過去這個週末學生考了 2020 年 7 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 2020 年 7 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 2020 年 7 月 ACT 考試閱讀文章
Passage 1
Passage A is adapted from the essay “Touring Home” by Susan Power (©1996 by Susan Power). Passage B is adapted from the memoir Beyond the Narrow Gate: The Journey of Four Chinese Women from the Middle Kingdom to Middle America by Leslie Chang (©1999 by Leslie Chang).
Passage I
My mother tells me stories every day: while she
cleans, while she cooks, on our way to the library.
standing in the checkout line at the supermarket. I like
to share her stories with other people and chatter away
hen I am able to command adult attention.
“She left the reservation when she was sixteen
years old.” I tell my audience. Sixteen sounds very old
to me, but I always state the number because it seems
integral to my recitation. “She had never been on a train
before or used a telephone. She left Standing Rock to
take a job in Chicago so she could help out the family
during the War. She was so petrified of the new sur-
roundings, she stayed in her seat all the way from
McLaughlin. South Dakota. to Chicago, Illinois, and
didn’t move once.”
I usually laugh after saying this because I cannot
imagine my mother being afraid of anything. She is so
tall, a true Dakota woman; she rises against the sun like
a skyscraper, and when I draw her picture in my notebook,
she takes up the entire page. She talks politics
and attends sit-ins and says what’s on her mind.
I am her small shadow and witness. I am the timid
daughter who can rage only on paper.
We don’t have much money, but Mom takes me
from one end of the city to the other, on foot, on buses.
I will grow up believing that Chicago belongs to me,
because it was given to me by my mother.
Some days we haunt the Art Institute, and my
mother pauses before a Picasso. “He did this during his
blue period,” she tells me.
I squint at the blue man holding a blue guitar.
“Was he very sad?” I ask.
“Yes, I think he was.” My mother takes my hand
and looks away from the painting. I can see a story
developing behind her eyes. and I tug on her arm to
release the words. She will tell me why Picasso was
blue, what his thoughts were as he painted this canvas.
She relates anecdotes I will never find in books, never
see footnoted in a biography of the master artist. I don’t
even bother to check these references because I like my
mother’s version best.
Passage II
Water belongs to everyone and to no one. For this
reason. I have always had a particular affinity for it,
which may strike some as mysterious. Westerners ask
me where my parents were born, as though the answer
will enable them to glean some knowledge. The answer
is Beijing and Luoyang. The truth is that this response
signifies nothing. The meaningful question would be to
ask where my ancestors lived. The answer to that is
inland. My father’s people came from Wuhan. birth-
place of the Chinese republic and the capital of Hubei.
that sweltering province sandwiched between Sichuan
and Anhui. My mother’s father was from Inner Mongolia.
land of desert and grassy plains.
Yet water calls to me. I remain convinced that I
would find peace if I could only have a house by the
ocean. I insisted on being married near the sea. This
bond, I know, comes from my mother.
She longs for a view more than anything else.
Once, staying at a hotel ‘in San Francisco, she insisted
on seeing three different rooms before she found one
with which she was satisfied. It was on a floor so high
it made me dizzy, with a corner window overlooking
the bay: Even so, my mother spent most of her time on
the bridge linking the elevator bank to our wing. The
bridge consisted almost entirely of windows. It offered
a view in either direction that was brilliant and
blinding. If there had been a chair, she could have sat
forever, letting the gold sun and blue sea overwhelm her
through the glass.
My mother may have descended from inland
people, but they were also nomads. Her father once
rode his horse practically the length of China. from
Inner Mongolia to Guangzhou. a distance of some
twelve hundred miles. My mother could only become a
nomad herself—forever moving, changing and going.
yet always retaining some essential part of her being.
recognizable and intact in spite of all the places she has
been. In this, she is like water. not dead water but fearsomely
alive. When she gazes out on its shimmering
expanse, she sees her own reflection. When I gaze out. I
see her, my mother. always pulling away, returning and
pulling away again. I drink from her. and she slips
between my fingertips. She has borne me all this way. I
cannot decide whether I want her to stay or go. When
she is here. I wish she would leave. When she is gone. I
wish she would return. She pulls away again, a force as
elemental as the ebbing tide. I remain a child on the
shore, eagerly collecting the sea glass and driftwood
she has left behind.
