202011 SAT Reading Passages

2020 年 11 月 SAT (美國/北美版) 考題回顧:所有 5 篇閱讀文章!

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!

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