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2019 12月 SAT (美國/北美版) 考題回顧:所有 5 篇閱讀文章!

2019年12月SAT回顧

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:

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.

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 and therefore is scored a 1,

while in Japanese, aka does not contain 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 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!


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