過去這一週學生考了 2021 年 3 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 2021 年 3 月 School Day 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 2021 年 3 月 (亞洲/國際) SAT 考試閱讀文章
Passage 1
This passage is adapted from James Baldwin, ‘This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” ©1993 by The James Baldwin Estate. Originally published in 1960.
“You are full of nightmares,” Harriet tells me.
She is in her dressing gown and has cream all over
her face. She and my older sister, Louisa, are going
out to be girls together. I suppose they have many
things to talk about—they have me to talk about,
certainly—and they do not want my presence. I have
been given a bachelor’s evening. The director of
the film which has brought us such incredible and
troubling riches will be along later to take me out to
dinner.
I watch her face. I know that it is quite impossible
for her to be as untroubled as she seems. Her
self-control is mainly for my benefit—my benefit,
and Paul’s. Harriet comes from orderly and
progressive Sweden and has reacted against all the
advanced doctrines to which she has been exposed by
becoming steadily and beautifully old-fashioned. We
never fought in front of Paul, not even when he was a
baby. Harriet does not so much believe in protecting
children as she does in helping them to build a
foundation on which they can build and build again,
each time life’s high-flying steel ball knocks down
everything they have built.
Whenever I become upset, Harriet becomes very
cheerful and composed. I think she began to learn
how to do this over eight years ago, when I returned
from my only visit to America. Now, perhaps, it has
become something she could not control if she
wished to. This morning, at breakfast, when I yelled
at Paul, she averted Paul’s tears and my own guilt by
looking up and saying, “Your father is cranky this
morning, isn’t he?”
Paul’s attention was immediately distracted from
his wounds, and the unjust inflicter of those wounds,
to his mother’s laughter. He watched her.
“It is because he is afraid they will not like his
songs in New York. Your father is an artiste, mon
chop, and they are very mysterious people,les
artistes. Millions of people are waiting for him in
New York, they are begging him to come, and they
will give him a tot of money, but he is afraid they will
not like him. Tell him he is wrong.”
She succeeded in rekindling Paul’s excitement
about places he has never seen. I was also, at once,
reinvested with all my glamour. I think it is
sometimes extremely difficult for Paul to realize
that the face he sees on record sleeves and in the
newspapers and on the screen is nothing more or
less than the face of his father—who sometimes yells
at him. Of course, since he is only seven—going on
eight, he will be eight years old this winter—he
cannot know that I am baffled, too.
“Of course, you are wrong, you are silly,” he said
with passion—and caused me to smile. His English
is strongly accented and is not, in fact, as good as
his French, for he speaks French all day at school.
French is really his first language, the first he ever
heard. “You are the greatest singer in France”—
sounding exactly as he must sound when he makes
this pronouncement to his schoolmates—”the
greatest American singer”—this concession was so
gracefully made that it was not a concession at all, it
added inches to my stature, America being only a
glamorous word for Paul. It is the place from which
his father came, and to which he now is going, a
place which very few people have ever seen. But his
aunt is one of them and he looked over at her. “Mme.
Dumont says so, and she says he is a great actor, too.“
Louisa nodded, smiling. “And she has seen Les
Fauves Nous Attendent-five times!” This clinched it,
of course. Mme. Dumont is our concierge and she
has known Paul all his life. I suppose he will not
begin to doubt anything she says until he begins to
doubt everything.
He looked over at me again. “So you are wrong to
be afraid.”
“I was wrong to yell at you, too. I won’t yell at you
any more today.”
“All right.” He was very grave.
Louisa poured more coffee. “He’s going to knock
them dead in New York. You’ll see.”
“Mais bier sar,” said Paul, doubtfully. He does not
quite know what “knock them dead” means, though
he was sure, from her tone, that she must have been
agreeing with him. He does not quite understand this
aunt, whom he met for the first time two months
ago, when she arrived to spend the summer with us.
Her accent is entirely different from anything he has
ever heard. He does not really understand why, since
she is my sister and his aunt, she should be unable to
speak French.
Harriet, Louisa, and I looked at each other and
smiled. “Knock them dead,” said Harriet, “means
d’avoir un succes fou. But you will soon pick up all
the American expressions.” She looked at me and
laughed. “So will I.”
Passage 2
This passage is adapted from Ann Gibbons, “A Find in Australia Hints at Very Early Human EXit from Africa.” ©2017 by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The timing of the peopling of Australia has been
contentious for decades. Many archaeologists split
into two camps, favoring settlement either
60,000 years ago or sometime after 50,000 years ago,
depending on whether they trusted the dates from
certain sites. Last year, geneticists analyzing DNA
from living Aborigines joined the fray, but they came
up with a wide range of dates, from 50,000 to
70,000 years ago.
