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 (美國/北美) SAT 考試閱讀文章
Passage 1
This passage is adapted from Meg Wolitzer, The Wife. ©2003 by Meg Wolitzer. The narrator, a student at Smith College, a women’s college, is enrolled in a creative writing class in the 1950s.
“Write what you know,” Professor Castleman advised as he sent us off to complete our first writing assignment.
That night after dinner (shepherd’s pie, I remember, for I sat there looking at it and trying to describe it to myself in a writerly fashion, though the
best I could come up with was, pathetically, “a roof of mashed potato spread thickly atop a squat house of meat”), I climbed to the upper reaches of the Neilson Library. On tall steel shelves all around me were ancient bound volumes of scientific abstracts: Annals of Phytochemistry, Sept.–Nov. 1922; International Journal of Haematology, Jan.–Mar. 1931. I wondered if anyone would ever open any of these books again, or whether they’d remain shut for eternity, like some spell-fastened door in a fairy tale.
Should I be the one to open them, to plant kisses on their frail crisp pages and break the spell? Did it make any sense to try and write? What if no one ever read what I wrote, what if it languished untouched on the chilled shelf of a college library forever? I sat down at a carrel, looking around at the ignored spines of books, the lightbulbs suspended in their little cages, and I listened to the distant scrapes of chair legs and the rumble of a lone book cart being rolled along one of the levels of the stacks.
For a while I stayed there and tried to imagine what it was I actually knew. I’d seen almost nothing of the world; a trip to Rome and Florence with my
parents when I was fifteen had been spent in the protection of good hotels and pinned behind the green-glass windows of tour buses, looking at stone
fountains in piazzas from an unreal remove. The level of my experience and knowledge had remained the same, hadn’t risen, hadn’t overflowed. I’d stood with other Americans, all of us huddled together, heads back and mouths dropped open as we peered up at painted ceilings. I thought now about how I had never been in love, had never gone to a political meeting in someone’s basement, had never really done anything that could be considered independent or particularly insightful or daring. At Smith, girls
surrounded me, the equivalent of those American tourists. Girls in groups were safe as shepherd’s pie.
Now I sat in the upper part of the library, freezing cold but not minding, and finally I made myself begin to write something. Without censoring it or
condemning it for being trivial or narrow or simply poorly constructed, I wrote about the impenetrable wall of femaleness that formed my life. This,
apparently, was what I knew. I wrote about the three different perfumes—Chanel No. 5, White Shoulders, and Joy—that could be smelled everywhere on campus, and about the sound of six hundred female voices rising up together at convocation to sing “Gaudeamus Igitur.”
When I was done, I sat for a long time at that carrel, thinking of Professor J. Castleman and how he’d looked in class with his eyes closed. His eyelids had a purplish, nearly translucent quality, making them appear inadequate to the task of keeping the world out. Maybe that was what it was like to be a writer: Even with the eyes closed, you could see.
During his office hours the following week, sitting on the bench in the hallway, I waited with nearly rabid anticipation. Someone was already in there; I could hear the dueling murmurs of a male voice and a female one, punctuated by an occasional shriek of female hilarity, all of which increased my annoyance. Was there a party going on? Were drinks being served, and damp little sandwiches? Finally the door opened and Abigail Brenner, one of the other students from the class, emerged, holding her tedious story about her grandmother’s recent death from double pneumonia, which she had been reworking pointlessly since the first day of class. From within the office, I could see Castleman at his desk; his jacket was off, and he was in
his shirtsleeves and tie.
“Well, hello there, Miss Ames,” he said, finally realizing I was there.
“Hello, Professor Castleman,” I said, and I sat across from him on a wooden chair. He held my new story in his hand, the one I’d left in his department
mailbox.
“So. Your story.” He looked at it serenely. There were almost no markings on it, no red-pen hieroglyphics. “I’ve read this twice,” he said, “and frankly, both times I’ve found it to be wonderful.”
