過去這個週末學生考了 2020 年 11 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！
我們整理了 2020 年 11 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 2020 年 11 月 (美國/北美) SAT 考試閱讀文章
Passage 1
This passage is adapted from Paul Laurence Dunbar, “The Visiting of Mother Danbury”. Originally published in 1901. This passage is set in a small town in Dunbar’s native Ohio. Dunbar was an African American author renowned for his incorporation of regional dialects into traditional literary forms.
There was no lack of village meddling, if meddling
it might be called, when Felix Danbury, he who was
son of the Widow Danbury and chorister at Cory
church, led Martha Dickson to the altar. He it was
who had led the fight for an organ to be used in the
house of worship, and some of the older heads were
still sore upon the subject; but when it was generally
known that at last the day was set when he was to
leave the state of bachelorhood, all animosities were
put aside in the general enthusiasm to assist in such
an event.
There was some sorrow too in all this interest, for
the marriage of Felix meant his loss to the
community. Martha lived at Baldwin’s Ford, and
thither her betrothed had promised to go and take up
his abode. Martha’s mother, old Mrs. Dickson, who
was also a widow, had protested so loud and long
against separation from her only child that the lover
was compelled to assure her that she would gain a
son rather than lose a daughter. It was very noble
indeed, and there had been a beautiful scene in which
old Mrs. Dickson had wept on Felix’s shoulder and
blessed him.
“You’re a good boy,” she had told him. “I know
that the folks air a-goin’ to say that you’re desertin’
yore mother, but ’tain’t so; she’ll come over here
a-visitin’, an’ we’ll go over there, an’ it’ll be jest like
one family; an’, besides, yore mother wouldn’t be
lonely like me, for she’s got Melissy.”
“Melissy” was Felix’s married sister, and on his
marriage it was with her that his mother went to live.
There were those who came to condole with
Mother Danbury upon the loss of her son, but she
was very brave, and they had their trouble for their
pay.
“No, no,” she would say, rocking complacently, “a
man ought to have a wife, an’ ef he can’t git her to
come to him, he’s got to go to her. I don’t blame
Widder Dickson now a bit about Marthy. “Fain’t like
me, that’s blessed with two children to be the support
of my declinin’ years.”
“But why couldn’t she ‘a’ come over here?” her
gossips protested.
“‘Twouldn’t ‘a’ been fair to ask her that; for she’d
‘a’ had to tore up root an’ branch, while I ain’t got
nothin’ to do scarcely but to slip out o’ my house into
Melissy’s. An’ then it ain’t as ef Felix was gone fur
good. You see Baldwin’s Ford ain’t fur away, an’ I kin
run over an’ drop in on ’em almost anytime.”
And so, placidly, the old lady went on with her
knitting day by day, looking under and over her
glasses as often as through them as she paused for
little chats with the neighbors or to murmur gentle
admonition to Melissy’s children.
Outwardly she was calm, but her soul longed for a
sight of this son, whose form had gladdened her eyes
every evening as he returned from work, and the
honeymoon was hardly over before she had
“dropped over” to spend a day with her two dear
children.
The day was a joyous one for her—for them all.
Felix was radiant, bis wife shyly happy, and the
Widow Dickson brought out and spread for her
visitor the best that her larder afforded.
All that bothered Mother Danbury was that the
Widow insisted upon making company of her. She
had assumed an air of possession over Felix that left a
little sting in the mother’s heart.
Mother Danbury did not want to be company,
and she did want to be allowed a part in her son, and,
above all, she did not want to sit in the front room
and look at the staring wax flowers under their glass
case and the shell houses on the mantel, even if she
did have on her best alpaca. But when she first
essayed forth with her dress tucked up around her
waist and her sleeves rolled up, she was
conducted—nay, almost carried—back to her prison
with many and profuse protestations of horror at
letting their guest do anything.
This was all very well for a time. She sat still and
knitted, alone save for a minute’s peep in from one or
the other of her hostesses, until she heard the clatter
and clucking of the fowls in the yard. Then she
rebelled and, resolutely laying down her knitting,
went forth to usefulness. She helped feed the
chickens, and after that they all sewed together or
knitted. She helped get supper. Felix came home
again, as it seemed to her, almost as he used to
do. Now, what could the gossips say? thought
Mother Danbury.
Passage 2
This passage is adapted from Nicola Twilley, “Accounting for Taste.” @2015 by Condé Nast.