The Madjedbebe rock shelter, formerly known as
Malakunanja II, has always been central to the issue.
Known for its striking rock art, researchers proposed
in 1989 that the shelter was the oldest human
occupation in Australia, after they dated sediments
containing stone tools to 50,000 to 60,000 years ago
using the then-experimental method of
thermoluminescence. But skeptics suggested that the
1500 tools and other artifacts could have drifted
downward over time in the sandy sediments or that
animals or termites had disrupted the layers
. University of Queensland archaeologist Chris
Clarkson had long wanted to reexcavate Madjedbebe
to resolve the controversy. Geochronologist Richard
“Bert” Roberts, now at the University of
Wollongong, who did the first dates, agreed to redate
the site with Wollongong geochronologist Zenobia
Jacobs, using optically stimulated luminescence
(OSL) dating, a higher resolution form of
thermoluminescence dating.
With Aborigine permission, the team reexcavated
the site in 2012 and 2015 with painstaking
stratigraphic controls. They found hundreds of
thousands of new artifacts, including “elaborate”
technologies such as the world’s oldest ground-edge
stone axes, grindstones for pulverizing seeds, and
finely made stone points that may have served as
spear tips. The earliest people at the site also used
“huge quantities of ochre” and are the first humans
shown to have used reflective mica to decorate
themselves or rock walls.
The team took extensive steps to rule out the
migration of artifacts between layers, for example by
refitting together broken stone tools found in the
same layer. Jacobs dated quartz grains from various
layers with OSL, determining when light last struck
each grain and thus when it was buried. She dated
28,500 individual grains from 56 samples, checking
to be sure that the dates were in proper order,
growing older from top to bottom layers. Using a
Bayesian statistical technique to narrow the margins
of error, she concluded that the oldest human
occupation was 65,000 years ago, with a range of
about 60,000 to 70,000 with 95% probability. “I think
we nailed it,” she says.
Other dating experts agree: “I feel really good
about the dates,” says geochronologist Edward
Rhodes, calling the resulting chronology °highly
robust.”
The authors also suggest the new date of
65,000 years for the peopling of Australia pushes
back the time when modern humans coming out of
Africa mated with archaic species in Asia, such as
Neandertals and Denisovans. Living Aborigines carry
traces of those two species’ DNA, which their
ancestors must have acquired by mixing somewhere
in Asia before they reached Australia.
But such early mixing with Denisovans and
Neandertals is at odds with genetic evidence from
living Aborigines and nearby Melanesians, says
population geneticist David Reich. Analyses of these
people’s DNA “confidently” suggest that the mixing
happened only 45,000 to 53,000 years ago, Reich
says. “If these (new] dates are correct, they must be
from a human population that was largely replaced
by the people who are the primary ancestors of
today’s Australians and New Guineans,” he says.
That makes sense to archaeologist Jim O’Connell,
who has favored the later chronology. This is “the
only reliable [early] date,” he says.
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from Patricia S. Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality. ©2011 by Princeton University Press.
Among male primates, cooperation may be rather
limited in those social organizations where
dominance hierarchies are strong and maintained by
aggression. Cooperation among female primates may
also be sensitive to rank, as it is in baboons. Research
on the question of social tension and its effect on
cooperation has been undertaken by psychologist
Brian Hare.
Bonobos tend to be more easygoing than
chimpanzees, arguably because their foraging
territory south of the Congo River is much richer in
large fruiting trees than the chimpanzee territories
north of the Congo River. As Hare explains, “Overall,
large patches of fruit and higher levels of high quality
herbs to fall back on when fruit is unavailable reduce
the costs of co-feeding and group living for bonobos
relative to chimpanzees.” With reduced foraging
competition, there is likely to be reduced aggression,
and hence a more relaxed way of life. Being more
relaxed means that bonobos will be tolerant of the
close presence of others during eating. Chimpanzees,
by contrast, have a rather high-stress social
organization with a tight male dominance hierarchy.
Bonobo females within a group bond closely,
especially along kin lines, and although males have a
dominance hierarchy, a coalition of females can gang
up on a male. A female bonobo will take food from a
male, and bite one who resists, a behavior rarely seen
in chimpanzees though also common in ringed
lemurs. Chimps are also less likely than bonobos to
tolerate the close presence of down-rank or up-rank
bystanders during feeding.
