過去這個週末學生考了 2020 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 2020 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 2020 年 10 月 (亞洲/國際) SAT 考試閱讀文章
Passage 1
This passage is adapted from Haruki Murakami, 1Q84. ©2009 by Haruki Murakami. Translation by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. ©2011 by Haruki Murakami. Tengo, a writer, has just completed a project of editing another author’s book, Air Chrysalis, for his publisher Komatsu.
Tengo had spent ten days reworking Air Chrysalis before handing it over to Komatsu as a newly finished work, following which he was visited by a string of calm, tranquil days. He taught three days a week. The rest of his time he spent doing housework, taking walks, and writing his own novel. April passed like this. The cherry blossoms scattered, new buds appeared on the trees, the magnolias reached full bloom, and the seasons moved along in stages. The days flowed by smoothly, regularly, uneventfully.
This was the life that Tengo most wanted, each week linking automatically and seamlessly with the next.
Amid all the sameness, however, one change became evident. A good change. Tengo was aware that, as he went on writing his novel, a new
wellspring was forming inside him. Not that its water was gushing forth: it was more like a tiny spring among the rocks. The flow may have been limited, but it was continuous, welling up drop by drop. He was in no hurry. He felt no pressure. All he had to do was wait patiently for the water to collect in the rocky basin until he could scoop it up. Then he would sit at
his desk, turning what he had scooped into words, and the story would advance quite naturally.
The concentrated work of rewriting Air Chrysalis might have dislodged a rock that had been blocking his wellspring until now. Tengo had no idea why that should be so, but he had a definite sense that a heavy lid had finally come off. He felt as though his body had become lighter, that he had emerged from a cramped space and could now stretch his arms and legs freely. Air Chrysalis had probably stimulated something that had been deep inside him all along.
Tengo sensed, too, that something very like desire was growing inside him. This was the first time in his life he had ever experienced such a feeling. All
through high school and college, his judo coach and older teammates would often say to him, “You have the talent and the strength, and you practice enough, but you just don’t have the desire.” They were probably right. He lacked that drive to win at all costs, which is why he would often make it to the semifinals and the finals but lose the all-important championship match. He exhibited these tendencies in everything, not just judo. He was more placid than determined. It was the same with his fiction. He could write with some style and make up reasonably interesting stories, but his work lacked the strength to grab the reader by the throat. Something was missing. And so he would always make it to the short list but never take the new writers’ prize, as Komatsu had said.
After he finished rewriting Air Chrysalis, however, Tengo was truly chagrined for the first time in his life. While engaged in the rewrite, he had been totally absorbed in the process, moving his hands without thinking. Once he had completed the work and handed it to Komatsu, however, Tengo was assaulted by a profound sense of powerlessness. Once the powerlessness began to abate, a kind of rage surged up from deep inside him. The rage was directed at Tengo himself. I used another person’s story to create a rewrite that amounts to a literary fraud, and I did it with far more passion than I bring to my own work. Isn’t a writer someone who finds the story hidden inside and uses the proper words to express it? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You should be able to write something as good as Air Chrysalis if you make up your mind to do it. Isn’t that true?
But he had to prove it to himself.
Tengo decided to discard the manuscript he had written thus far and start a brand-new story from scratch. He closed his eyes and, for a long time, listened closely to the dripping of the little spring inside him. Eventually the words began to come naturally to him. Little by little, taking all the time he
needed, he began to form them into sentences.
Passage 2
This Passage is adapted from Michael Rosenwald, “Print Is Dead. Long Live Print.” ©2016 by Columbia Journalism Review.
Two decades have passed since newspapers launched websites, and yet here we are. Big city papers have gone under, thousands of journalists
have lost their jobs, and the idea that digital news will eventually become a decent business feels like a rumor. The reality is this: No app, no streamlined website, no “vertical integration,” no social network has come close to matching the success of print in revenue or readership. And the most crucial assumption publishers have made about readers, particularly millennials—that they prefer the immediacy of digital—now seems questionable, too.
I wish I were being hyperbolic, but Iris Chyi, a University of Texas associate professor and new media researcher, has been collecting facts to support
these assertions. While pursuing her PhD in the late 1990s, Chyi conducted audience research for the Austin American-Statesman. But looking at reader metrics nearly a decade later, it became clear to Chyi that online penetration and engagement weren’t growing. This got her wondering whether newspapers were pursuing a future that would never come.
