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過去這個週末學生考了 2019 年 3 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 3 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 3 月 (北美) SAT 考試閱讀文章
PASSAGE 1
This passage is adapted from Rita Dove, Through the ivory Gate. ©1992 by Rita Dove. The novel’s main character, Virginia, has just found her old cello while unpacking after a move.
She had not played seriously since college. Accompanying the theater troupe’s performances and clowning around as her friend Parker picked out old Beatles songs on the piano didn’t count—that wasn’t real music, music that made you forget where you were, made you forget where your arms and legs ended and luscious sound began.
She had started playing the cello when she was nine, shortly after the move to Arizona. At the beginning of the school year in Akron, every child in fourth grade had been issued a pre-instrument called a tonette so the teacher could determine who had an “aptitude” for music. Virginia had liked the neatness of the tonette, its modest musical range and how it fit into her school desk on the right side. Whenever she covered a fingerhole, she felt the contour of its slightly raised lip and imagined she was playing the tentacle of an octopus.
She had chafed through months of scales and simple songs, waiting for the moment when she would walk across the auditorium stage and choose: kneel among the rows of somber black cases, undo the metal clasps and fling open the lid to reveal her instrument, a flute or a clarinet, glowing softly, half buried in deep blue velvet.
But before she could make her choice, they moved to Arizona. There, the music instruments were stored in a classroom trailer, and when she opened the flute case she nearly winced from the glare bouncing off all that polished silver, those gloating caps and hinges. The clarinet was worse—it looked like an overdesigned walking stick, sounded like a clown laughing, and had reeds that needed to be softened in spit.
The music teacher shut the cases with a succession of curt clicks. “That leaves the strings,” she sighed, leading the way back through the noonday blaze and into the main building, where the violins, violas, cellos and double basses were housed. There, by virtue of its sonorous name, Virginia asked for the violoncello—and was too intimidated by the teacher’s growing impatience to protest when what emerged from the back closets was something resembling not a guitar, but a childsized android. In her anguish Virginia bowed her head and blindly accepted the instrument. It was not long, however, before she realized that she had made a good choice, for the sound of its name was synonymous with the throbbing complaint that poured out of its cumbersome body.
It took her nearly a year just to learn how to hold it properly. She had been accustomed to practicing after school, but one weekend evening while her parents were out, she dragged the instrument into their bedroom and used pillows to prop the music on the armchair. She was just about to sit on the edge of the bed when something, maybe the shadow thrown from the flowered lampshade or the slats of light sifting from the street, made her want to do things right. She got a straightback chair from the dining room and sat down correctly, bringing the instrument slowly toward her body. The lamp picked up the striations down the back of the wood, each strip slightly different, a little browner, a little more golden, but meeting its mate at the spine, a barely perceptible seam. For the first time she saw that the back of the cello was rounded like a belly, the belly of a tiger she had to bring close to her, taming it before she was torn limb from limb. She had to love and not be scared, and show the cat that it did not need to growl to protect itself. The animal stood on its hind legs and pressed its torso to hers, one paw curled like a ribbon behind her left ear. It was heavy; she sat very straight in the chair in order to support it. Funny how fantasy works. And memory. I haven’t thought about that evening in years. Virginia bent down and lay the cello case on its back, as she knelt to unsnap the metal clasps.
PASSAGE 2
This passage is adapted from Elizabeth Svoboda, What Makes a Hero? The Surprising Science of Selflessness. 02013 by Elizabeth Svoboda.
A variety of studies have confirmed the strength of the connection between altruism and well-being. In 1999, the behavioral medicine specialist Carolyn Schwartz, then at the University of Massachusetts, and her colleagues divided multiple sclerosis patients into two groups and had members of one group call members of the other regularly to provide them with emotional support. After tracking the groups for three years, Schwartz found that the helpers—the people in the phone-call group—reported profound improvements in their self-worth and their moods. “These people seemed to be blossoming,” Schwartz says. “They talked about how helping other people transformed their experience of multiple sclerosis from something that victimized them to something that enabled them to be a positive force in the world.”