Sitting in a pub one night a dozen years ago,
Charles Spence realized that he was in the presence
of the ideal experimental model: the Pringles potato
chip. Spence, a professor of experimental psychology
at Oxford University, runs the Crossmodal Research
Lab there, which studies how the brain integrates
information from the five human senses to produce a
coherent impression of reality. Very often, these
modes of perception influence one another on the
way to becoming conscious thought. For instance,
scientists have long known that whether a strawberry
tastes sweet or bland depends in no small part on the
kinds of organic molecule detected by olfactory
receptors in the nose. Spence had been wondering
whether taste might be similarly shaped by sound:
Would a potato chip taste different if the sound of its
crunch was altered? To explore that question, he
needed a chip with a reliably uniform crunch.
The Pringle—that thin, homogeneous, stackable
paraboloid—was perfect.
Over the next few weeks, Spence invited twenty
research subjects to his basement lab and sat them in
front of a microphone in a soundproof booth.
There they were handed a pair of headphones and
instructed to bite, one by one, into nearly two
hundred Pringles original-flavor chips. After a single
crunch, each subject spat out the chip and gave it a
rating: crisper or less crisp, fresh or less fresh. The
subjects could hear each crunch as it looped from the
mike into the headphones. But, without letting the
participants know, Spence funnelled the crunching
noises through an amplifier and an equalizer,
allowing him to boost or muffle particular
frequencies or the over-all volume. About an hour
later, released from the booth, each subject was asked
whether he or she thought all the chips were the
same.
The chips were identical, of course, but nearly all
the volunteers reported that they were different—
that some had come from cans that had been sitting
open awhile and others were fresh. When Spence
analyzed his results, he saw that the Pringles that
made a louder, higher-pitched crunch were perceived
to be a full fifteen percent fresher than the softer-
sounding chips. The experiment was the first to
successfully demonstrate that food could be made to
taste different through the addition or subtraction of
sound alone. Spence published his results in the
Journal of Sensory Studies, in 2004. The paper,
written with a postdoctoral researcher, Massimiliano
Zampini, was titled “The Role of Auditory Cues in
Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of
Potato Chips.”
Over the past decade, Spence has found that a
strawberry-flavored mousse tastes ten percent
sweeter when served from a white container rather
than a black one; that coffee tastes nearly twice as
intense but only two-thirds as sweet when it is drunk
from a white mug rather than a clear glass one; that
adding two and a half ounces to the weight of a
plastic yogurt container makes the yogurt seem about
twenty-five percent more filling, and that bittersweet
toffee tastes ten percent more bitter if it is eaten while
you’re listening to low-pitched music.
It does not require an enormous leap of
imagination to see how these kinds of cognitive
insights could be incorporated into commercial
packaging design, and, gradually, this is exactly what
is happening. Americans derive a sizable proportion
of their daily calories from food or drinks that are
consumed directly from the package, and that is only
expected to rise in tandem with the “snackification”
of the Western diet. Marketing departments and
product-design agencies have an extra incentive to
enlist Spence’s findings in the cans, packets, tubs, and
squeeze tubes that populate grocery-store shelves.
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from Katherine Harmon Courage, Octopus! The MostMysteriousCreature in the Sea. 02013 by Katherine Harmon Courage.
In the wild, the octopus often relies on its
dexterous arms to go rooting around in crevasses for
crabs or other crawling foodstuff These arms can
feel and even taste their way to dinner and then react
to capture it. With all of this limb autonomy,
octopuses were, for a long time, presumed to be blind
(so to speak) about where their arms were and what
each one was doing while it felt along for food.
Certainly many small operations are likely being
controlled from within the arms themselves—or at
least below the brain. But there must be some sort of
central perception and processing going on, or else
the animal would just be a big eight-armed pile of
mess. °If you look at octopus behavior, it does not
make a lot of sense” that it would have no idea where
any one of its arms is at any given time, Hebrew
University’s Michael Kuba says. “Anybody who uses
common sense should see that an octopus must
know where its arm is because otherwise its very
hard to function,” he says with a laugh. But “it’s one
of those problems science sometimes has” in which
researchers don’t always use common sense in
developing hypotheses, he notes. Somehow, “the
brain has to decide which arm to activate, at wha
speed,” Kuba’s colleague Binyamin Hochner
explains. How does it know this?
