過去這個週末學生考了 2019 年 12 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 2019 年 12 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 2019 年 12 月 (美國/北美) SAT 考試閱讀文章
Passage 1
This passage is adopted from Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban.@ 1992 by Cristina Garcia.At her mother’s request, Pilar, an art student and punk rock fan, has painted a picture of the Statue of Liberty for the opening of her mother’s bakery.
I keep getting the feeling that Mom is going to spy
on my work. After all, her record doesn’t exactly
inspire confidence. So, before I leave my studio, I set
up a booby trap—two tight rows of paint cans on the
floor just inside the door. Mom would trip on them if
she managed to open the latch and come creeping
around late at night. It would serve her right, too,
show her that she can’t go breaking promises and
invading my privacy any time she pleases.
I’m usually a heavy sleeper but these last nights
every little noise makes me jump out of bed.
I’d swear I heard her footsteps, or someone picking
the lock on my studio. But when I get up to
investigate, I always find my mother sound asleep,
looking innocent the way chronically guilty people
do sometimes. In the mornings, my paint cans
remain undisturbed and there are no suspicious
stains on any of Mom’s clothing in the hamper.
Jesus,I must really be getting paranoid.
My boyfriend Max helps me set the painting up in
the bakery the night before the grand opening, and
we drape it with sewn-together sheets. My mother,
surprisingly, still hasn’t even tried to get a glimpse of
the work. I can tell she’s proud of the blind faith she’s
placed in me. She’s positively aglow in her
magnanimity. When I come home that night, Mom
shows me the full-page ad she took out in the
Brooklyn Express:
Free food and drinks! This is more serious than I
thought. Mom doesn’t give anything away if she can
help it.
Now I can’t sleep all night thinking maybe this
time I’ve gone too far. After all, Mom didn’t seem to
have any ulterior motives, at least none that I can
figure. For once, I think she genuinely wanted to give
me a break. I try to calm down by reminding myself
that she was the one that cornered me into doing this
painting. What did she expect?
At five in the morning, I go to my parents’ room. I
want to warn her: “Look, I wanted to do it
straight but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. Do you
understand?”
She shifts in her sleep, her plump body curling
forward, I reach out to touch her but quickly pull
back my hand.
“What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” Mom is
suddenly awake, sitting upright.
“Nothing, Mom. I only wanted … I couldn’t sleep.”
“You’re just nervous, Pilar.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Don’t worry, mi cielo.” Mom takes my hand and
pats it gently. “Go back to bed.”
The next morning, the bakery is hung with flags
and streamers and a Dixieland band is playing
“When the Saints Go Marching in.” Mom is in her
new red, white, and blue1 two-piece suit, a matching
handbag stiff on her elbow. She’s giving away apple
tartlets and brownies and cup after cup of coffee.
“Yes, my daughter created it,” I hear her boast,
trilling her “r”‘s, clipping her vowels even more
precisely than usual, as if her accent were partly
responsible for the painting. “She is an artista. A very
brilliant arista.“Mom is pointing in my direction
and I feel the sweat collecting at the small of my back.
Someone from the Brooklyn Express snaps my
picture.
At noon, Mom gingerly balances atop a stepladder
on her tiny, size-four feet. The drum rolls endlessly as
she pulls on the sheet. There’s a stark silence as
Liberty, in her full punk glory, glares down at the
audience. For a brief moment, I imagine the sound of
applause, of people calling my name. But my
thoughts stop when I hear the hateful buzzing. It’s as
if the swarm of stick figures have come alive in their
background, threatening to fly off the canvas and
nest in our hair. The blood has drained from my
mother’s face and her lips are moving as if she wants
to say something but can’t form the words. She
stands there,immobile, clutching the sheet against
her silk blouse, when someone yells in raucous
Brooklynese,”Gaaahbage! Whadda piece of
gaaah-bage!” A lumpish man charges Liberty with a
pocketknife, repeating his words like a war cry.
Before anyone can react, Mom swings her new
handbag and clubs the guy cold inches from the
painting. Then, as if in slow motion,she tumbles
forward, a thrashing avalanche of patriotism and
motherhood, crushing three spectators and a table of
apple tartlets.
And I, I love my mother very much at that
moment.
1 the colors of the American flag
Passage 2
Passage 1 is adapted from Albert Einstein, “Albert Einstein Warns of Dangers In Nudear Arms Race”©1950 by NBCUniversal Media, LLC. Passage 2 Is adapted from Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security.” originally delivered in 1983. The USA and the USSR (the Soviet Union) engaged in a nuclear arms race from the late 1940s through the 1980s.