Passage 2
This passage Is adapted horn Th. Frozen. View nods: A Two Story by Gavin Weightman (02003 by Gavin Valghtmen).
When the first comprehensive report on the ice
industry of the United States was commissioned in
1879 as part of a national census, it was estimated that
about eight million tons were harvested annually,
though the business was so extensive and production so
poorly documented that this was, at best, a well-
informed guess. The figures were put together by one
Henry Hall. who signed himself “special agent’ and
gave an account of the great growth of the industry in
the preceding ten years. Of the tight million tons of ice
harvested, about five million reached the consumer—
the rest melted during shipment and storage. By far the
biggest market was In New York. and none of its ice
was manufactured artificially: it was all cut in winter
and stored in hundreds of timber warehouses that lined
the lakes and rivers and had a capacity of up to fifty
thousand tons each. Between New York and Albany,
150 miles up the Hudson River, there were 135 ice-
houses, but even this was not enough to supply the
metropolis, which relied heavily on imports. In
fact, in the year of the great ice census. New York and
Philadelphia suffered one of their recurrent ice “famines,” when
unseasonably warm weather destroyed the harvest on
the Hudson and local lakes, and the price of ice rose
from $4 to $5 a ton. That year the ice was fifteen to
twenty inches thick in Maine. a top-quality crop, and it
could be shipped down to New York at an estimated
cost of $1.50 a ton. This produced a frenzy of harvest-
ing on the Kennebec. Penobscot. and Sheepscot Rivers,
and two thousand cargoes of ice packed in hay and saw-
dust were shipped south to New York. Philadelphia, and
other more southern cities, where they were sold for a
total of around $1.5 million.
Though the demand for ice rose annually, the New
York suppliers did not explore the use of artificial
refrigeration. Instead, they began to buy up sections of
the Kennebec River shoreline and to erect great wooden
warehouses there, transforming the landscape of the
river for many miles. It was the same farther inland.
where ice companies bought up shoreline along the
lakes and put up storehouses to supply the meal industry
of Chicago and the brewers of Milwaukee, as well
as millions of domestic consumers.
The first real crisis in the natural-ice trade was
caused not by competition from artificial manufacture,
but by pollution. As the cities grew, they encroached on
the rivers and lakes from which the ice was cut, and
soon there were health scares. This produced a search
for cleaner supplies away from towns, and stimulated
the search for a means of manufacturing ice with pure
water. The realization that the bacteria that cause dis-
eases such as typhoid were not killed off in frozen
water added to the urgency of finding safer form, of
refrigeration.
The natural-ice trade began to decline from the
early decades of the twentieth century. though in more
remote areas of North America where electric power
was not available but lake ice was abundant in winter. It
survived as late as the 1950s. As ice harvesting died
out, the evidence of its former vast scale rapidly disappeared.
There was no alternative use for the great ice-
houses, many of which simply burned down, often set
alight by a spark from a steam train—they were surprisingly
flammable, as most were made of wood and kept
as dry as possible to better preserve the blocks of ice
they housed. But the majority were demolished or
simply rotted away.
Over a wide area of the northern states, young
diving enthusiasts with no knowledge of the former ice
trade still emerge from lakes and rivers clutching an
impressive variety of odd implements—plows and chis-
els and scrapers that fell through the ice during the har-
vesting. One or two museums keep small displays of
these tools, and collectors have preserved manufactur-
ers’ catalogs that proudly present their versions of the
ice plow, the ice saw, the grapple. the Jack grapple, the
breaking-off bar, the caulk bar. the packing chisel,
the house bar, the fork bar, the float hook. the line
marker. and many other specialist implements the use
of which has long been forgotten.
The inner-city icehouses have also gone. and the
ice wagon and the iceman are rapidly fading memories.
All that is left in America of this once-great industry is
the water itself. which provided a continuously renew-
able supply of ice each winter. There are few memorials
on the banks of the rivers and lakes that once produced
such a vital crop.
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from the article “Read My Lips”by Chiara Barzini (©2012 by the Harper’s Magazine Foundation).
