過去這個週末學生考了 2021 年 4 月的 ACT 考試。如果這是你最後一次考 ACT，恭喜你完成了一個艱難的任務！
我們整理了 2021 年 4 月 ACT 考試當中的 4 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 ACT 考試中出現，但是透過真正的 ACT 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 ACT 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。閱讀更多來自這些地方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。ACT 的閱讀文章包含這五種類型：
- 社會研究：人類學，考古學，傳記，商業，經濟，教育，地理，歷史，政治學，心理學和社會學。
- 自然科學：解剖學，天文學，生物學，植物學，化學，生態學，地質學，醫學，氣象學，微生物學，自然史，生理學，物理學，技術和動物學。
- 散文小說：短篇小說或短篇小說的摘錄。
- 人文：回憶錄和個人散文，以及建築，藝術，舞蹈，倫理，電影，語言，文學批評，音樂，哲學，廣播，電視和戲劇等內容領域。
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 6月 ACT 考試閱讀文章
Passage 1
This passage is from the short story “Long Distance” by Alejandro Zambra.
Portillo was a good boss, a generous guy; I rarely
saw him, sometimes only on the twenty-ninth, when I
waited, with some stupendous circles under my eyes, to
pick up my paycheck. What I remember most about him
is his voice, so high-pitched, like a teenager’s—a
common enough tone among Chileans but, for me, a
disconcerting one to hear from a Spaniard. He would
call me very early, at six or seven in the morning, so I
could give him a report on what had happened the previous
night, which was pretty much pointless, because
nothing ever happened, or almost nothing: maybe some
call or other from Rome or Paris, simple cases from
people who weren’t really sick but who wanted to make
the most of the medical insurance they had bought in
Santiago. My job was to listen to them, take down their
information, make sure the policy was valid and connect
them to my counterparts in Europe.
Portillo let me read or write, or even doze off, on
the condition that I always answer the phone in good
time. That’s why he called at six or seven—although,
when he was out partying, he might call earlier. “The
phone should never ring more than three times,” he
would tell me if I took too long picking up. But he
didn’t usually scold me; on the contrary, he was quite
friendly. Sometimes he asked me what I was reading. I
would say Paul Celan, or Emily Dickinson, or
Emmanuel Bove, or Humberto Díaz Casanueva, and he
always burst out laughing, as if he had just heard a very
good and very unexpected joke.
One night, around four in the morning, I received a
call from someone whose voice sounded mock-serious,
or disguised, and I thought it was my boss pretending to
be someone else. “I’m calling from Paris,” said the
voice. The man was calling direct, which increased my
feeling that it was a prank of Portillo’s, because clients
usually reversed the charges when they called. Portillo
and I had a certain level of trust between us, so I told
him not to mess with me, that I was very busy reading.
“I don’t understand, I’m calling from Paris,” the man
responded. “Is this the number of the travel insurance?”
I apologized and asked him for his number so I
could call him back. When we talked again I’d become
the nicest phone operator on the planet, which wasn’t
really necessary, because I’ve never been impolite, and
because the man with the unrealistic voice was also
unrealistically nice, which was not usual in that job: it
was more common for clients to show their bad manners,
their high-handedness, their habit of treating
phone operators badly, and surely also laborers, cooks,
salespeople, or any other of the many groups made up
of their supposed inferiors.
Juan Emilio’s voice, on the other hand, suggested
the possibility of a reasonable conversation, although I
don’t know if reasonable is the word, because as I was
taking down his information (fifty-five years old, home
address in Lo Curro, no preexisting conditions) and
checking his policy (his insurance had the best cover-
age available on the market), something in his voice
made me think that, more than a doctor, he just needed
someone to talk to, someone who would listen.
