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2019 年 6 月 ACT 考題回顧:所有 4 篇閱讀文章!

2019年6月ACT回顧

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:

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!


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