過去這個週末學生考了 2019 年 12 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 12 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 12月 ACT 考試閱讀文章
Passage 1
This passage is adapted from the novel Love Marriage by V. V. Ganeshananthan (©2008 by Vasugi Ganeshananthan).
He met her, my mother, in New York City, and the
Heart said plaintively: Thump thump thump. That was
not the sound of illness. Theirs was an auspicious meet-
ing, although no one had troubled to check the alignment
of the stars; the young woman was
twenty-seven—old for a prospective bride?—but she
did not look it. She had a generous face, he said to
himself.
He liked her glossy sheaf of dark hair, her sparse
brows, her pronounced chin, her full lower lip. She
smiled with her mouth closed because she did not like
her teeth. He could already see within the structure of
her face how she would become thinner, that her bones
would give her older face a certain elegance, a chiseled
and austere severity. He liked her precision in even the
smallest of tasks, like arranging hibiscus in a vase. Her
reserve, her inability to say anything truly personal in
public. He thought she might be full of secrets and
wanted to know them. She never raised her voice, but
she did not speak softly. How are you? That’s a beautiful
sari. How are the children? I like this rice. She liked
her food steaming and spicy. as he did. She made her
own clothes, staying up late into the night, her foot on
the pedal of a sewing machine that had belonged to her
mother and had crossed the ocean with her. Her hem-
lines suited both the times and her young pale slimness,
which reminded him of a flowering tree by his home in
Jaffna. He never caught her admitting she was wrong:
her words clambered around that impossibility, but so
sheepishly that he found it endearing. In a noisy room
he learned to tell the clear bell sound of her bangles
apart from the rest.
Suddenly, he was no longer thinking about widows
or about repeating his own father’s collapse. It was as
though an invisible conductor was directing the pulling
of strings to draw them together. Whether it was Murali
who managed to get introduced to Vani or the other way
around, no one else really remembers. And they will
never admit which one of them was responsible. And
yet, it was this simple: a friend of his noticed that they
were staying near each other. Perhaps Murali could give
Vani a ride home? Yes, yes. two heads nodded. They
left the party they were at too quickly to say all their
good-byes. After the door closed behind them the space
where they had been was filled with the laughter of
friends.
He took her home. She boarded with a family in
Brooklyn. During the car ride they were silent. It was a
strange and comfortable silence for two people who had
waited for so long to be alone. The thrum of the motor
was loud because the car was old. When they turned
around the corner he pulled over and turned the engine
off and there was a quiet as loud as the motor had been.
He walked her to her door and she thanked him. She did
not ask him in for a cup of coffee: it was not her house.
But it was out of his way and both of them knew it. She
forgot that she did not like her teeth and bared them at
him. Her smile, for once, was not self-conscious. She
watched him drive away, waving from the window.
The Sri Lankan elders of New York City were all
too eager to play parents to the couple. She was Proper:
smart and polite and a good cook and lovely. Vani had a
job. and more important than any of these things, she
had grace, which was something that could not be
taught. Murali, of course, was the Beloved Parentless
Boy: their favorite bachelor-doctor whom they took into
their homes and bosoms and tried to smother with welcome
and curry. Occasions were arranged: even the
very rooms seemed to conspire to make the two end up
next to each other. And then one day something was
suggested by one of those elders. And somehow the
pair of them were talking about it. To each other.
Directly.
Which was a faux pas. But neither of them
minded.
Oceans away, families exploded. True to form, his
family’s discord faded quickly. But her family almost
did not consent: afraid of the Improper, they questioned
his intentions, his failure to observe certain formalities.
his ancestry, his habits and his character. He heard
about what they had said and turned to her, his eyes full
of questions.
They may not know these things about you. she
said, but I do.
Are you sure? he asked her. The unsaid: they may
not forgive you for this.
Positive, she answered. Countries away. Vani’s
brother crashed into Murali’s brother’s house, yelling:
Who is this doctor who wants to marry my sister? Who
is this doctor who is in love with my sister?
