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過去這個週末學生考了 2019 年 10 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 10 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 10 月 (北美) SAT 考試閱讀文章
PASSAGE 1
This passage is adapted from Willa Cather, 0 Pioneers! Originally published in 1913. John Bergson is a farmer on his deathbed. Alexandra Bergson is his teenage daughter.
In eleven long years John Bergson had made but little impression upon the wild land he had come to tame. It was still a wild thing that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to come, or why. Mischance hung over it. Its Genius was unfriendly to man. The sick man was feeling this as he lay looking out of the window, after the doctor had left him, on the day following Alexandra’s trip to town. There it lay outside his door, the same land, the same lead-colored miles. He knew every ridge and draw and gully between him and the horizon. To the south, his plowed fields; to the east, the sod stables, the cattle corral, the pond,—and then the grass.
John Bergson had the Old-World belief that land, in itself, is desirable. But this land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces. He had an idea that no one understood how to farm it properly, and this he often discussed with Alexandra. Their neighbors, certainly, knew even less about farming than he did. Many of them had never worked on a farm until they took up their homesteads. They had been handwerkers at home; tailors, locksmiths, joiners, cigar-makers, etc. Bergson himself had worked in a shipyard.
For weeks, John Bergson had been thinking about these things. His bed stood in the sitting-room, next to the kitchen. Through the day, while the baking and washing and ironing were going on, the father lay and looked up at the roof beams that he himself had hewn, or out at the cattle in the corral. He counted the cattle over and over. It diverted him to speculate as to how much weight each of the steers would probably put on by spring. He often called his daughter in to talk to her about this. Before Alexandra was twelve years old she had begun to be a help to him, and as she grew older he had come to depend more and more upon her resourcefulness and good judgment. His boys were willing enough to work, but when he talked with them they usually irritated him. It was Alexandra who read the papers and followed the markets, and who learned by the mistakes of their neighbors. It was Alexandra who could always tell about what it had cost to fatten each steer, and who could guess the weight of a hog before it went on the scales closer than John Bergson himself. Lou and Oscar were industrious, but he could never teach them to use their heads about their work.
Alexandra, her father often said to himself, was like her grandfather; which was his way of saying that she was intelligent. John Bergson’s father had been a shipbuilder, a man of considerable force and of some fortune. Late in life he married a second time, a Stockholm woman of questionable character, much younger than he, who goaded him into every sort of extravagance. On the shipbuilder’s part, this marriage was an infatuation, the despairing folly of a powerful man who cannot bear to grow old. In a few years his unprincipled wife warped the probity of a lifetime. He speculated, lost his own fortune and funds entrusted to him by poor seafaring men, and died disgraced, leaving his children nothing. But when all was said, he had come up from the sea himself, had built up a proud little business with no capital but his own skill and foresight, and had proved himself a man. In his daughter, John Bergson recognized the strength of will, and the simple direct way of thinking things out, that had characterized his father in his better days. He would much rather, of course, have seen this likeness in one of his sons, but it was not a question of choice. As he lay there day after day he had to accept the situation as it was, and to be thankful that there was one among his children to whom he could entrust the future of his family and the possibilities of his hard-won land.
PASSAGE 2
Passage 1 is adapted from Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose. 1980 by Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman. Passage 2 is adapted from Douglas J. Amy, Government is Good. 2011 by Douglas J. Amy.
Passage 1
An essential part of economic freedom is freedom to choose how to use our income: how much to spend on ourselves and on what items; how much to save and in what form; how much to give away and to whom. Currently, more than 40 percent of our income is disposed of on our behalf by government at federal, state, and local levels combined. One of us once suggested a new national holiday, ‘Personal Independence Day—that day in the year when we stop working to pay the expenses of government… and start working to pay for the items we severally and individually choose in light of our own needs and desires.’ In 1929 that holiday would have come on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, February 12; today it would come about May 30; if present trends were to continue, it would coincide with the other Independence Day, July 4, around 1988.