In the passage, dubbing primarily refers to providing a film with a new sound track. especially dialogue. in a different language.
Filmmakers have debated the respective merits of
subtitles and dubbing since the earliest sound films. In
“The Impossible Life of Clark Costa.” published in 1940 in
the film journal Cinema, director Michelangelo
Antonioni wrote that Romolo Costa. the person who
dubbed all of actor Clark Gable’s performances. was a
“hybrid individual burn out of a chemical combination.
” This “half Clark. half Costa” was unbearable to
Antonioni, who considered dubbing to be a mere
“acoustic surrogate” of acting. To him, dubbing com-
promised the intention of the director, leading to an
artificial product that lacked artistic unity. Director Pier
Paolo Pasolini. who called both dubbing and subtitles
“evils,” said that, between the two. dubbing was the less
harmful. since it allowed you to see the picture in full.
Director Jean Renoir called dubbing a “monstrosity, a
challenge to human and divine laws.
Director Federico Fellini didn’t agree with any of
them. Dubbing was an extension of his shoots, a tech-
nique he would use to retouch and rewrite. He mercilessly
dubbed over his actors, changing dialogue in
posipmduction. sometimes having worked without a
script. (He reportedly instructed his actors to count
aloud in front of the camera so that he could insert new
dialogue afterward.) Renato Conesi, a veteran Fellini
dubber, told me that, during the filming of Amarrord
(1973). he witnessed Fellini ask an old Neapolitan lady
to tell him a sad story. Over footage of this woman
recounting a tragic tale about her grandson, Fellini
added a new sound track about war and hunger
recorded by an actor from Emilia-Romagna, combining
the vivid expressiveness of the South with his favorite
northern accent.
If you visit a dubbing studio, the over-the-top zest
of the actors is evident in everything front their melo-
dramatic speech to their movements: standing in front
of the microphone. they coil and twitch. I asked Conesi
whether this was a consequence of having to focus
one’s lifelong talent into the few centimeters between
mouth and microphone, a kind of bodily rebellion to the
condition of being heard but not seen, and he laughed.
“Of course it isn’t easy to spend a life in the darkness,
but this is hardly the reason why they twitch and turn!
Dubbers are used to reciting while trying to re-create
the bodily sensations of what they see on the screen
before them. If there is running in the film, they will
run on their feet. The moving.” he explained. “is the
result of re-creating large movements in small spaces.”
There are still few options for those seeking to
watch subtitled, original-language films at a movie
house in Italy. The Metropolitan cinema on Via del
Corso closed recently after a long battle involving
intellectuals, show-business people,and American and
British opals in Rome, to be replaced with a clothing
store. Italians remain hooked on. dubbing—perhaps
because of simple affection. Familiar voices yield
emotional attachment.
Francesco Vairano, a dubber and dubbing director
known for adapting foreign films considered to be
“undubbable.” such as the French box office hit Bien-
venue chez its Ch’tis (“Welcome to the Sticks:’ 2008),
which relies on linguistic misunderstandings for much
of its comedy. explained that actors become just as
attached to their parts as audiences do. Vairano has
been one of the few directors to break the habit or
matching the same Italian dubber to a foreign actor for
all his films, preferring instead to select the dubber
according to the requirements of the role, and, he
admits, he was hated by all the prima donna dubbers for
this. “If you take that actor away from them: he told
me, “they will insult you.”
In 2007. I met dubber Luca Ward, who provided
the voice of the narrator for a romantic comedy I co-
wrote. Sousa ma Ti Chiamo Amine (“Sorry but I Love
You”). What I didn’t then know was that everyone Ward
met wanted him to recite actor Samuel L. Jackson’s
Ezekiel 25:17 passage from the film Pulp Fiction. and
that I should consider it an honor that he would offer a
performance to a stranger. When he finally did recite
the monologue. it was astonishing. every dramatic
pause carefully timed and every word perfectly enunciated.
I understood that, if anybody took Samuel L.
Jackson away from Ward. it would have meant taking
away a part of his soul; he was, as Antonioni would say.
half Ward. half Jackson. Leaving the day’s recording
session. Ward told me he was off to have dinner with
actress Meg Ryan. before raising an eyebrow and clan-
fying. “With Meg Ryan’s dubber … I am having
dinner with Meg Ryan’s voice.”