Chyi began conducting surveys and collecting readership data, analyzing it all in academic papers and a recent book titled, Trial and Error: U. S. Newspapers’ Digital Struggles Toward Inferiority. She has come to believe that the digital shift has been a disaster for media organizations, and that there is no evidence online news will ever be economically or culturally viable. “They have killed print, their core product, with all of their focus online,” Chyi told me in an interview.
In her book, Chyi writes that “the (supposedly dying) print edition still outperforms the (supposedly hopeful) digital product by almost every standard, be it readership, engagement, advertising revenue,” and
especially willingness to actually pay for the product. In a paper published earlier this year, Chyi examined data collected by Scarborough, a market research firm, for the 51 largest US newspapers, finding that the print edition reaches 28 percent of circulation areas, while the digital version reaches just 10 percent.
Publishers argue that print readers are just getting older while younger readers move further away from even considering print, but Pew surveys and Chyi’s analysis of the Scarborough data show that considerable interest in print still persists, even among young readers. Pew reports that print-only is still the most common way of reading news, with more than half of readers last year opting for ink on their hands every day. The percentage who only read news via a computer? Five percent in 2014 . . . and in
2015? Also 5 percent.
Chyi’s findings show that among 18- to 24-year-old news readers, 19.9 percent had read the print edition of a newspaper during the past week.
Less than 8 percent read it digitally.
Chyi has been making this argument for several years, but when I spoke to her this past summer she told me that few people in the industry were paying attention, including media reporters. Now they are. Jack Shafer, a sharp media critic at Politico, highlighted her research in an October column on the enduring value of print, but missed the larger context—that her numbers don’t exist in a vacuum. Print is rebounding or stabilizing in other areas of daily life. Sales of print books have risen every year since 2013, while e-books have leveled off and in some genres declined. Yet as book publishers double down on print—even raising the price of e-books to
make paper more attractive—the cost of printed newspapers is going up, not down. Publishers are watering down the lemonade and asking for more quarters. You don’t have to be an economist to see this won’t end well.
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from Erika Ebsworth-Goold, “A Simple Sniff: Nanoparticle Research Tested in Locusts Focuses on New Drug-Delivery Method.” ©2017 by Washington University in St. Louis.
Delivering life-saving drugs directly to the brain in a safe and effective way is a challenge for medical providers. One key reason: the blood-brain barrier, which protects the brain from tissue-specific drug delivery. Methods such as an injection or a pill aren’t as precise or immediate as doctors might prefer, and ensuring delivery right to the brain often requires invasive, risky techniques.
A team of engineers from Washington University in St. Louis has developed a new nanoparticle generation-delivery method that could someday
vastly improve drug delivery to the brain, making it as simple as a sniff.
“This would be a nanoparticle nasal spray, and the delivery system could allow a therapeutic dose of medicine to reach the brain within 30 minutes to one hour,” said Ramesh Raliya, research scientist at the School of Engineering & Applied Science.
“The blood-brain barrier protects the brain from foreign substances in the blood that may injure the brain,” Raliya said. “But when we need to deliver
something there, getting through that barrier is difficult and invasive. Our non-invasive technique can deliver drugs via nanoparticles, so there’s less risk and better response times.”
The novel approach is based on aerosol science and engineering principles that allow the generation of monodisperse nanoparticles, which can deposit on upper regions of the nasal cavity via diffusion. Working with Assistant Vice Chancellor Pratim Biswas, Raliya developed an aerosol consisting of
gold nanoparticles of controlled size, shape and surface charge. The nanoparticles were tagged with fluorescent markers, allowing the researchers to track their movement.
Next, Raliya and biomedical engineering postdoctoral fellow Debajit Saha exposed locusts’ antennae to the aerosol, and observed the nanoparticles travel from the antennae up through the olfactory nerves. Due to their tiny size, the nanoparticles passed through the blood- brain barrier, reaching the brain and suffusing it in a matter of minutes.
The team tested the concept in locusts because the blood-brain barriers in the insects and humans have anatomical similarities, and the researchers consider going through the nasal regions to neural pathways as the optimal way to access the brain.