Passage 2
This passage is adapted from a speech delivered in 1860 by John Hossack, “Speech of John Hossack, Convicted of a Violation of the Fugitive Slave Law, before Judge Drummond, of the United States District Court, Chicago, IL.” Hossack was tried for aiding an escaped African American slave, in violation of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
I am a foreigner. I [was born] among the rugged but free hills of Scotland; a land, Sir, that never was conquered, and where a slave never breathed. Let a slave set foot on that shore, and his chains fall off forever, and he becomes what God made him—a man. In this far-off land, I heard of your free institutions, your prairie lands, your projected canals, and your growing towns. Twenty-two years ago, I landed in this city. . . . I then opened a prairie farm to get bread for my family, and I am one of the men who have made Chicago what it is to-day, having shipped some of the first grain that was exported from this city. I am, Sir, one of the pioneers of Illinois, who have gone through the many hardships of the settlement of a new country. I have spent upon it my best days, the strength of my manhood. I have eleven children, who are natives of this my adopted country. No living man, Sir, has greater interest in its welfare; and it is because I am opposed to carrying out wicked and ungodly laws, and love the freedom of my country, that I stand before you to-day. . . .
Sir, I ought not to be sentenced because, as has been argued by the prosecution, I am an Abolitionist. I have no apologies to make for being an Abolitionist. When I came to this country, like the mass from beyond the sea, I was a Democrat; there was a charm in the name. But, Sir, I soon found that I had to go beyond the name of a party in this country, in order to know any thing of its principles or practice. I soon found that however much the great parties of my adopted country differed upon banks, tariffs and land
questions, in one thing they agreed, in trying which could stoop the lowest to gain the favor of the most cursed system of slavery that ever swayed an iron rod over any nation. . . . As a man who had fled from the crushing aristocracy of my native land, how could I support a worse aristocracy in this land? I was compelled to give my humble name and influence to a
party who proposed, at least, to embrace in its sympathies all classes of men, from all quarters of the globe. In this choice, I found myself in the company of Clarkson and Wilberforce1 in my native land, and of Washington and Franklin, and many such, in this boasted land of the free; and more than all these, the Redeemer in whom I humbly trust for acceptance with my God, who came to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, to set at liberty those who were bruised. . . . Tell me, Sir, with these views, can I be any thing but an Abolitionist? Surely, for this I ought not to be sentenced.
Again, Sir, I ought not to be sentenced, because the Fugitive Slave Law, under which I am torn from my family and business by the supple tools of the Slave Power. . . is at variance with both the spirit and letter of the Constitution. Sir, I place myself upon the Constitution, in the presence of a nation who have the Declaration of Independence read to them every
Fourth of July, and profess to believe it. Yea, in the presence of civilized man, I hold up the Constitution of my adopted country as clear from the blood of men, and from a tyranny that would make crowned heads blush. The parties who [bend] the Constitution to the support of slavery are traitors—traitors not only to the liberties of millions of enslaved countrymen, but traitors to the Constitution itself which they have sworn to support. A foreigner upon your soil, I go not to the platforms of contending
parties to find truth. I go, Sir, to the Constitution of my country: the word slave is not to be found. I read, “We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice,”—yes, Sir, establish justice—“to promote the general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” These were the men who had proclaimed to the world that all men were created equal; that they were endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and contended even unto death for seven long years. Can it be, Sir, that these great men, under cover of those hallowed words, intended to make a government that should outrage justice and trample upon liberty as no other government under the whole heavens has ever done?
Passage 3
Passage 1 is adapted from “‘Cloud Seeding’ Not Effective at Producing Rain as Once Thought, New Research Shows.” ©2010 by American Friends of Tel Aviv University. Passage 2 is adapted from Janet Pelley, “Does Cloud Seeding Really Work?” ©2017 by American Chemical Society.
Passage 1
In many areas of the world, including California’s Mojave Desert, rain is a precious and rare resource. To encourage rainfall, scientists use “cloud seeding,” a weather modification process designed to increase precipitation amounts by dispersing chemicals into the clouds.
But research now reveals that the common practice of cloud seeding with materials such as silver iodide and frozen carbon dioxide may not be as effective as it had been hoped. In the most comprehensive reassessment of the effects of cloud seeding over the past fifty years, new findings from Prof. Pinhas Alpert, Prof. Zev Levin and Dr. Noam Halfon of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences have dispelled the notion that cloud seeding is an effective mechanism for precipitation enhancement.
During the course of his study, Prof. Alpert and his colleagues looked over fifty years’ worth of data on cloud seeding, with an emphasis on the effects of seeding on rainfall amounts in a target area over the Sea of Galilee in the north of Israel. The research team used a comprehensive rainfall database and compared statistics from periods of seeding and non-seeding, as well as the amounts of precipitation in adjacent non-seeded areas.