Of course, we have something to say about how much of our income is spent on our behalf by government. We participate in the political process that has resulted in government’s spending an amount equal to more than 40 percent of our income. Majority rule is a necessary and desirable expedient. It is, however, very different from the kind of freedom you have when you shop at a supermarket. When you enter the voting booth once a year, you almost always vote for a package rather than for specific items. If you are in the majority, you will at best get both the items you favored and the ones you opposed but regarded as on balance less important. Generally, you end up with something different from what you thought you voted for. If you are in the minority, you must conform to the majority vote and wait for your turn to come. When you vote daily in the supermarket, you get precisely what you voted for, and so does everyone else. The ballot box produces conformity without unanimity; the marketplace, unanimity without conformity. That is why it is desirable to use the ballot box, so far as possible, only for those decisions where conformity is essential.
Passage 2
So why are most people in denial about the beneficial roles that government plays in their lives? There are several answers. First, most Americans have become so used to the benefits of government that they simply take them for granted. Benefits that are provided reliably for long periods of time—such as clean water and a stable currency system—tend to fade into the background and to not be considered benefits at all. They disappear from our consciousness. Our failure to notice or appreciate what government does for us also has to do with the unique and peculiar nature of many government benefits. The benefits we get from paying our taxes are usually not immediate, and they are often not particularly tangible either. They can be remote and elusive. This is easy to see if we contrast government benefits with the benefits we receive from exchanges in the marketplace. When we go to the store, we hand over our money and immediately get something very concrete in return—a candy bar, a blouse, some groceries. This kind of exchange is very satisfying; we see what we get for our money right away.
Not so with many of the exchanges we have with our governments. We shell out money for our taxes, but what we gain in return is frequently delayed or remote. For instance, we pay our local government to treat our sewage, but the environmental payoffs may not be immediately obvious to us. When we later go fishing or swimming in our local lake or river—waters whose purity depends upon adequate sewage treatment—we probably do not see this enjoyable experience as a result of our sewer tax. When benefits are remote like this, it is hard to make the connections between them and the taxes we pay.
Government benefits are also different because they are often less tangible than the goods we get from a store. These benefits frequently take the form not of the presence of something, but of the absence of something. Think of it this way: much of the job of government in our lives is to ensure that bad things don’t happen to us. We pay taxes so that our homes don’t get burgled, and our food doesn’t make us sick, our banks don’t fail, and our bridges don’t collapse. In other words, often when people in government are doing their job right—nothing happens. No wonder no one notices. So while we really do get a lot for our taxes, we often get it in a form that is largely invisible to us. This is one of the reasons why we too easily fall for the illusion that government is doing nothing for us.
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from Catherine Clabby, “If Not for Plants, Could Rivers Bend?” ©2010 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society.
For decades, the Canadian geologist Martin Gibling has been intrigued by the tough-to-prove hypothesis that land plants created the shape of modern rivers hundreds of millions of years ago.
Plant roots reinforced the ground, the thinking goes, creating stable banks that funneled what once were wide, shallow water flows into narrower and deeper channels. By extension, that set the stage for lots of significant Earth history events, including the rise of human civilizations in modern river basins so many millennia later.
Now Gibling and postdoctoral scientist Neil Davies, both at Dalhousie University, have strengthened this case. When the pair compared a much-improved plant fossil record with evidence of how rivers changed very long ago, the transitions matched up.
“As soon as the plants got a foothold on land and rooted vegetation started, that changed the landscape. Basically plants engineered that landscape as they evolved,” says Davies.
Back in the Cambrian period, which ended some 500 million years ago, the geologic record indicates that rivers were very shallow but wide things, almost floods that allowed rainwater to wash from largely barren solid ground to sea. Deposits left behind were preserved as sheets of coarse grains, some of which suggest these rivers were 1,000 or more times as wide as they were deep.
“There is probably nowhere on Earth where rivers form the way they did before vegetation,” Gibling says.
But at the time separating the Silurian and Devonian periods, some 420 million years ago, the picture found in preserved sedimentary rock changes. The blankets of unconsolidated sediment found in earlier river deposits appear less frequently. It happens just as evidence of land vegetation with root systems also expands in the rock record.
In addition, more complex and diverse river remains emerge, including more traces of mud, probably due to the enhanced chemical weathering that plants assist; smaller-sized sand grains; and samples of organic remains. Significantly, shapes shift too.