Hare wondered whether easygoing bonobos
might be more successful than the more socially
tense chimpanzees in solving a problem that requires
cooperation of two animals. To test this, Hare and
his team trained the chimps by putting two food
dishes separated by 2.7 meters on a platform in a
cage. To retrieve the food, the two animals had to
simultaneously pull on the attached rope-ends. The
chimps easily learned the task, whereupon the
experiment changed, and only a single dish of food
was placed on the platform, which the chimps could
share if they successfully pulled the platform
forward. What Hare observed was that if a
chimpanzee could work with a “friend” (roughly, a
chimp of the same rank), cooperation was smooth,
but if he or she was paired with a nonfriend, such as
a more dominant chimp, cooperation failed, even
though both knew what they needed to do to get the
food. In other experiments, a chimp was allowed to
go and get another chimp to help in the one-dish
food-pulling task. Under this condition, chimps
generally picked someone both friendly to them and
known to be skilled at the task.
How did the bonobos do? Even though the
chimps were given more experience at the task, the
naïve bonobos outperformed them. This was clearly
evident when only one of the food dishes was baited.
and after pulling the platform in, the two bonobos
shared. Chimps were wary of the one-dish situation,
either to avoid interacting with a more dominant
chimp, or because the more dominant chimp could
not suppress entitlement to all the food.
Interestingly, comparable results had been found
earlier for two species of macaques—the strict-
hierarchy rhesus, known to be socially prickly, were
less cooperative than the loose-hierarchy tonkean,
known to be more socially easygoing.
In analyzing the results, Hare suggests that a
relatively high level of cooperativity in a species may
be enabled by the social system and the
temperamental portfolio that supports it. Both
chimps and bonobos are clever enough to know how
to cooperate, and to understand the value of a
cooperative interaction. But cooperation is much
more constrained by the chimpanzee social system.
As noted, in the wild bonobos live in a richer
resource environment than chimpanzees, which may
have allowed the more easygoing temperament to
flourish. Arguably, the chimps’ higher levels of
aggression and social intolerance during feeding may
in general have served them fairly well in a highly
competitive food environment.
Passage 4
Passage 1 is adapted from the majority opinion by Supreme Court Justice Pierce Butler, delivered in the 1929 case Unit e d States v. Schwimmer, 279 U.S. 644 (1929). Passage 2 is adapted from a dissenting opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the same case. Hungarian refugee Rosika Schwimmer was denied United State s citizenship for refusing to promise to bear arms in the country’s defense, as required by the oath of allegiance . Her case went to the Supreme Court.
Passage I
Whatever tends to lessen the willingness of
citizens to discharge their duty to bear arms in the
country’s defense detracts from the strength and
safety of the government. And their opinions and
beliefs as well as their behavior indicating a
disposition to hinder in the performance of that duty
are subjects of inquiry under the statutory provisions
governing naturalization and are of vital importance,
for if all or a large number of citizens oppose such
defense the ‘good order and happiness’ of the United
States cannot long endure. And it is evident that the
views of applicants for naturalization in respect of
such matters may not be disregarded. The influence
of conscientious objectors against the use of military
force in defense of the principles of our government
is apt to be more detrimental than their mere refusal
to bear arms. The fact that, by reason of sex, age or
other cause, they may be unfit to serve does not
lessen their purpose or power to influence others….
The record shows that respondent strongly desires
to become a citizen. She is a linguist, lecturer, and
writer; she is well educated and accustomed to
discuss governments and civic affairs. Her testimony
should be considered having regard to her interest
and disclosed ability correctly to express herself …
Taken as a whole, it shows that her objection to
military service rests on reasons other than mere
inability because of her sex and age personally to bear
arms. Her expressed willingness to be treated as the
government dealt with conscientious objectors who
refused to take up arms in the recent war indicates
that she deemed herself to belong to that class.
The fact that she is an uncompromising pacifist, with
no sense of nationalism, but only a cosmic sense of
belonging to the human family, justifies belief that
she may be opposed to the use of military force as
contemplated by our Constitution and laws. And her
testimony clearly suggests that she is disposed to
exert her power to influence others to such
opposition.
Passage II
The applicant seems to be a woman of superior
character and intelligence, obviously more than
ordinarily desirable as a citizen of the United States.
