ACT 考試閱讀文章
Passage 1
This passage Is adapted from the novel Bitter Grounds by Sandra Benftez (©1997 by Sandra Benftez).
Alvaro Tobar gripped the wheel of his convertible
and leaned into the approaching curve. He loved the
sense of power he experienced when be was in the
driver’s seat. He’d owned the car since before the war,
and maybe now that the war had ended, he would buy a
newer model .This convertible he would not sell, how-
ever. He patted the wheel as if reassuring the vehicle of
his loyalty.
It was a late afternoon in early November. The air
was heavy with coming rain, surely one of the last
downpours before the dry season. Alvar6 would wait
for the fust drops to fall before he stopped to raise the
car’s top. He was only a few kilometers. from San
Salvador and, once inside the city limits, only minutes
from home.
Alvaro’s thoughts turned to his cotton harvest. For
the past week, he’d been on the eastern coast, at his
plantation outside Usulutin. On this trip, be had helped
ready the hacienda for the harvest, which would start at
month’s end: Much was riding on his cotton. He always
referred-to it as “mi algodon.” My cotton, a venture that
he, and not his mother, controlled. He pictured his
mother’s strong, handsome face. Eugenia Herrera de
Tobar. At seventy-three, dolla Eugenia was still the
undisputed ruler of the Tobar family. As the doyenne,
she controlled her business and private affairs with as
much vigor as she had since her husband’s death.
Because she had Alvaro and his lour older sisters to
raise, she took over the reins of her husband’s cattle-
ranching operation and his vast property holdings and
never relinquished them. Under her control, her bus-
band’s enterprises prospered. Oh, there were moments
when she cried out against the fate that had sent her
down a path. strewn with so much responsibility “It’s a
heavy burden life has handed me,” she liked to say. “A
burden I long to have lifted from my shoulders.”Even
as a youngster, hoivever, when Alvaro heard his
mother’s lamentations, he had glimpsed into her heart
as if her cheat were made of glass. In her heart, he bad
seen the pleasure the burden gave her.
It was power that obsessed her. And could he
blame her? He had had a whiff of the heady scent of
power himself. He smelled it in Ills cotton. He’d been in
the business for four years. The first three years were
hopeful ones. There was a world war, and unlike coffee,
cotton prices rose steadily, thanks to the growth of the
local textile industry.
From the start, his mother had not encouraged him
to strike out on his own. “Only fools go into cotton
when there’s cattle to be raised or coffee to be grown,”
she said; compelling him to work all the harder to prove
her. wrong. He had spent months scouting for the right
land among the family’s properties on the flat coastal
plain. When he found it, he had lovingly sown the best
seed himself. And he had kept a vigil on the growing
plants. Lying in a hut next to the field, he was present at
the moment the buds broke into flower.
Once Alvaro reached Avenida Cuscatlan, he accel-
erated, weaving in and out of traffic. Cotton. A man
took a risk growing it, for cotton might never make the
money coffee would, but Alvaro did not allow this
thought to perturb him. He had various means of
making a living: There was real estate to be bought and
sold, a season the bank board, the shrimping business
on the coast. He had disbanded his law practice years
ago, although, at times, he took a case or two on a con-
sulting basis. But it was in the cotton business that he’d
placed his heart and money. Last year, so sure was he of
a better-than-ever yield, that he’d invested his wife’s
money in it as well. It’ was the inheritance from her
grandfather, bequeathed to her twelve years before.
Magda had entrusted It to Alvaro, and he had carefully
managed the money, seeing to its growth. When the
time was right, she would use her inheritance for her
own business scheme: a gift shop named Tesoros.
The disaster of last year’s harvest flooded his
mind. He sank back against the. seat, remembering his
cotton, the bolls swollen and soon to burst into a cloud
of white, infested malevolently with weevils.
But this year would be different. He had taken
measures. He had spent the better part of the week
stockpiling insecticides that would insure this crop
against failure. He had not told Magda any of this, of
course. Why cause her concern? It was all a matter of
cash flow, of money transferred from one account to the
other, of bank loans and promissory notes. This year,
because of insecticides, would bring his first bumper
crop.