Organized deposits become visible in the remains of highly sinuous, single-thread channels. Evidence of lateral accretion—the digging away of material at the outer bends of a river and the simultaneous deposition of material at the inner bends—is more abundant.
There is also variation that appears to be related to the local climate during the times that the rivers flowed. “Before plants evolved, it didn’t matter if a river was in a polar region, a temperate region or an arid region, the rivers looked the same. Later you find differences,” says Davies, who devoted two and a half years to this project.
Using funding from the Canadian government, Davies and Gibling reviewed 144 published reports describing river sediment preserved in the rock record, dating from the Cambrian to the Devonian, to build their case. They visited 34 spots themselves in North America and Europe. And they scrutinized experimental results.
One laboratory finding that impressed Gibling was achieved at St. Anthony Falls Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. Working in a tank, researchers there described how vegetation—in this case alfalfa sprouts that were allowed to germinate on banks—transformed a channel that flowed between multiple sandbars into one that self-organized into a single-thread channel.
“The strength of the roots of alfalfa was enough to completely change the whole pattern. That generated a meandering river with banks that migrate and are erosion resistant,” Gibling says.
Dov Corenblit, an associate professor at the University of Paris who describes himself as a biogeomorphologist, says Davies and Gibling have delivered more than just insight into the history of rivers. They have expanded evidence that the biotic and abiotic features of this planet influence one another.
Their findings “may be considered significant progress in the comprehension of one of the most critical phases in the coupling between physical and biological processes on Earth,” Corenblit says.
The Dalhousie University geologists aren’t done. They want to explore whether any of the periodic mass extinctions experienced on Earth might have affected the shapes of rivers as well. They are scouring the literature for changes preserved from the end of the Permian, when a lot of plant life was wiped out.
“We’ll look to see if rivers reverted to the older form,” Davies say.
Passage 4
This passage is adapted from Philip E.Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. 02015 by Philip Tetlock Consulting, Inc., and Connaught Street, Inc.
Human beings have coped with uncertainty for as long as we have been recognizably human. And for almost all that time we didn’t have access to statistical models of uncertainty because they didn’t exist. It was remarkably late in history—arguably as late as the 1713 publication of Jakob Bernoulli’s Ars Conjectandi—before the best minds started to think seriously about probability.
Before that, people had no choice but to rely on the tip-of-your-nose perspective. You see a shadow moving in the long grass. Should you worry about lions? You try to think of an example of a lion attacking from the long grass. If the example comes to mind easily, run! If the response is strong enough, it can produce a binary conclusion: “Yes, it’s a lion,” or “No, it’s not a lion.” But if it’s weaker, it can produce an unsettling middle possibility: “Maybe it’s a lion.” What the tip-of-your-nose perspective will not deliver is a judgment so fine grained that it can distinguish between, say, a 60% chance that it is a lion and an 80% chance. That takes slow, conscious, careful thought. Of course, when you were dealing with the pressing existential problems our ancestors faced, it was rarely necessary to make such fine distinctions. It may not even have been desirable. A three-setting dial gives quick, clear directions. Is that a lion? YES = run! MAYBE = stay alert! NO = relax. The ability to distinguish between a 60% probability and an 80% probability would add little. In fact, a more fine-grained analysis could slow you down—and get you killed.
In this light, the preference for two- and three-setting mental dials makes sense. And lots of research underscores the point. Why is a decline from 5% to 0% so much more valuable than a decline from 10% to 5%? Because it delivers more than a 5% reduction in risk. It delivers certainty. Both 0% and 100% weigh far more heavily in our minds than the mathematical models of economists say they should. Again, this is not surprising if you think about the world in which our brain evolved. There was always at least a tiny chance a lion was lurking in the vicinity. Or a snake. Or any of the countless other threats people faced. But our ancestors couldn’t maintain a state of constant alert. The cognitive cost would have been too great. They needed worry-free zones. The solution? Ignore small chances and use the two-setting dial as much as possible. Either it is a lion or it isn’t. Only when something undeniably falls between those two settings—only when we are compelled—do we turn the mental dial to maybe.