The nerve of Murali, they thought. In Love? These
were not words they were used to saying.
Passage 2
Passage A is adapted from the article ‘Our Vanishing Night’ by Verlyn Klinkenborg (©2008 by National Geographic Society. Inc.). Passage B is adapted from the book The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Art:facial Light by Paul Bogard (©2013 by Paul Bogard).
Passage I
For most of human history, the phrase “light pollution”
would have made no sense. Imagine walking
toward London on a moonlit night around 1800. when it
was Earth’s most populous city. Nearly a million people
lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles
and rushlights and torches and lanterns. Only a few
houses were lit by gas. and there would be no public
gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven
years. From a few miles away, you would have been as
likely to smell London as to see its dim collective glow.
Now most of humanity lives under intersecting
domes of reflected, refracted light, of scattering rays
from ovcrlit cities and suburbs, from light-flooded
highways and factories. Nearly all of nighttime Europe
is a nebula of light, as is most of the United States and
all of Japan. In the south Atlantic the glow from a
single fishing fleet—squid fishermen luring their prey
with metal halide lamps—can be seen from space, burn-
ing brighter, in fact, than Buenos Aires or Rio de
Janeiro.
In most cities the sky looks as though it has been
emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze that mirrors
our fear of the dark. We’ve grown so used to this
pervasive orange haze that the original glory of an unlit
night—dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadows
on Earth—is wholly beyond our experience. And
yet above the city’s pale ceiling lies the rest of the uni-
verse, utterly undiminished by the light we waste—a
bright shoal of stars and planets and galaxies, shining in
seemingly infinite darkness.
We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied
country, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal
species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological
force, and on many species it acts as a magnet, a
process bring studied by researchers such as Travis
Longcore and Catherine Rich. The effect is so powerful
that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being
“captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from
gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling
in the thousands.
Passage II
Unless Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night from
1889 is traveling as part of an exhibition, it hangs at
home on its wall at the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) in Manhattan as fifty million people pass by
every year. On a Saturday morning I stand near Van
Gogh’s scene of stars and moon and sleeping town,
talking with its guardian for the day. Joseph. as he
repeats. “No flash, no flash: “Two feet away.” and
“Too close, too close” again and again as people from
around the world crowd near. -What’s the appeal of this
painting?” I ask. “It’s beautiful,” he says. “What more
can you say than that?”
You could rightly leave it at that. But I love the
story this painting tells, of a small dark town, a few
yellow-orange gaslights in house windows, under a
giant swirling and waving blue-green sky. This is a
painting of our world from before night had been
pushed back to the forest and the seas, from back when
sleepy towns slept without streetlights. People are too
quick. I think. to imagine the story of this painting—
and especially this sky—is simply that of “a werewolf
of energy:’ as Joachim Pissarro. curator at the MoMA
exhibition Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night. would
tell me. While Van Gogh certainly had his troubles, this
painting looks as it does in part because it’s of a time
that no longer exists, a time when the night sky would
have looked a lot more like this. Does Van Gogh use his
imagination? Of course. but this is an imagined sky
inspired by a real sky of a kind few of the fifty million
MoMA visitors have ever seen. It’s an imagined sky
inspired by the real sky over a town much darker than
the towns we live in today. So a painting of a night
imagined? Sure. But unreal?
In our age, yes. But Van Gogh lived in a time
before electric light. In a letter from the summer of
1888. he described what he’d seen while walking a
southern French beach:
The deep blue sky was flecked with clouds of a
blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt,
and others of a clearer blue, like the blue whiteness of the
Milky Way. In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish.
yellow, white, pink, more brilliant, more sparkling gemlike than
at home—even in Paris: opals you might call them, emeralds,
lapis lazuli. rubies, sapphires.
It’s remarkable to modern eyes. first of all, that
Van Gogh would reference the stars over Paris—no one
has seen a sky remotely close to this over Paris for
at least fifty years. But stars of different colors? It’s true.