Passage 2
This passage Is adapted from The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Deference by Malcolm Oladwell (©2002 by Malcolm Oladwell).
There is a concept in cognitive psychology called
the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of
space in our brain for certain kinds of information. Sup-
pose, for example, that I played you a number of different
musical tones, at random, and asked you to identify
each one with a number. If I played you a really low
tone, yob would call it one, and if I played you a
medium tone you would call it two, and a high tone you
would call three. The purpose of the test is to find out
how long you can continue to distinguish among different
tones. Most people can divide tones into oitly about
six different categories before they begin to make mistakes
and start lumping different tones in the same cate-
gory. This is a remarkably consistent finding. If, for
example, I played you five very high pitched tones.
you’d be able to tell them apart. And if I played you
five very low pitched tones, you’d be able to tell them
apart. You’d think, then, that if I combined those high
and low tones and played them for you all at once,
you’d he able to divide them into ten categories. But
you won’t be able to. Chances are you’ll still be stuck
at about six categories.
As human beings, we can only handle so much
information at once. Once we pass a certain boundary.
we become overwhelmed. What I’m describing here is
an intellectual capacity—our ability to process raw
information. But if you think about it, we clearly have a
channel capacity for feelings as well.
Take a minute, for example, to make a list of all
the people whom you would consider yourself truly
close to. The average answer is 12 names. Those names
make up what psychologists call our sympathy group.
Why aren’t groups any larger? Partly It’s a question of
time. If you look at the names on your sympathy list,
they are probably the people whom you devote the most
attention to. If your list was twice as long, would you .
still be as close to everyone? Probably not. Tb be some-
one’s friend requires a minimum investment of time.
More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. At a
certain point, at somewhere between 10 and 15 people,
we begin to overload, just as we begin to overload when
we have to distinguish between too many tones.
Perhaps the most interesting natural limit, how-
ever, is what might be called our social channel capacity.
The case for a social capacity has been made, most
persuasively, by the British anthropologist Robin
Dunbar. Dunbar begins with a simple observation.
Primates—monkeys. chimps, baboons, humans—have the
biggest brains of all mammals. More important, a apeelk
part of the brain of humans and other primates—
the region known as the neocortex, which deals with
complex thought and reasoning—is huge by mammal
standards. For years. scientists have argued back and
forth about why this is the case. One theory is that our
brains evolved because our primate ancestors began to
engage in more sophisticated food gathering: instead of
just eating grasses and leaves they began eating fruit.
which takes more thinking power. You travel much farther
to find fruit than leaves, so you need to be able to
create mental maps. You have to worry about ripeness.
You have to peel parts away in order to eat the flesh of
a fruit, and so on. The problem with that theory is that
if you try to match up brain size with eating patterns
among primates, it doesn’t work. So what does corm-
late with brain size? The answer, Dunbar argues, is
group size. If you look at any species of primate—at
every variety of monkey and ape—the larger their neo-
cortex is, the larger the average size of the groups they
live with.
Dunbar’s argument is that brains evolve, they get
bigger, in order to handle the complexities of larger
social groups. If you belong to a group of five people,
Dunbar points out, you have to keep track of ten separate
relationships: your relationships with the four
others in your circle and the six other two-way relation-
ships between the others. That’s what. it means to know
everyone in the circle. You have to understand the personal
dynamics of the group. If you belong to a group
of twenty people, however, there are now 190 two-way
relationships to keep track of: 19 involving yourself and
171 involving the rest of the group. Even a relatively
small increase in the size of a group creates a significant
additional social and intellectual burden. Humans
socialize in the largest groups of all primates because
we are the only animals with brains large enough to
handle the complexities of that social arrangement.
Passage 3
Passage A Is adapted from the essay ‘On Miniatures’ by Lia Purpura (©2008 by Lia Purpure). Passage B Is adapted from the article When the Virtual Trumps Reality: The Prayer Book of Claude de France’s by James Gardner (©2008 by TWO SL LLC).
Passage I
Why are miniature things so compelling?
The miniature is mysterious. We wonder how all
those parts work .when they’re so small. It’s why we
linger over an infant’s fingers and toes, those astonish-
ing replicas: we can’t quite. believe. they work. Chihuahuas work.