In a 2010 survey of more than 4,500 American volunteers, 89 percent—nearly 9 in 10—stated that volunteering improved their sense of well-being, while a sizable majority reported that it lowered their stress levels and enhanced their sense of purpose in life. This connection appears to hold true regardless of culture: In a 2012 study of older Maori and non-Maori in New Zealand, those who volunteered more often scored higher on happiness measures.
In best-case scenarios, regular helping may even help stave off an early death. Analyzing data from more than seven thousand respondents collected for the government’s Longitudinal Study of Aging, the researchers Alex Harris and Carl Thoresen found that frequent volunteers had a 19 percent lower mortality risk than people who never volunteered when the subjects’ level of social support was taken into account. That means volunteering is associated with longer survival independent of the advantages social ties provide. Even more dramatically, when University of Michigan researchers studied 423 older couples who were followed for five years, those who helped others were nearly 60 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who never helped.
While many survey studies have found more or less strong associations between helping and happiness, the University of California, Riverside, psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky wanted to test the connection in a real-world setting. She asked students to carry out five “random acts of kindness” of their choice every week for six weeks—they could choose anything that benefited others, from making a homeless person a meal to helping a kid with a school assignment. The subjects experienced higher levels of happiness than controls when they performed all five kind acts in one day, suggesting that the well-being boost is pronounced when people help often.
Interestingly, though, students who spaced the kind acts out, performing them on different days, didn’t experience the same happiness boost. Lyubomirsky’s work suggests altruistic acts may need to be frequent in order to confer a lasting change in well-being. With isolated acts of helping, says the London School of Economics social scientist Francesca Borgonovi, “it could be that there’s a very short—narrowly defined in time and space—bump in happiness that doesn’t shift your [overall] happiness in any meaningful way.”
On balance, though, being generous boosts your mood and health because it strengthens your sense that you’re really doing something significant. The social psychologist Sara Konrath of the University of Michigan notes that helping others may signal our bodies to release pleasurable chemicals such as oxytocin. The boost we get from helping may also mute our stress response, causing us to release fewer jarring stress hormones such as cortisol and norepinephrine.
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from Jonathan Shaw,”The’Bionic Lear02015 by Harvard Magazine Inc.
Harvard scientists have created a “bionic leaf” that converts solar energy into a liquid fuel. The work—a proof of concept in an exciting new field that might be termed biomanufacturing—is the fruit of a ; collaboration between the laboratories of professor of biochemistry and systems biology Pamela Silver and professor of energy Daniel Nocera. The pair, who began collaborating two years ago, share an interest in developing energy sources that might someday have ; practical application in remote locales in the developing world. Silver dubbed the system “bionic” because it joins a biological system to a clever piece of inorganic chemistry previously developed by Nocera: that invention, widely known as the artificial leaf, converts solar energy into hydrogen fuel.
Nocera’s artificial leaf, which serves as the fuel source in the bionic leaf, works by sandwiching a photovoltaic cell between two thin metal oxide catalysts. When submersed in a glass of water at room temperature and normal atmospheric pressure, the artificial leaf mimics photosynthesis. Current from the silicon solar wafer is fed to the catalysts, which split water molecules: oxygen bubbles off the catalyst on one side of the wafer, while hydrogen rises from the ; catalyst on the wafer’s other side. Nocera has been perfecting the artificial leaf since he first demonstrated it in 2011; today, it is far more efficient than a field-grown plant, which captures only 1 percent of sunlight’s energy. He says he can reach efficiencies of 70 percent to 80 percent of the underlying solar-wafer technology, which is improving constantly.
The hydrogen it produces is a versatile fuel from a chemical standpoint, Nocera reports, and could easily become the basis of a fuel cell, but it has not been ; widely adopted, in part because it is a gas. Liquid fuels are much easier to handle and store, hence the new bionic leafs importance.