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from the essay ‘On Places. Photographs. and Memory’ by Chris Engman (©2012 by Chris Engmany )
Recently I visited a place that I knew intimately in
childhood, a waterfall with cliffs on both sides and a
pool of cold water below. We used to jump from those
cliffs despite our parents’ concerns. I loved this place,
and revisiting it I am amazed by all that I can remember.
Bends in trails, sap stains on bark, crooks in
branches, the intricate web of root structures, the shape
of trees—all are startlingly unchanged and I remember
them precisely. A small tree is in the middle of the trail.
I put my hand on it for support and drops of moisture
fall on my back from above, and I realize: I have done
this before. I remember the sensation precisely, the
sound of rustling leaves above, the freshness of the
smell, the temperature of the droplets, the mixture of
apprehension and pleasure. Standing on a rock ledge
getting ready to jump. I reach for a handhold so I can
lean over the edge and prepare myself for what I am
about to do. The shape of the rock where my hand
touches it is known to me: I have performed this ritual.
Places hold memories better than people and better
than photographs. Family, or people from our past who
may remind us of events in our lives and with whom we
may reminisce, are themselves constantly changing, as
is their version of events. Conversations with others
about shared experiences of the past can seem to augment
memory but quite often, more often than we probably
realize, they operate in the opposite way: they alter
or even replace our own memories with those of
another. Whatever the event, one’s memory of it is
inevitably altered through conversation: recalling the
same event at a later date, it becomes difficult or impossible
to distinguish an original memory from the altered
version that emerged.
Photographs act on us in a similar fashion. What-
ever their apparent precision or correctness, photographs
inaccurately reflect experience from the start.
They convert the three dimensions of space into two
and eliminate the third spatial dimension and time. Also
sacrificed are smell, touch. sound. and context. In a
word, a photograph is an abstraction of experience. Yet
we take them compulsively. We fill scrapbooks and
hard drives with family outings, vacations, ballgames—
Scotty in front of Niagara Falls, Dad and Grandma
smiling in front of the famous restaurant—in the hope
of freezing time, making experience tangible for future
reference, preserving memory. I do it. too. But it is well
to realize that photographs do not preserve memory.
they replace memory. lust as photographs are an
abstraction of experience, they are even more so an
abstraction of memory—a dangerously compelling
abstraction. Memories are fragile and impressionable.
They cannot hold up against the seemingly irrefutable
factuality of a photograph. It isn’t that what is in a photograph
is false: a photograph’s version of events did
happen. what is in a picture did indeed pass before the
lens. The problem is that photographs only tell such a
small part of any story. And while they may be technically
correct, nonetheless they deceive. Does a smile in
a photograph mean that a person is happy? Or does it
mean that a photographer prodded. “look up and
smile”? Was the fish I caught really bigger than my
uncle’s, or did I cleverly, intentionally hold mine closer
to the lens? Photographs deceive in another respect.
Whatever the event one wishes to preserve, snapshots
are most commonly a break from that event. The
moment that a photograph is taken is experienced as a
moment taking a photograph, not as a moment engaged
in the activity implied by the resulting image. Time
taken to make photographs is time subtracted from the
experience of the thing being photographed. What photographs
most accurately record. ultimately, is nothing
more than the act of photography, itself.
To be sure, photographs can form a record of our
lives that has value, and I cherish my old snapshots as
much as the next person. But as image-makers and consumers.
which all of us are these days. there is also
value to be had in a recognition of the limits of photography
to the facility of memory—in an understanding
of what images can and cannot offer us in this regard.
Moreover it is precisely the deceitfulness of photography
as it pertains to memory that gives the medium its
unique platform to address the nature of memory itself:
its malleability, its unreliability, its elusiveness. It
seems to me that no conversation or photograph can
make memory so vivid or recognizable, so physically
palpable, as the return to a place.
Passage 4
This passage Is adapted from the article ‘Reinventing the Lear by Antonio Regalado (©2010 by Scien-tific American. a division of Nature America. Inc.).