“The shortest and possibly the easiest path to the brain is through your nose,” said Barani Raman, associate professor of biomedical engineering.
“Your nose, the olfactory bulb and then olfactory cortex: two relays and you’ve reached the cortex. The same is true for invertebrate olfactory circuitry, although the latter is a relatively simpler system, with supraesophageal ganglion instead of an olfactory bulb and cortex.”
To determine whether or not the foreign nanoparticles disrupted normal brain function, Saha examined the physiological response of olfactory
neurons in the locusts before and after the nanoparticle delivery. Several hours after the nanoparticle uptake, no noticeable change in the
electrophysiological responses was detected.
“This is only a beginning of a cool set of studies that can be performed to make nanoparticle-based drug delivery approaches more principled,” Raman said.
The next phase of research involves fusing the gold nanoparticles with various medicines, and using ultrasound to target a more precise dose to specific areas of the brain.
“We want [targeted drug] delivery within the brain using this non-invasive approach,” Raliya said.
Passage 4
Passage 1 is adapted from Henry Knox, “A Plan for the General Arrangement of the Militia of the United States,” presented to Congress in 1790. Passage 2 is adapted from Wilson Nicholas’s comments in a 1788 session of the Virginia state convention on the adoption of the US Constitution. Both passages discuss volunteer militias and standing armies, or permanent forces of professional soldiers.
Passage 1
[W]hoever seriously and candidly estimates the power of discipline and the tendency of military habits will be constrained to confess, that whatever
may be the efficacy of a standing Army in War, it cannot in peace be considered as friendly to the rights of human nature. . . .
A small Corps of well disciplined and well informed Artillerists and Engineers, and a Legion for the protection of the frontiers, and the Magazines and Arsenals, are all the Military establishment which may be required for the present use of the United States, the privates of the Corps to be enlisted for a certain period and after the expiration of which to return to the mass of the Citizens.
An energetic National Militia is to be regarded as the capital security of a free republic, and not a standing Army forming a distinct class in the
community.
It is the introduction and diffusion of vice and corruption of manners into the mass of the people that renders a standing army necessary. It is when
public spirit is despised, and avarice, indolence, and [excessive refinement] of manners, predominate and prevent the establishment of institutions, which would elevate the minds of the youth in the paths of virtue and honor, that a standing Army is formed and rivetted forever.
While the human character remains unchanged, and societies and Governments of considerable extent are formed, a principle ever ready to execute the laws and defend the State must constantly exist. Without this vital principle, the Government would be invaded or overturned and trampled upon by the bold and ambitious. No community can be long held
together unless its arrangements are adequate to its probable exigencies.
If it should be decided to reject a standing Army for the military branch of the Government of the United States as possessing too fierce an aspect, and
being hostile to the principles of liberty it will follow that a well constituted Militia ought to be established.
Passage 2
[T]he great object of government, in every country, is security and public defence. I suppose, therefore, that what we ought to attend to here, is, what is the best mode of enabling the general government to protect us. One of three ways must be pursued for this purpose. We must either empower
[elected officials] to employ, and rely altogether on, a standing army; or depend altogether on militia; or else we must enable them to use the one or the other of these two ways, as may be found most expedient. . . . If a standing army were alone to be employed, such an army must be kept up in time of peace as would be sufficient in war. The dangers of such an army are so striking that every man would oppose the adoption of this government, had it been proposed by it as the only mode of defence. Would it be safe to depend on militia alone, without the agency of regular forces, even in time of war? Were we to be invaded by a powerful, disciplined
army, should we be safe with militia? Could men unacquainted with the hardships, and unskilled in the discipline of war—men only inured to the
peaceable occupations of domestic life—encounter with success the most [skillful] veterans, inured to the fatigues and toils of campaigns? Although some people are pleased with the theory of reliance on militia, as the sole defence of a nation, yet I think it will be found, in practice, to be by no means adequate. Its inadequacy is proved by the experience of other nations. But were it fully adequate, it would be unequal. If war be supported by militia, it is by personal service. The poor man does as much as the rich. Is this just? What is the consequence when war is carried on by regular troops? They are paid by taxes raised from the people, according to their property; and then the rich man pays an adequate share.