It is agreed that she is qualified for citizenship except
so far as the views set forth in a statement of facts
may show that the applicant is not attached to the
principles of the Constitution of the United States
and well disposed to the good order and happiness of
the same, and except in so far as the same may show
that she cannot take the oath of allegiance without a
mental reservation.’ The views referred to are an
extreme opinion in favor of pacifism and a statement
that she would not bear arms to defend the
Constitution. So far as the adequacy of her oath is
concerned I hardly can see how that is affected by the
statement, inasmuch as she is a woman over fifty
years of age, and would not be allowed to bear arms
if she wanted to. And as to the opinion the whole
examination of the applicant shows that she …
thoroughly believes in organized government and
prefers that of the United States to any other in the
world. Surely it cannot show lack of attachment to
the principles of the Constitution that she thinks that
it can be improved….
. . . She is an optimist and states in strong and, I
do not doubt, sincere words her belief that war will
disappear and that the impending destiny of
mankind is to unite in peaceful leagues. I do not
share that optimism nor do I think that a philosophic
view of the world would regard war as absurd. But
most people who have known it regard it with
horror, as a last resort, and even if not yet ready for
cosmopolitan efforts, would welcome any practicable
combinations that would increase the power on the
side of peace. The notion that the applicant’s
optimistic anticipations would make her a worse
citizen is sufficiently answered by her examination,
which seems to me a better argument for her
admission than any that I can offer. Some of her
answers might excite popular prejudice, but if there
is any principle of the Constitution that more
imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is
the principle of free thought—not free thought for
those who agree with us but freedom for the thought
that we hate.
Passage 5
This passage is adapted from Jonathan B. Losos, Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution. ©2017 by Jonathan B. Losos. The Rothamsted Park Grass Experiment is a collection of grass plots established in the nineteenth century to study the effects of fertilizers on plants.
Botanist Roy Snaydon saw in the Park Grass
Experiment a way to experimentally test the idea that
soil chemistry can drive evolutionary divergence in
plants, even over very short distances and short
periods of time. If this were the case, he reasoned,
then it was possible that the variation seen among the
Park Grass Experiment plots may partly have
resulted from the adaptive divergence of members of
the same species to the varying conditions on the
different plots.
There was only one problem: the staff at
Rothamsted looked upon the experimental plots—at
that point one hundred years old—as hallowed
ground. Only a few select staff members were
allowed to even walk on the plots to tend them.
Nobody was allowed to collect material or conduct
research on them. The scientist supervising the plots
and the Plots Committee were dubious about
Snaydon’s proposals, but his request came at the
right time. The committee was considering
discontinuing the experiments because they saw
nothing left to learn, so what could be the harm in
letting the professor do a little work on a few plots?
Snaydon was called to appear before the committee
and intensely grilled. Finally, approval was granted,
albeit grudgingly, and they permitted Snaydon to
collect a limited number of seeds.
To test his idea that plants had diverged among
the plots, Snaydon focused on sweet vernal grass, the
plant found on the plots throughout the
experimental field. He initially selected three plots
that had been fertilized with different chemical mixes
since the initiation of the experiment in 1856.
Because lime had been applied to the southern half of
each plot for half a century, the study involved six
subplots varying markedly in mineral content and
soil acidity. Snaydon’s hypothesis was that over the
past century, the grass populations had diverged
evolutionarily to adapt to the specific conditions they
experienced.
And diverge they had. Snaydon, quickly joined by
ace graduate student Stuart Davies, found
tremendous variation in the sweet vernal grass from
one subplot to the next. The total weight (termed
“yield”) of the grass on some subplots was fifty
percent higher than on others; height varied to a
comparable extent. To test for genetic differences,
they planted the seeds from different plots side by
side. Sweet vernal grass from the different plots
grown under identical conditions in a university
research garden differed in a variety of traits,
including the weight of the flowers, the size of the
leaves, and the grass’s susceptibility to mildew,
demonstrating a genetic basis for differences among
the subplots.
The existence of evolved genetic differences
among plots did not, in itself, prove that these
changes were adaptive—the changes could represent
the sort of random genetic fluctuations that occur by
chance in small populations. To test the adaptation
hypothesis directly, Snaydon and Davies grew plants
under a variety of different soil conditions. As they
expected, plants grew best on soil with the same
chemical composition as their natal plot. Taking this
approach one step further, they took garden-reared
plants and placed them back out onto the
experimental plots (by this point, the scientific
dividends of the work were so obvious that the Plots
Committee was more liberal in the sort of work it
allowed). Sure enough, plants grew much better on
their home plot than on plots with different soil
chemistry and vegetation characteristics. The
conclusion was clean over the course of a century,
plants had adapted to the conditions they
experienced on their own subplots.
2021年 3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2021年3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！