Recent human experiments have shown that if
you create the optical illusion for a person of having
a third arm, and if it’s in a believable location, a
I person’s brain will start to perceive it as part of his or
her body plan. The person will even react when the
false arm is threatened with a knife. Hochner, Kuba,
and their colleagues designed a slightly less violent
experiment to test the octopus’s ability to visually
assess its arms. They drew upon the octopus’s natural
behavior of sending individual arms into holes to
look for food. They built a clear plexiglass maze that
had one central vertical tube and three separate
compartments just beyond it. They first trained the
octopus that food would be waiting in a
compartment with a black dot on it. For the
experiment, the octopus—upon seeing which
compartment had a black dot on it—would need to
send one of its arms through one of the tubes,
through an air gap (so that it couldn’t receive any
food smells through the water), and into the
compartment where the food was. The researchers
randomly changed the location of the dot and food
ten times for each animal each day for up to three
weeks. Each assay, an octopus got only three minutes
to complete the task—and no second guesses. Six out
of the seven common octopuses passed the test by
getting the right box five times in a row.
Watching footage of the experiment. Hochner
and his team noticed that when the animals couldn’t
see the box with the dot—because they had
positioned themselves poorly—they weren’t likely to
select it. “Animals learned to orient themselves to get
an unobstructed view of the target,” they noted in
their paper. When researchers tried the same
experiment with an opaque maze, the octopuses got
the answer right only randomly. This suggests not
only that octopuses can figure out the location of one
of their arms based on visual information but also
that they can visually guide it to a target. In the real
world, this would mean that being able to spot a tasty
crab would help them accurately capture it with an
arm. So even though octopuses are impressively
skilled at hunting “blind,” aided by tactile and taste/
smell senses locally on the anus, being able to help
guide their body parts centrally with sight makes
them even better predators—and improves
general coordination to help keep themselves from
becoming prey.
Passage 4
Passage 1 is adapted from Justice Edward Douglass White’s majority opinion In the 1903 US Supreme Court case Lone Wofl v. Hitchcock. Passage 2 is adapted from the American Indian Chicago Conference’s Declaration of Indian Purpose: The Voice of the American Indian. Originally published in 1961. The ruling in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock hinged on the question of whether Congress had the power to cancel US treaties with Native American tribes without the consent of the tribes themselves.
Passage I
Now. it is true that in decisions of this court. the
Indian sight of occupancy of tribal lands. whether
declared in a treaty or otherwise created. has been
stated to be sacred. or. as sometimes expressed. as
sacred as the fee [legal possession] of the United
States in the same lands. But in none of these cases
was that involved a controversy between Indians
and the government respecting the power of
Congress to administer the property of the
Indians…In one of the cited caws it was clearly
pointed out that Congress possessed a paramount
power over the property of the Indians. by reason of
its exercise of guardianship over their interests. and
that such authority might be implied. even though
opposed to the strict letter of a treaty with the
Indians…
Plenary [absolute] authority over the tribal
relations of the Indians has been exercised by
Congress from the beginning… Until the year 1871
the policy was pursued of dealing with the Indian
tribes by means of treaties. and. of course. a moral
obligation rested upon Congress to as in good faith
in performing the stipulations entered into on its
behalf. But as with treaties made with foreign
nations, the legislative power might pass laws in
conflict with treaties made with the Indians.
The power exists to abrogate [cancel] the
provisionsof an Indian treaty. though presumably
such power will be exercised only when
circumstances arise which will not only justify the
government in disregarding the stipulations of the
treaty, but may demand, in the interest of the
country and the Indians themselves, that it should do
so. When. therefore. treaties were entered into
between the United States and a tribe of Indians It
was never doubted that the power to abrogate existed
in Congress, and that in a contingency such power
might be availed of from considerations of
goanunental policy. particularly if consistent with
a perfect good faith towards the Indians.
Passage II
It is a universal desire among all Indians that their
treaties and trust.protectcd lands remain intact and
beyond the reach of predatory men.
This is not special pleading, though Indians have
been told often enough by members of Congress
and the courts that the United Slates has the
plenary power to wipe out our treaties at
will. Governments, when powerful enough. can act in
this arbitrary and immoral manna.
Still we insist that We are not pleading for special
treatment at the hands of the American people. …
The right of self-government. a right which the
Indians possessed before the coming of the white
man, has never been extinguished: indeed, it has
been repeatedly sustained by thecourts of the United
States. Our leaders made binding agreenments—
ceding lands as requested by the United States;
keeping the peace: harboring no enemies of the
nation. And the people stood with the leaders in
to accepting these obligations.