We want answers. A confident yes or no is satisfying in a way that maybe never is, a fact that helps to explain why the media so often turn to hedgehogs [single-minded people] who are sure they know what is coming no matter how bad their forecasting records may be. Of course it’s not always wrong to prefer a confident judgment. All else being equal, our answers to questions like “Does France have more people than Italy?” are likelier to be right when we are confident they are right than when we are not. Confidence and accuracy are positively correlated. But research shows we exaggerate the size of the correlation. For instance, people trust more confident financial advisers over those who are less confident even when their track records are identical. And people equate confidence and competence, which makes the forecaster who says something has a middling probability of happening less worthy of respect. As one study noted, people “took such judgments as indications the forecasters were either generally incompetent, ignorant of the facts in a given case, or lazy, unwilling to expend the effort required to gather information that would justify greater confidence.”
Passage 5
This passage is adapted from Dawn Levy, “ORNL Researchers Invent Tougher Plastic with 50 Percent Renewable Content:’ Published in 2016 by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
A car’s bumper is usually made of a moldable thermoplastic polymer called ABS, shorthand for its acrylonitrile, butadiene and styrene components. Light, strong and tough, it is also the stuff of ventilation pipes, protective headgear, kitchen appliances, Lego bricks and many other consumer products. Useful as it is, one of its drawbacks is that it is made using chemicals derived from petroleum.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have made a better thermoplastic by replacing styrene with lignin, a brittle, rigid polymer that, with cellulose, forms the woody cell walls of plants. In doing so, they have invented a solvent-free production process that interconnects equal parts of nanoscale lignin dispersed in a synthetic rubber matrix to produce a meltable, moldable, ductile material that’s at least ten times tougher than ABS. The resulting thermoplastic—called ABL for acrylonitrile, butadiene, lignin—is recyclable, as it can be melted three times and still perform well. The results, published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, may bring cleaner, cheaper raw materials to diverse manufacturers.
The technology could make use of the lignin-rich biomass byproduct stream from biorefineries and pulp and paper mills. With the prices of natural gas and oil dropping, renewable fuels can’t compete with fossil fuels, so biorefineries are exploring options for developing other economically viable products. Among cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, the major structural constituents of plants, lignin is the most commercially underutilized. The ORNL study aimed to use it to produce, with an eye toward commercialization, a renewable thermoplastic with properties rivaling those of current petroleum-derived alternatives.
“Lignin is a very brittle natural polymer, so it needs to be toughened,” explained study author Amit Naskar, leader of ORNL’s Carbon and Composites group. A major goal of the group is producing industrial polymers that are strong and tough enough to be deformed without fracturing. “We need to chemically combine soft matter with lignin. That soft matrix would be ductile so that it can be malleable or stretchable. Very rigid lignin segments would offer resistance to deformation and thus provide stiffness.”
All lignins are not equal in terms of heat stability. To determine what type would make the best thermoplastic feedstock, the scientists evaluated lignin from wheat straw, softwoods like pine and hardwoods like oak. They found hardwood lignin is the most thermally stable, and some types of softwood lignins are also melt-stable.
Next, the researchers needed to couple the lignin with soft matter. Chemists typically accomplish this by synthesizing polymers in the presence of solvents. Because lignin and a synthetic rubber containing acrylonitrile and butadiene, called nitrile rubber, both have chemical groups in which electrons are unequally distributed and therefore likely to interact, Naskar and Chau Tran (who performed melt-mixing and characterization experiments) instead tried to couple the two in a melted phase without solvents.
In a heated chamber with two rotors, the researchers “kneaded” a molten mix of equal parts powdered lignin and nitrile rubber. During mixing, lignin agglomerates broke into interpenetrating layers or sheets of 10 to 200 nanometers that dispersed well in and interacted with the rubber. Without the proper selection of a soft matrix and mixing conditions, lignin agglomerates are at least 10 times larger than those obtained with the ORNL process. The product that formed had properties of neither lignin nor rubber, but something in between, with a combination of lignin’s stiffness and nitrile rubber’s elasticity.
2019年 10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10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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