Passage I
The idea of achieving security through national
armament is, at the present state of military
technique, a disastrous illusion. On the part of the
U.S.A. this illusion has been particularly fostered by
the fact that this country succeeded first in producing
an atomic bomb. The belief seemed to prevail that in
the end it would be possible to achieve decisive
military superiority. In this way, any potential
opponent would be intimidated, and security, so
ardently desired by all of us, brought to us and all of
humanity. The maxim which we have been following
during these last five years has been, in short:
security through superior military power, whatever
the cost.
Is there any way out of this impasse created by
man himself? All of us, and particularly those who
are responsible for the attitude of the U.S.A. and the
U.S.S.R, should realize that we may have vanquished
an external enemy, but have been incapable of
getting rid of the mentality created by the war
[World War II]. It is impossible to achieve peace as
long as every single action is taken with a possible
future conflict in view. The leading point of view of
all political action should therefore be: what can we
do to bring about peaceful coexistence and even
loyal cooperation of the nations? The first problem is
to do away with mutual fear and distrust. Solemn
renunciation of violence (not only with respect to
means of mass destruction) is undoubtedly
necessary. Such renunciation, however, can be
effective only if at the same time a supranational
judicial and executive body is set up empowered to
decide questions of immediate concern to the
security of the nations. Even a declaration of the
nations to collaborate loyally in the realization of
such a “restricted world government” would
considerably reduce the imminent danger of war.
In the last analysis, every kind of peaceful
cooperation among men is primarily based on
mutual trust and only secondly on institutions such
as courts of justice and police. This holds for nations
as well as for individuals. And the basis of trust is
loyal give and take.
Passage II
Since the dawn of the atomic age, we’ve sought to
reduce the risk of war by maintaining a strong
deterrent and by seeking genuine arms control.
“Deterrence” means simply this: making sure any
adversary who thinks about attacking the United
States, or our allies, or our vital interest, concludes
that the risks to him outweigh any potential gains.
Once he understands that, he won’t attack. We
maintain the peace through our strength; weakness
only invites aggression.
This strategy of deterrence has not changed. It still
works. But what it takes to maintain deterrence has
changed. It took one kind of military force to deter
an attack when we had far more nuclear weapons
than any other power; it takes another kind now tha
t the Soviets, for example, have enough accurate and
powerful nuclear weapons to destroy virtually all of
our missiles on the ground. Now, this is not to say
that the Soviet Union is planning to make war on us.
Nor do I believe a war is inevitable—quite the
contrary. But what must be recognized is that our
security is based on being prepared to meet all t
hreats.
There was a time when we depended on coastal
forts and artillery batteries, because, with the
weaponry of that day, any attack would have had to
come by sea. Well, this is a different world, and our
defenses must be based on recognition and
awareness of the weaponry possessed by other
nations in the nuclear age.
We can’t afford to believe that we will never be
threatened. There have been two world wars in my
lifetime. We didn’t start them and, indeed, did
everything we could to avoid being drawn into them.
But we were ill-prepared for both. Had we been
better prepared, peace might have been preserved.
I know that all of you want peace, and so do I. I
know too that many of you seriously believe that a
nuclear freeze would further the cause of peace. But a
freeze now would make us less, not more, secure and
would raise, not reduce, the risk of war. It would be
largely unverifiable and would seriously undercut
our negotiations on arms reduction. It would reward
the Soviets for their massive military buildup while
preventing us from modernizing our aging and
increasingly vulnerable forces. With their present
margin of superiority, why should they agree to arms
reductions knowing that we were prohibited from
catching up?
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from R. Ford Denison, Darwinian Agriculture: How Understanding Evolution Can Improve Agriculture. ©2015 by Princeton University Press.
Experiments with wild species often seem to
show greater productivity from mixtures of species,
relative to the average of those species grown
separately. One such experiment has been directed
for many years here in Minnesota. The higher-
diversity treatments have indeed been more
productive. However, as I will explain, it’s not clear
how well these results apply to other ecosystems,
natural or agricultural.