Passage 4
This passage is adapted from the essay “Matting Stun: From Bacon to Bakelite” by Philip Ball( ©2010 by Philip Bait. )
During the Industrial Revolution, the high price of
steel meant that many large engineering projects were
carried out that used instead cast iron, which is brittle
and prone to failure. This was why Henry Bessemer’s
new process for making sled was greeted with jubilation:
the details, announced at a meeting of the British
Association in 1856. were published in full in The
Times. Bessemer himself was lauded not just as an
engineer but as a scientist, being elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society in 1879.
Bessemer’s process controlled the amount of
carbon mixed with iron to make steel. That the proportion
of carbon governs the hardness was first noted in
1774 by the Swedish metallurgist Torbern Bergmann.
who was by any standards a scientist, teaching chemistry,
physics and mathematics at Uppsala. Bergmann
made an extensive study of the propensity of different
chemical elements to combine with one another—a
property known as elective affinity, central to the
eighteenth-century notion of chemical reactivity. He
was a mentor and sponsor of Carl Wilhelm Scheele. the
greatest Swedish chemist of the age and co-discoverer
of oxygen.
Oxygen. as a component of air, was the key to the
Bessemer process. It offered a way of removing impurities
from pig iron and adjusting its carbon content
during conversion to steel. A blast of air through the
molten metal turned impurities such as silicon into light
silica slag (a collection of compounds removed from
metal in the smelting process). and removed carbon in
the form of volatile carbon dioxide. Pig iron contains as
much as 4 per cent carbon: steels have only around
0.3-2 per cent. Meanwhile, the heat produced in these
reactions with oxygen kept the iron molten without the
need for extra fuel.
It was long known that steel can be improved with
a spice of other elements. A dash of the metal man-
ganese helps to remove oxygen and sulphur from the
iron, and most of the manganese currently produced
globally is used for this purpose. Manganese also
makes steel stronger. while nickel and chromium
improve its hardness. And chromium is the key additive
in stainless steel—in a proportion of more than about
11 per cent, it makes the metal rust-resistant. Most
modern steels are therefore alloys blended to give the
desired properties.
But is this science? Some of the early innovations
in steel alloys were chance discoveries, often due to
impurities incorporated by accident. In this respect.
metallurgy has long retained the air of an artisan craft.
akin to the trial-and-error explorations of dyers. glass-
makers and potters. But the reason for this empiricism
is not that the science of metallurgy is trivial; it
is because it is so difficult. According to Rodney
Coriorill, a remarkable British physicist whose expertise
stretched from the sciences a materials to that of
the brain. ‘metallurgy is one of our most anrts,
but is often referred to as one of the youngest sciences’.
One of the principal difficulties in understanding
the behaviour of materials such as steel is that this
depends on its structure over a wide range or length
scales. from the packing of individual atoms to the size
and shape of grains micrometres or even millimeters in
size. Science has trouble dealing with such a span of
scales. One might regard this difficulty as akin to that
in the social sciences. where social behaviour is gov-
erred by how individuals behave but also how we inter-
act on the scale of families and neighbourhoods, within
entire cities. and at a national level. (That’s why the
social sciences are arguably among the hardest of
sciences too.)
The mechanical properties of metals depend on
how flaws in the crystal structure, called defects, move
and interact. These defects arc produced by almost
inevitable imperfections in the regular stacking of
atoms in the crystalline material. The most common
type of stacking fault is called a dislocation: Metals
bend, rather than shattering like porcelain, because dis-
locations can shift around and accommodate the
deformation. But if dislocations accumulate and get
entangled, restricting their ability to move, the metal
becomes brittle. This is what happens after repeated
deformation, causing the cracking known as metal
fatigue. Dislocations can also get trapped at the boundaries
between the fine, microscopic grains that divide a
metal into mosaics of crystallites. The arrest of dislocations
at grain edges means that metals may be made
harder by reducing the size of their grains, a useful
trick for modifying their mechanical behaviour.
2020 年 7 月 ACT 考試閱讀題目
Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到 2020 年 7 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！