Birds and bonsai trees work. Miniatures
are improbable, unlikely. Causes to marvel. Surprises.
Feats of engineering. Products of an obsessive detailer.
Miniatures offer changes of scale by which we
measure ourselves anew. On one hand, miniatures posit
an omniscient onlooker, able to take in the whole at
Once. Consider your self in relation to dollhouses,
snowglobes, frog spawn, aquariums, souvenir keychains
you look through to see a picture of the very
spot you’re visiting, stilled. ‘Yon are large enough to
hold such things fully in hand. On the other hand,
miniatures issue invitations to their. realm, and suggest
we forget or disregard our size. In dollhouse hind, you
can walk through the kitchen, livingroom, bedroom
with your three inch high friend and face pressed to the
window; feel the Cushions of the thumbnail loveseat
hold you. Fit inside Me ministers, we experience certain
Mates of being or belief:rworlds in a grain of sand;
eternities in wildflowers. Regions beyond our normal-
sized perception. Whether we are, in relation to them,
omniscient or companionably small beings, miniatures
invite us to leave our known selves and perspectives
behind.
Miniatures encourage attention—in the wag whispering
requires a listener to quiet down and incline
toward the speaker. Sometimes we need binoculars,
microscopes, viewmasters to assist our looking, but
mediated or lot, miniatures suggest there is more there
than meets the eye easily. They suggest there is, much to
miss if we don’t look hard at spaces, crevices, crannies.
The miniature, a working, functioning complete
world unto itself is not merely a “small” or “brief”
thing or a “shortened” form of something larger. Miniatures
transcend their size. Most strangely to me, miniatures
are radically self-sufficient. The beings who
inhabit fairylands, those elvei and sprites, pixies and
trolls, don’t usually strive to be our pals. They don’t
need us. Their smallness is our problem, or intrigue, or
desire.
Passage II
Without meaning to do so, the Morgan Library has
created a triumph of conceptual .art: the smallest art
exhibition in the world. “The Prayer Book of Claude de
France,”as tne ambitionis called, consists of noting
other than “The. Prayer. Book of Claude de Franca.” At
2 3/4 by 2 inches, the exhibition and the book are both
so small that they can et in the palm of your hand. That
may not sound like much until you realize that this illuminated
miniature contains.132 scenes froth the lives of
Christ, the Virgin, the apostles, and sundry saints. As
such, it is’ gallery unto Itself.
In “The Work of Art itt the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin’s overrated. essay of
1936 ,the author famously asserted. that no one would
feel the need to stand before the original when one
ee could own a reproduction. The folly of this idea will be
self-evident to anyone with the remotest sensitivity to
visual art. No matter how good a reproduction you
have to bear physical witness to each pucker and weave
of canvas, each splash of ptiddled ink in an Old Master
drawing. Only then can you truly say that you have seen
the work of art.
It was with such convictions that I rushed over to
the Morgan to see the tiny commodity in question.
What a waste of time! Not because the object is lacking
in worthiness, but because the Morgan’s own Web site
offers a means of examining the book.that, in this case,
far surpasses, any direct encounter. Every page of the
manuscript ls there in living color, and the zoom mech-
anism is so powerful and so precisethat you can get in
closet than if you were hunched over the real fling with a
strong magnifying glass. Zoom in to one of the fig-
ures, scarcely the size.of a fingernail, and you see the
tiny head in perfect focus. Zooming in deeper,you see
the beard on the head, then the hairs on the beard, then
the point at which the whole thing dissolves into
abstract art, as the strokes of the artist’s single-hair
brush merge with the’ warped and mottled surface of the
vellum.
The Miniature in question was commissioned for
Queen Claude of France. Nearly three generations after
the invention of printing, there was no practical reason
to commission this work. Rather, it was the delight in
luxury itself, as well, perhaps, as the spirit of sacrifice
that brought this work into existence.
Passage 4
This passage is adapted from the article “Back to the Future” by J. Madeleine Nash (©2008 by J. Madeleine Nash).