A treaty, in the minds of our people, is an eternal
word. Events often nuke it seem expedient to depart
from the pledged word, but we are conscious that the
first departure creates a logic for the second
departure. until there Is nothingleft of the word.
We recognize that our view of these matters
differs at times from the prevailinglegal view
regarding due process.
When our lands are taken for a declared public
purpose, scattering our people and threatening our
continued existence, it grieves us to be told that a
money payment is the equivalent of all the things we
surrender. Our forefathers could be generous when
all the continent was theirs. They could cast away
whole. empires for a handful of trinkets for their
children. But in our day. each remaining acre is a
promise that we will still be here tomorrow. Were we
paid a thousand times the market value of our lost
holdings, still the payment would not suffice. Money
never mothered the Indian people. as the land has
mothered them. nor have any people become more
closely attached to the land. religiously and
traditionally.
We insist again that this is not special
pleading. We ask only that the United States be true
to its own traditions and set an example to the world
in fair dealing.
Passage 5
This passage is adapted from “Zoology to the Rescue.” ©2015 by the Economist Newspaper Limited.
Adin Ross-Gillespie of Zurich University is a
zoologist, not a physician. But his study of
co-operative animals such as meerkats and naked
mole rats has led him to think about the behaviour of
another highly collaborative group, bacteria. He and
his colleagues have presented a way of subverting this
collaboration to create a new class of drug that seems
immune to the processes which cause resistance to
evolve.
Antibiotic resistance happens because, when a
population of bacteria is attacked with those drugs,
the few bugs that, by chance, have a genetic
protection against their effects survive and multiply.
As in most cases of natural selection, it is the survival
of these, the fittest individuals, that spurs the process
on. But Dr Ross-Gillespie realised that, in the case of
bacteria, there are circumstances when the survival of
the fittest cannot easily occur.
One of these is related to the way many bacteria
scavenge a crucial nutrient, iron, from the
environment. They do it by releasing molecules
called siderophores that pick up iron ions and are
then, themselves, picked up by bacterial cells. In a
colony of bacteria, siderophore production and use is
necessarily communal, since the molecule works
outside the boundaries of individual cells. All colony
members contribute and all benefit.
In theory, that should encourage free riders—
bacteria which use siderophores made by others
without contributing their own. In practice, perhaps
because the bacteria in a colony are close kin, this
does not seem to happen. But inverting free riding’s
logic makes the system vulnerable to attack, for a bug
that contributes more than its share does not
prosper.
Following this line of thought Dr Ross-Gillespie
turned to gallium, ions of which behave a lot like
those of iron and can substitute for them in a
siderophore, making it useless to a bacterium. In fact,
siderophores bind more effectively with gallium than
with iron, hijacking the whole process. A judicious
dose of gallium nitrate can thus take out an entire
bacterial colony, by depriving it of the iron it needs
to thrive.
The crucial point is that, because siderophores are
a resource in common, a mutated siderophore that
did not bind preferentially to gallium would be
swamped by the others, would fail to benefit the bug
that produced it, and therefore would not be selected
for and spread. At least, that was Dr Ross-Gillespie’s
theory.
To test this theory out, he and his colleagues grew
cultures of an infectious bacterium, Pseudomonas
aeruginosa. They then exposed these cultures either
to ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic, to gentamicin,
another such, to both drugs at the same time, to
saline as a control, or to gallium nitrate.
As they expected, both the antibiotics and the
gallium nitrate curtailed the growth of Pseudomonas
to start with. As they also expected, resistance to both
of the antibiotics built up steadily over the 12-day
course of the experiment. But nothing similar
happened in the cultures exposed to gallium nitrate.
These continued to be suppressed. And when the
researchers took a closer look at what was going on,
they found that not only were the bacteria in their
gallium-laced samples starved of iron, but the bugs
were also responding to the crisis by pouring their
energy into producing more and more siderophores,
thus hastening the colony’s demise.
What makes all this more than just a laboratory
curiosity is that gallium nitrate is already an
established drug. It has been used safely, and for a
long time, to treat certain cancers and bone diseases.
This suggests (though tests would need to be done)
that it might be safe for use against infection. Dr
Ross-Gillespie’s evolutionary analysis of how to
attack antibiotic resistance might therefore have
provided the breakthrough the field needs.
2020 年 11 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 2020 年 11 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！