Plots were seeded in 1994 with different numbers
of wild prairie species per plot. By 1997, the eight-
species plots had more than twice the growth of the
average one-species plot. But averaging across all
one-species plots may not be the best measure of
monoculture’s potential. An experienced farmer
would choose the best monoculture crops, not
average ones. How did the high-diversity prairie
plots compare with the best one-species plots? In
1997, only 10 percent of two-species plots had more
growth than the best one-species plots, and plots
with even more species did no better. Over several
years, however, the performance of the more-divers
e plots apparently improved. When results for 1999
and 2000 were averaged, almost half of the sixteen-
species plots had more growth than even the best
single-species plot.
I visited Cedar Creek, the site of this famous
experiment. The more-diverse plots certainly had
more growth per plot, but what struck me was the
surprisingly large amount of bare soil in the
one-species plots. The only data I found published
on this were from 1996, when one-species plots had
only 1/3 plant cover. Low plant cover provides a
simple explanation for why the one-species plots had
such poor productivity: much of the sunlight
potentially available to drive photosynthesis was
hitting soil rather than leaves. Few farm fields—even
few natural areas, aside from deserts—have so much
bare soil by the middle of the growing season. Before
applying results from Cedar Creek to agriculture, or
to other natural areas, we need to know why the
monoculture plots had such poor cover. Why didn’t
resident plants in the monoculture plots spread by
runners or seeds into the bare areas?
Plots with a lot of bare soil might, perhaps, have
had plenty of roots underground, consuming
resources that seedlings would need to get
established. But actually, less-diverse plots had less
root mass and more soil nitrate than more diverse
plots, so seedlings should have done at least as well as
in more-diverse plots. Seedlings did germinate in the
one-species plots. In fact, seedling biomass there was
about ten times as great as in sixteen-species plots
, but they apparently didn’t grow into adults. Why
not?
One possible explanation is that plots were
weeded three or four times a year, to remove
seedlings not belonging in a plot. Weeders attempted
to minimize disturbance by pulling weeds while still
small, but could outnumbered resident-species
seedlings have been accidentally damaged or
removed along with the invaders? I also wonder
whether weeders might miss nonresident species
more easily in a diverse plot than in a single-species
plot. In a single-species plot, it may be more obvious
which seedlings don’t belong there, so they are more
likely to be removed. It’s interesting that a somewhat
similar experiment nearby found “idiosyncratic”
(that is, inconsistent) effects of species diversity on
seed production, with diversity increasing seed
production by some prairie species but decreasing
seed production by others.
Whatever the reason for the low plant cover in
single-species plots at Cedar Creek, we know that
agricultural monocultures usually achieve complete
cover. Therefore, the poor performance of the
one-species plots at Cedar Creek is probably not
representative of most agricultural monocultures.
Passage 4
This passage is adapted from Anne Pycha, “‘R’ is for Red: Common Words Share Similar Sounds in Many Languages.” ©2016 by Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc.
Since the 1900s, linguists have argued that
associations between speech sounds and meanings
are purely arbitrary. Yet a new study calls this into
question.
Together with his colleagues, Damián Blasi of the
University of Zurich analyzed lists of words from
4,298 different languages. In doing so, they
discovered that unrelated languages often use the
same sounds to refer to the same meaning. For
example, the consonant r is often used in words for
red—think of French rouge, Spanish rojo, and
German rot, but also Turkish krmz, Hungarian piros,
and Maori kura.
The idea is not new. Previous studies have
suggested that sound-meaning associations may not
be entirely arbitrary, but these studies were limited
by small sample sizes (200 languages or fewer) and
highly restricted lists of words (such as animals only).
Blasi’s study, published in Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences USA, is notable because it
included almost two thirds of the world’s languages
and used lists of diverse words, including pronouns,
body parts, verbs, natural phenomena, and
adjectives—such as we, tongue, drink, star and small,
respectively.
The scope of the study is unprecedented, says
Stanka Fitneva, associate professor of psychology at
Queen’s University in Canada, who was not involved
in the research. And Gary Lupyan, associate
professor of psychology at the University of
Wisconsin, adds, “Only through this type of large-
scale analysis can worldwide patterns be discovered.”
The method involved two key parts. The first step
was to estimate how frequently the word for a given
concept uses a particular sound by assigning binary
values of 0 or 1 to associations in individual
languages. For example in English, the word for red
uses the consonant r and therefore is scored a 1,
while in Japanese, aka does not contain r and
therefore receives a 0. Aggregating these numbers
across the thousands of languages studied yields the
overall probability that any word for red in any
language will contain r—in this case, 0.35.