The Sand Creek Divide is a high point in
Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. From it you can see the
emerald patchwork of irrigated sugar beet and malt
barley fields that hug the Big Horn River as well as the
jagged mountain ranges that define the edges of this
harsh mid-latitude desert.
But between 55 and 56 million years ago, says
Scott Wing, a paleo-botanist at the Smithsonian’s
Museum of Natural History, the Big Horn Basin was a
balmy, swampy Eden, teeming with flora and fauna that
would be at home in today’s coastal Carolinas. And
then, all of,a sudden, things got a whole lot warmer. In
a geological eye blink—less than 10,000 years. some
think—global mean temperaturershot up by around
10 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Big Red, a sinuous ribbon of rose-colored
rock, is the most vivid marker of this exceptionally
torrid time—the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum,
or PETM, as most paleontologists call it. Even before it
had a Dame, the PETM was starting to fascinate Wing.
For some time, it had been clear to paleontologists
studying the evolution of mammals that the transition
between the Paleocene and the Eocene was marked by
the kind of innovative burst that implies sweeping eco-
logical change. Yet no hint of such a change had
appeared in any of the fossil leaves Wing had collected.
He would stare at leaves from the Paleocene and leaves
from the Eocene, but see almost no difference between
them. “It was getting to be annoying,” he recalls.
The Paleocene is the geological epoch that started
65 million years ago. At the time, mammals were rather
simple, general-purpose creatures with few specializations.
Then, barely 10 million years later, at the dawn
of the Eocene, the first relatives of deer abruptly
appear, along with the first primates and first horses.
“You can literally draw a line in the rock,” says
Philip Gingerich, a vertebrate paleontologist at the
University of Michigan. “Above it there are horses; below
it there aren’t.” in fact, where Gingerich works—at
Polecat Bench, in the northern sector of the Big Horn
Basin-you can actually see the line, in the form of a
band of light gray sandstone. Oddly enough, many
fossil mammals commonly found above this line,
including those first horses, were abnormally small.
Typically, Gingerich says. Eocene hones grew to the
size of modern-day cocker spaniels. but these horses
were “about the size of Siamese cats.”
In 1991, as Gingerich and others were marveling
over the miniature mammals of Polecat Bench,
oceanographers James Kennett and Lowell Stott investigated
a major extinction of small, shelly creatures
that. during the late Paleocene, lived on the sea floor
found, coincided with a steep rise in deep-ocean
temperatures and a curious spike in atmospheric carbon.
Less than a year later, paleontologist Paul Koch
and paleo-oceanographer James Zachos teamed up with
Gingerich to show that this geochemical glitch had also
left its calling card on land. The trio established this
indirectly by measuring the carbon content of fossilized
teeth and nodules plucked from the Big Horn Basin’s
55.5-million-year-old rocks.
To Wing, it began to seem increasingly implausible
that plant communities could have segued through
the PETM unaffected. So in 1994, he started a methodical
search for the fossils, returning year after year to the
Big Horn Basin.
At first, he found just a smattering of leaves, too
few to suggest any pattern. Then, in 2005, at the end of
a long day, he slid his shovel into a grayish mound and
pulled out a tiny leaf: “I knew immediately that this
was totally different from anything I’d seen before.”
From that one site. Wing went on to extract more
than 2,000 leaf fossils representing 30 different species.
Missing from the mix are the cypresses and other
conifers that were so common during the Paleocene:
gone also are the distant cousins of broadleaf temperate
zone trees. In their place are the legumes, a family of
plants, shrubs and trees that thrive today in seasonally
dry tropical and subtropical areas.
“What you see is almost a complete changeover
from what was growing here before,” Wing marvels.
“What this means is that you could have stood in this
one spot in Wyoming, surrounded by a forest, and
everything would have looked pretty much the same for
millions of years. And then, over a few tens of thou-
sands of years, almost all the plants you’re familiar
with disappear and are replaced by plants you’ve never
seen before in your lift.”
2021 年 6 月 ACT 考試閱讀題目
Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到 2021 年 6 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！如果你想購買考題在家做，學生可以在Ivy-Way蝦皮商城、Ivy-Way臉書粉專、或 Line (ivyway) 直接購買喔！