“By comparing rainfall statistics with periods of seeding, we were able to show that increments of rainfall happened by chance,” says Prof. Alpert. “For the first time, we were able to explain the increases in rainfall through changing weather patterns” instead of the use of cloud seeding.
Most notable was a six year period of increased rainfall, originally thought to be a product of successful cloud seeding. Prof. Alpert and his fellow
researchers showed that this increase corresponded with a specific type of cyclone which is consistent with increased rainfall over the mountainous regions. They observed a similarly significant rain enhancement over the Judean Mountains, an area which was not the subject of seeding.
Passage 2
Last year marked the conclusion of a massive six-year study that has been the most comprehensive and rigorous to date to investigate whether cloud
seeding actually increases precipitation. Called the Wyoming Weather Modification Pilot Project (WWMPP), the study was run by a team of researchers from government, academia, and private industry. In the end, WWMPP wasn’t able to provide a definitive answer. “But the results do provide a body of evidence that cloud seeding is working under certain conditions,” says Roelof Bruintjes, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), who was not part of the project although his colleagues at NCAR were deeply involved.
Earlier studies would inject silver iodide into clouds, then compare precipitation gauges in areas inside and outside the seeding zone. But the studies weren’t repeatable, and they didn’t include enough trials to guarantee that observed increases in precipitation weren’t due to chance. The challenge with measuring the effect of weather modification is that natural rain- and snowfall variability is 10 to 100 times as large as the amount of precipitation augmented by seeding, Bruintjes says.
Still, the WWMPP researchers thought they could address the drawbacks of past studies. The researchers designed their $14 million project to run for six winter seasons in the mountains of Wyoming. They conducted more than 150 tests, randomly selecting clouds to seed and clouds to be their
unseeded controls.
Measurements from the high-resolution snow gauges on the ground indicated that seeding elevated snowfall by 5–15%. But this result was achieved only after the researchers threw out some of the tests where silver iodide drifted into control clouds or where not enough seeding material was released, so the final results weren’t statistically significant. “Nevertheless, all the results provided evidence for a positive trend,” Bruintjes says.
The scientists also took advantage of new developments in remote-sensing and atmospheric modeling to examine dynamics inside a small subset of seeded clouds.
Remote-sensing observations are valuable because radar can describe growth of snow in a cloud in a much more immediate way than snow gauges can, says Bart Geerts, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wyoming who was part of WWMPP. “Detailed remote-sensing measurements of cloud dynamics are cheaper and more doable than
randomized statistical experiments that measure increases in snow on the ground,” Geerts says.
Passage 4
This passage is adapted from Jonah Berger, Contagious: Why Things Catch On. ©2013 by Social Dynamics Group, LLC.
Although geography clearly matters in voting—the East Coast leans Democratic while the South skews Republican—few people would think
that the exact venue in which they vote matters.
But it does.
Political scientists usually assume that voting is based on rational and stable preferences: people possess core beliefs and weigh costs and benefits
when deciding how to vote. If we care about the environment, we vote for candidates who promise to protect natural resources. If we’re concerned about health care, we support initiatives to make it more affordable and available to greater numbers of people. In this calculating, cognitive model of voting behavior, the particular kind of building people happen to cast their ballot in shouldn’t affect behavior.
But we weren’t so sure. Most people in the United States are assigned to vote at a particular polling location. Polling locations are typically public
buildings—firehouses, courthouses, or schools—but can also be churches, private office buildings, or other venues.
Different locations contain different triggers. Churches are filled with religious imagery, which might remind people of church doctrine. Schools are filled with lockers, desks, and chalkboards, which might remind people of children or early educational experiences. And once these thoughts are triggered, they might change behavior. Could voting in a school lead people to support education funding?
To test this idea, Marc Meredith, Christian Wheeler, and I acquired data from each polling place in Arizona’s 2000 general election. We used the name and address of each polling location to determine whether it was a church, a school, or some other type of building. Forty percent of people were assigned to vote in churches, 26 percent in schools, 10 percent in
community centers, and the rest in a mix of apartment buildings, golf courses, and even RV parks.