On its own, however, this calculation is not
enough. There are thousands of words that use
r—road, mural, and waiter, to name only a few
English examples. So how do we know that the
association between red and r is special? To address
this question, the authors performed a second step,
this time calculating the probability that any
randomly selected word uses r. By comparing the
two probabilities, they were able to show that across
languages, r is more than twice as likely to occur in
words for red than in other words. With this method,
the researchers reported 74 robust associations
between word sounds and meanings, including l and
leaf, l and tongue (English is among the exceptions),
and n and nose.
One limitation of the study is the relatively small
number of meanings that were included in the
analysis, points out Eric Holman, professor emeritus
of psychology at the University of California, Los
Angeles. Despite the diversity of meanings, the
typical word list contained only 28 to 40 items.
Another limitation concerns the transcription
system, which collapsed certain distinctions (such as
that between plain and nasal vowels, which are found
in French words like non) that are known to play an
important role in many languages.
The study raises some big-picture questions.
Why, for example, should it be the case that
culturally and geographically diverse groups of
humans link the same sounds with the same
meanings? Blasi and colleagues used statistical
analyses to rule out the possibility that people
happened to borrow words like red from neighboring
languages, or that such words descended from the
same ancient protolanguage. So the answer to this
question remains elusive.
Passage 5
This passage is adapted from Doug Macdougall, Nature’s Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything. © 2008 by The Regents of the University of California. Metamorphic rocks are formed from sedimentary of igneous rocks exposed to heat and pressure.
What are currently claimed to be the earliest signs
of life— and this is still a controversial claim—are
found in ancient rocks from western Greenland.
The evidence is not in the form of recognizable
fossils, but rather in the properties of small blebs of
graphite—pure carbon—that occur in metamorphic
rocks and are thought to have a biological origin.
The Greenland rocks are so old that over their long
history they have been buried, heated, folded, and
recrystallized almost beyond recognition, so much so
that it has been difficult to determine whether they
were originally sedimentary (formed from material
deposited on Earth’s surface or underwater) or
igneous rocks (formed from cooling magma or lava).
But recent detailed investigations by a team from the
University of California and the University of
Colorado have demonstrated that the Greenland
rocks were almost certainly precipitated chemically
from an ancient ocean. That at least allows the
possibility that the graphite is carbon from
once-living organisms that lived in the sea.
Carbon is one of the most abundant elements in
the universe and is essential for all living things.
Ordinary carbon is made up of two stable isotopes,
carbon-12 and carbon-13; the numbers designating t
he isotopes are a measure of their mass, so
carbon-12 is the “lighter” of the two isotopes.
During biological processes such as photosynthesis,
when living organisms take carbon from the
environment to make the various components of
their cells, they preferentially take up the lighter
isotope because carbon-12 has slightly weaker
chemical bonds than carbon-13, and it therefore
reacts more readily. Thus biological carbon is always
“light,” enriched in carbon-12, an isotopic
fingerprint that can be used to distinguish whether a
particular sample is biological in origin. Even severe
metamorphism that converts organic remains into
graphite doesn’t affect this signature. Just such a
process apparently produced the Greenland graphite
, because it carries the isotopic fingerprint of
biological carbon: it is enriched in carbon-12.
The results for the Greenland samples are not in
question: they indeed signify a biological origin. But
some researchers have voiced doubts about whether
this signature is original or was modified later (for
example, by addition of organic carbon long after th
e rocks formed). There are passionate advocates on
both sides of this controversy, but, as in all scientific
debates, the matter will eventually be settled through
continued research and collection of evidence. If for
the moment we accept that the biological fingerprint
is original, we can ask when the organisms that were
eventually turned into graphite actually lived. In
other words, what is the age of the original
sedimentary rocks?
That question has now been answered
definitively. The same team that confirmed the
sedimentary origin of the graphite-containing rocks
also identified bands of igneous rocks that cut
across—and are therefore younger than—the
sedimentary units. Zircon crystals extracted from
these igneous rocks have been dated to 3.825 billion
years. The graphite-bearing sediments must be older,
although it is not possible to say exactly how much
older.
If the Greenland graphite really did originate as
biological carbon, life existed in the Earth’s oceans
before 3.8 billion years ago, only some 700 million
years after the Earth formed. In some ways, this is
not so surprising. All the necessary conditions have
been in place from very early in our planet’s history.
We are the right distance from our principal source of
energy, the sun, and the Earth hosts all the
necessary chemical elements and compounds.
2019年 12月 (美國/北美) SAT 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！