In the bionic leaf, the hydrogen gas is fed to a metabolically engineered version of a bacterium called ) Ralstonia eutropha. The bacteria combine the hydrogen with carbon dioxide as they divide to make more cells, and then—through a trick of bioengineering pioneered by Anthony Sinskey, professor of microbiology and of health sciences and technology at MIT—produce isopropanol (rubbing alcohol), which can be burned in an engine much like the gasoline additive ethanol.
“The advantage of interfacing the inorganic catalyst with biology is you have an unprecedented platform for chemical synthesis that you don’t have with inorganic catalysts alone,” says Brendan Colon, a graduate student in systems biology in the Silver lab. “Life has evolved for billions of years to produce catalysts capable of making chemical modifications on complicated molecules with surgical precision, many times at room temperature,” Colon explains. “If you can use enzymes for building chemicals, you open the door to making many of the natural compounds we rely on every day,” such as antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, and pharmaceuticals.
Members of Silver’s lab have been working to perfect the tricky interface between the catalyst and the bacteria, so that they will thrive and grow optimally. In its first iteration, the bionic leaf matched the efficiency of photosynthesis in plants, far below the capabilities of Nocera’s underlying artificial leaf. Now the team is working to surpass blue-green algae, which—at 5 percent efficiency—do better at photosynthesis than plants. Colon has been developing a strain of the bacterium that grows well even at the lower voltages that might be emitted by the solar wafer at the system’s core on a cloudy day, for example; this could dramatically improve overall efficiency.
Ultimately, though, Silver’s goal is not to create fuels from this work, but “high-value commodities” in remote places. Fuel, she notes wryly, is cheap “because we fight wars over it”—and developing a system that could make fuel at a price lower than gasoline would therefore be very difficult, she says. Drugs, on the other hand, are high-value commodities, so engineering a bacterium to produce not isopropanol but a vitamin or a drug may be her next goal for this system.
Passage 4
Passage 1 is adapted from Albert Luthuli’s to the South African Congress of Democrats, delivered in 1958. Passage 2 is adapted from Harold Maanlaris address to the South African Parliament delivered in 1960. At the time of these speeches. South Africa was in the process of transitioning from”. a British colony to an independent republic under a system of white-minority rule known as apartheid Luthuli was the president of the African National Congress a group advocate equality for black South African Macro, the prime minister of Britain, was addressing the all-white South African Parliament.
Passage 1
Those of us who are in the freedom struggle in this country have really only one Rospel. We may poibly shade it in different ways, but it is a gospel of democracy and freedom.
If we are true to South Africa, that must be our vision, a vision of South Africa as a fully democratic country. It cannot in honesty be daimed that she is yet really democratic, when only about a third of her people enjoy democratic rights, and the rest—notwithstanding the fact that they constitute the majority—are still subjected to apartheid rule. I emphasize the words “are still” because I do believe firmly that it is not a state that can be perpetuated_ Apartheid rule is the antithesis of democracy. Apartheid—in theory and in practice—is an effort, to make Africans march back to tribalism.
Sometimes very nice and pretty phrases are used to justify this diversion from the democratic road. The one that comes to my mind is the suggestion that we Africans will “develop along our own lines.” I do not know of any people who really have “developed along their own lines.” My fellow white South Africans, enjoying what is called “Western civilization,” should be the first to agree that this civilization is indebted to previous civilizations, from the East, from Greece, Rome and so on. For its heritage, Western civilization is really indebted to very many sources, both ancient and modern….
The essence of development along your own lines is that you must have the right to develop, and the right to determine how to develop.
Its essence is freedom and—beyond freedom—self-determination. This is the vision we hold for our future and our development.
One might ask. ‘Is this vision of a democratic society in South Africa a realizable vision? Or is it merely a mirage?’ I say, it is a realizable vision. For it is in the nature of man. to yearn and struggle for freedom. The germ of freedom is in every individual, in anyone who is a human being. In fact, the history of mankind is the history of man struggling and striving for freedom. Indeed, the very apex of human achievement is FREEDOM and not slavery. Every human being struggles to reach that apex.
Passage 2
The wind of change is blowing through this continent and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact And we must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.