Then we examined whether people voted differently at different types of polling places. In particular, we focused on a ballot initiative that proposed raising the sales tax from 5.0 percent to 5.6 percent to support public schools. This initiative had been hotly debated, with good arguments on both sides. Most people support education, but few people enjoy paying more taxes. It was a tough decision.
If where people voted didn’t matter, then the percent supporting the initiative should be the same at schools and other polling locations.
But it wasn’t. More than ten thousand more people voted in favor of the school funding initiative when the polling place was a school. Polling location had a dramatic impact on voting behavior.
And the initiative passed.
This difference persisted even after we controlled for things like regional differences in political preferences and demographics. We even compared
two similar groups of voters to double-check our findings: people who lived near schools and were assigned to vote at one versus people who lived near
schools but were assigned to vote at a different type of polling place (such as a firehouse). A significantly higher percentage of the people who voted in schools were in favor of increasing funding for schools. The fact that they were in a school when they voted triggered more school-friendly behavior.
A ten-thousand-vote difference in a statewide election might not seem like much. But it was more than enough to shift a close election. In the 2000
presidential election the difference between George Bush and Al Gore came down to less than 1,000 votes. If 1,000 votes is enough to shift an election, 10,000 certainly could. Triggers matter.
Passage 5
This passage is adapted from Thomas W. Schoener and David A. Spiller, “Trophic Cascades on Islands.” ©2010 by Island Press.
In the 1970s, one of us visited more than 500 Bahamian islands to survey distributions of vertebrates, with special emphasis on lizards and birds.
A key objective was to determine the threshold island area on which vertebrate populations could just survive. We were astonished to find lizards, particularly Anolis sagrei, on some tiny islands, a discovery that multiplied by at least two orders of magnitude the list of Bahamian islands surmised or known to have resident populations of vertebrates. We realized we had to check many quite small islands to determine such thresholds, and in the course of that endeavor we came upon a large number of islands
without lizards. This led to a second, even more exciting discovery: Such islands sometimes had extraordinarily high densities of spiders, the omnipresent webbing giving them the appearance of the proverbial grandmother’s attic.
In 1981, we had time to investigate this phenomenon systematically for the many small islands in the central Bahamas near the relatively large island of Staniel Cay, a major stopover in our earlier survey. Our first study found that spiders were about an order of magnitude denser on no-lizard than lizard islands (adjusted for the positive and negative correlations with area and distance from large landmasses, respectively). A second observational
study in 1982 examined numbers of spider species, finding that no-lizard islands had 1.5–2 times the number of species as had lizard islands (again
adjusted for area and distance, and for the maximum height attained by the vegetation on the island, which correlated positively with number of spider species). This result was quite different from Paine’s (1966) famous one in the rocky intertidal, in which diversity increased with increasing predation, and it presaged other such results for terrestrial arthropods in our system and in others also.
Such comparative data pointed to a strong negative effect of lizards on spiders, but as is true of all comparative studies, the observations did not suffice to eliminate alternative hypotheses about why islands with and without lizards might differ. A more reliable investigation would be experimental, and toward that end we staked out nine approximately
83-square-meter plots on Staniel Cay in 1985. Three of the plots were unenclosed, and the others had wood-framed fences made of hardware cloth topped with smooth plastic to impede lizard locomotion in and out. Three of the enclosed plots were randomly chosen to maintain lizards at natural densities, whereas the other three had lizards removed. Thus we had three treatments: The two types of enclosed plots tested the lizard effect, and the unenclosed plots were a cage control, to be compared with the enclosed lizard plots. The 18-month experiment showed that lizard removal enclosures had spider densities three times higher than those in control enclosures and the unenclosed (also having lizards) plots. Numbers of spider species were higher without lizards as well, in parallel to the comparative studies. Numbers and biomasses of insects caught in sticky
traps were also higher in lizard removal enclosures than in control enclosures; therefore, an increase in spiders did not completely compensate for the absence of lizards. There was some effect of the enclosures: Sticky traps in enclosed plots caught about 20 percent fewer arthropod individuals than those in open plots.
What was the mechanism of the (now firmly established) lizard effect on spiders? The obvious one is predation. However, a second is competition for
food: Spiders consume prey large in relation to their own size, so lizards and spiders might overlap in prey size well beyond expectations from their relative body sizes alone.
2020年 10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！