Nathan S. Lewis has been giving a lecture on the
energy crisis that is both terrifying and exhilarating. To
avoid potentially debilitating global warming, the
chemist says civilization must be able to generate more
than 10 trillion watts of clean, carbon-free energy by
2050. That level is three times the U.S.’s average
energy demand of 3.2 trillion watts.
Before Lewis’s crowds get too depressed, he tells
them there is one source of salvation: the sun pours
more energy onto the earth every hour than humankind
uses in a year. But to be saved, humankind needs a
radical breakthrough in solar-fuel technology: artificial
leaves that will capture solar rays and chum out chemical
fuel on the spot. much as plants do. We can burn the
fuel, as we do oil or natural gas, to power cars, create
heat or generate electricity, and we can store the fuel
for use when the sun is down.
Lewis’s lab is one of several that are crafting prototype
leaves, not much larger than computer chips.
designed to produce hydrogen fuel from water. rather
than the glucose fuel that natural leaves create. Unlike
fossil fuels, hydrogen burns clean. Other researchers
are working on competing ideas for capturing the sun’s
energy. such as algae that has been genetically altered
to pump out biofuels. or on new biological organisms
engineered to excrete oil. All these approaches are
intended to turn sunlight into chemical energy that can
be stored, shipped and easily consumed. Lewis argues,
however, that the man-made leaf option is the most
likely to scale up to the industrial levels needed to
power civilization.
Although a few lab prototypes have produced
small amounts of direct solar fuel—or electrofuel. as
the chemicals are sometimes called—the technology
has to be improved so the fuel can be manufactured on
a massive scale, very inexpensively. To power the U.S..
Lewis estimates the country would need to manufacture
thin, flexible solar-fuel films, instead of discrete chip-
like devices, that roll off high-speed production lines
the way newsprint does. The films would have to be as
cheap as wall-to-wall carpeting and eventually cover an
area the size of South Carolina.
Far from being a wild dream, direct solar-fuel
technology has been advancing in fits and starts ever
since President Jimmy Carter’s push for alternative
energy sources during the 1970s oil shocks. Now, with
a new energy and climate crunch looming, solar fuel is
suddenly gaining attention.
In photosynthesis, green leaves use the energy in
sunlight to rearrange the chemical bonds of water and
carbon dioxide, producing and storing fuel in the form of sugars.
“We want to make something as close to a
leaf as possible,” Lewis says, meaning devices that
work as simply. albeit producing a different chemical
output. The artificial leaf Lewis is designing requires
two principal elements: a collector that converts solar
energy (photons) into electrical energy (electrons) and
an electrolyzer that uses the electron energy to split
water into oxygen and hydrogen. A catalyst—a chemical
or metal—is added to help achieve the splitting.
Existing photovoltaic cells already create electricity
from sunlight, and electrolyzers are used in various
commercial processes, so the trick is marrying the two
into cheap. efficient solar films.
Bulky prototypes have been developed just to
demonstrate how the marriage would work. Engineers
at a Japanese automaker. for example, have built a box
that stands taller than a refrigerator and is covered with
photovoltaic cells. An electrolyzer. inside, uses the
solar electricity to break water molecules. The box
releases the resulting oxygen to the ambient air and
compresses and stores the remaining hydrogen, which
the automaker would like to use to recharge fuel-cell
Cars.
In principle, the scheme could solve global warm-
ing: only sunlight and water are needed to create
energy. the by-product is oxygen, and the exhaust from
burning the hydrogen later in a fuel cell is water. The
problem is that commercial solar cells contain expen-
sive silicon crystals. And electrolyzers are packed with
platinum, to date the best material for catalyzing the
water-splitting reaction, but it costs $1.500 an ounce.
Lewis calculates that to meet global energy
demand, future solar-fuel devices would have to cost
less than $1 per square foot of sun-collecting surface
and be able to convert 10 percent of that light energy
into chemical fuel. Fundamentally new, massively scalable
technology such as films or carpets made from
inexpensive materials are needed.
2019 年 12 月 ACT 考試閱讀題目
Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到 2019 年 12 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！