Of course you understand this better than anyone. you are sprung from Europe, the home of nationalism. and here in Africa you have youmelves created a free nation. A new nation. Indeed, in the history of our times yours will be recorded as the firs/ of the African nationalists. And this tide of national consciousness which is now rising in Africa. is a fact, for which you and we, and the other nations of the Western world are ultimately responsible. For its causes are to be found in the achievements of Western civilisation….
I am sure you will agree that in our own areas of responsibility we must each do what we think right What we British think right derives from a long experience both of failure and success in the management of these affairs. We try to learn and apply the lessons of both. Our judgement of right and wrong and of justice is rooted in the same soil as yours—in Christianity and in the rule of law as the basis of a free society. This experience of our own explains why it has been our aim in the countries for which we have borne responsibility, not only to raise the material standards of life, but to create a society that respects the rights of individuals, a society in which men are given the opportunity to grow to their full stature—and that must in our view include the opportunity of an increasing share in political power and responsibility, a society finally in which individual merit and individual merit alone, is the criterion for a man’s advancement, whether political or economic.
Finally, in countries inhabited by several different races, it has been our aim to find means by which the community can become more of a community, and fellowship fostered between its various parts.
Passage 5
This passage is adapted from Robert M. Hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. ©2012 by Robert M. Hazen.
The Moon is bone-dry by conventional wisdom (actually drier than bone, which retains a significant water component even when baked in the desert sun). Multiple lines of evidence point to this aridity: Earth-based telescopes reveal no characteristic infrared absorption; Moon rocks from all six Apollo landing sites held no detectable traces of water (at least by 1970 analytical standards); and the finding of unrusted iron metal after four billion years on the lunar surface would seem to preclude even a trace of corrosive water.
It’s a funny thing about conventional wisdom, though. Eventually someone will challenge what everyone else knows to be true, and once in a while something really interesting will be found. In 1994 a single flyby of the Clementine spacecraft mission produced radar measurements that were consistent with water ice, though many planetary scientists were unconvinced. Four years later the Lunar Prospector employed neutron spectroscopy to detect a significant concentration of hydrogen atoms, and hence possibly water ice or water-containing minerals, near the poles. Still, many experts pointed to implanted hydrogen ions from the Sun’s solar wind as a more likely source of the signal. Then in October 2009 NASA smashed the upper stage of an Atlas rocket into one of the Moon’s craters (the Cabeus crater, near the southern lunar pole) and scrutinized the plume of impact debris for signs of H2O. Sure enough, the flurry of dust incorporated a small but significant amount of the life-giving stuff—enough to renew interest in lunar water and its possible origins. Three back-to-back articles in Science that same October established that evidence for water on the Moon is now unambiguous.
Enter Erik Hauri and his colleagues at the Carnegie Institution. Using an ion microprobe—a highly sensitive instrument that hadn’t been available to the first generation of scientists who studied the Apollo samples—Hauri’s team has revisited the colorful glass beads collected during lunar missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Other scientists had examined the glass beads for signs of water decades earlier, but their detection capacities were no match for the ion microprobe’s ability to resolve measurements at the scale of a millionth of an inch. Hauri and his coworkers polished a variety of glass beads so that their round cross sections were revealed in the ion probe. The beads’ outer rims proved to be very dry, with only a few parts per million water, but the cores of the largest beads have as much as [46 parts per million). Over billions of years, most of the glass beads’ original water has evaporated to space, more from the outsides than from the cores. However, based on the significant amount of remaining water deep inside the beads, Hauri and his colleagues calculate that the original water content of the Moon’s magma may have been as high as 750 parts per million—a lot of water, comparable to many volcanic rocks on Earth, and more than enough to drive surface volcanism that would have dispersed magma in explosive eruptions billions of years ago.
If that much water powered volcanoes in the Moon’s past, then a great deal of water must still be locked somewhere inside the Moon’s frozen interior. And since the Moon formed primarily by the wholesale excavation of Earth’s primordial mantle during a collision with another massive object, our planets deep interior likely holds prodigious amounts of unseen water as well.
2019年 3月 (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3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！
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