. . . As these two ways are ineligible, let us consider the third method. Does this Constitution put this on a proper footing? It enables Congress to raise an army when necessary, or to call forth the militia when necessary. What will be the consequence of their having these two powers? Till there be a necessity for an army to be raised, militia will do. And when an army will be raised, the militia will still be employed, which will render a less numerous army sufficient. By these means, there will be a sufficient defence for the country, without having a standing army altogether, or oppressing the people.
Passage 5
This passage is adapted from Lee Billings, “Astronomers Spy Shadowy Plumes around Europa.” ©2016 by Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found new evidence that a subsurface ocean within Jupiter’s icy moon Europa may be
intermittently venting plumes of water vapor into outer space. The finding suggests Europa’s ocean, thought to be buried beneath perhaps 100 kilometers of ice, may be more amenable to life—and accessible to curious astrobiologists—than previously believed.
“If there are plumes emerging from Europa, it is significant,” says study lead William Sparks, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute
in Baltimore, Maryland. “Because it means we may be able to explore that ocean for organic chemistry or even signs of life without having to drill through unknown miles of ice.”
Using Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), Sparks and his team observed Europa 10 times between late 2013 and early 2015 as
it crossed the face of Jupiter. Watching in ultraviolet light, in which Europa’s icy surface appears very dark, they looked for shadows of the plumes backlit against Jupiter’s bright, smooth cloudscapes. Three times, painstaking analysis and image processing unveiled what looked like ultraviolet shadows soaring over the southern edge of Europa’s silhouette. If they were plumes, they would contain an estimated few million kilograms of material and reach about 200 kilometers above Europa’s surface.
This is not the first time scientists have spied plumes on Europa. Lorenz Roth, an astronomer now at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm,
led a team of researchers who glimpsed what could be a single similarly sized and located plume in 2012. Those findings, reported in Science in 2013, also used Hubble’s STIS instrument. But instead of glimpsing shadows, the findings recorded the ultraviolet emission near Europa’s south pole of what could have been hydrogen and oxygen—exactly what would be produced by a plume of water vapor dissociating into its constituent atomic elements as it is bombarded by particles trapped in Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field.
Afterward, however, the putative plumes observed by Roth’s team vanished, failing to manifest in archival data or in every new search by other telescopes—until now. Perhaps, some thought, the plumes only appeared when Europa reached the farthest edge of its orbit, where the collective gravitational tugs of Jupiter and its other moons could flex and “tidally heat” Europa’s interior, opening fissures and melting ice to vent water into space. Or maybe it was a one-time event produced by an unseen asteroid or comet hitting Europa’s surface. Less-charitable skeptics speculated instead that plume-hungry scientists were just succumbing to
pareidolia, the human mind’s tendency to find patterns in chaos and project significance onto meaningless noise.
With the new detections reported by Sparks’s team, the “tidal heating” hypothesis seems weaker than before—the possible plumes they spotted do not seem to occur when Europa’s tidal heating should be strongest. This means that, if the plumes do exist, they now lack an obvious source of heating that could also explain their observed dimensions and mysterious intermittency. Similarly, because Sparks’s team has witnessed the plumes apparently recurring, the “one-time impact” idea loses its luster, too. While these hypotheses fall to the wayside, the broader idea that the plumes are somehow simply illusory remains firmly in contention. Both detections lie at the edge of statistical significance and come from the same instrument upon the same telescope, albeit one that is arguably more used and deeply understood than any other observatory in history.
“This is exactly as likely as the last detections,” says Britney Schmidt, a planetary scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved with the research. “Both results showed statistically significant signals, at about the same level. So I’m fairly neutral. I think we should expect plume-type behavior. What I don’t know is whether these are sensitive enough detections to really knock that out for good.”
Sparks fully acknowledges that his team’s results remain frustratingly hazy. “These observations are at the limit of what Hubble can do,” he says. “We’re not aware of any instrumental artifacts that could cause these features, and they are statistically significant, but we remain cautious. . . . We do not claim to have proven the existence of plumes, but rather to have contributed evidence that such activity may be present.”
2020年 10月 (亞洲/國際) SAT 考試閱讀題目
Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到2020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！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！