He told me he’d been in Europe for five months,
most of that time in Paris, where his daughter—whom
he called la Moño—was working on her doctorate and
living with her husband—el Mati—and the kids. None
of this was in response to my questions, but he was
talking so enthusiastically that it was impossible for me
to break in. He told me how the kids spoke French with
charmingly correct accents, and he also threw in a few
commonplace observations about Paris. By the time he
started talking to me about the difficulties la Moño had
been having lately meeting her academic obligations,
about the complexity of the doctoral programs, and
about what kind of sense parenthood made in a world
like this one (“a world that sometimes seems so strange
nowadays, so different,” he told me), I realized we’d
been talking for almost forty minutes. I had to interrupt
him and respectfully ask him to tell me why he was
calling. He told me he was a little under the weather,
and he’d had a fever. I typed up the fax and sent it to the
office in Paris so they could coordinate the case, and
then I started the long process of saying goodbye to
Juan Emilio, who fell all over himself in apologies and
politeness before finally accepting that the conversation
had ended.
Back then I’d picked up a few evening hours
teaching at the technical training institute. The schedule
fit perfectly.
From Alejandro Zambra’s “Long Distance,” in My Documents (McSweeney’s, 2015)
Passage 2
This passage is from the book On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks by Simon Garfield.
We are now sure—because we have seen it on
maps—that California is firmly attached to Oregon,
Arizona and Nevada. Even south of San Diego, when it
eventually becomes the Mexican state of Baja California,
it is firmly hitched to the mainland. But in 1622,
something untoward happened. After eighty-one years
officially attached to a huge landmass, California
drifted free. It wasn’t a radical act of political will, nor
a single mistake (a slip of an engraver, perhaps), but a
sustained act of cartographic misjudgment. Stranger
still, the error continued to appear on maps long after
navigators had tried to sail entirely around it and—with
what must have been a sense of utter bafflement—
failed.
The name California first appeared on a map in
1541. It was drawn as part of Mexico by Domingo del
Castillo—a pilot on an expedition by Hernando de
Álarcón—and it is shown as a peninsula and labeled. Its
first appearance on a printed map occurred in 1562,
when the Spanish pilot and instrument maker Diego
Gutierrez again wrote its name at the tip of a peninsula,
a very minor detail on a busy and very beautiful engraving
of the New World. The map, the largest then made
of the region at 107 x 104 cm, may have been engraved
after Gutierrez’s death by Hieronymus Cock, an artist
who clearly took great delight in imaginative trappings:
huge ships and legends populate its seas, with Poseidon
driving horses on a seaworthy chariot, and a huge
gorilla-type creature breaking the waves while it dines
on a fish.
California subsequently appeared attached to the
mainland for sixty years. And then off it floated into the
Pacific, where it remained a cartographic island for
more than two centuries.
Its first known insular appearance occurred in
1622, on an inset on a title page of a Spanish volume
entitled Historia General. Two years later it was drift-
ing free, bounded by the Mar Vermeio and Mar Del Zur
on a Dutch map by Abraham Goos. But it received its
most prominent currency on a London map of 1625
entitled “The North Part of America.” This accompanied
an article about the search for the Northwest
Passage by the mathematician Henry Briggs. He supplemented
the great untracked northerly spaces toward
the Arctic with text describing the wonders of his map,
“Conteyning Newfoundland, new Eng/land, Virginia,
Florida, New Spaine . . . and upon ye West the large
and goodly land/ of California.” On the eastern
seaboard, both Plymouth and Cape Cod are placed in
Massachusetts, but not yet Boston.
The misconception persisted for decades. It was
the seventeenth century’s forerunner to a mistake on
Wikipedia—doomed to be repeated in a thousand
school essays until a bright spark noticed it and dared
to make amends. Compiling a paper for the California
Map Society in 1995, Glen McLaughlin and Nancy H.
Mayo cataloged 249 separate maps (not including
world maps) which cast the Golden State adrift. Their
names carry bold assertions, with no wiggle room: “A
New and Most Exact map of America” claimed one,
while another promised “America drawn from the latest
and best Observations.” Between 1650 and 1657, the
French historian Nicolas Sanson published several
maps that showed California as an island, and their
translations into Dutch and German ensured that they
superseded Briggs as the most influential mythmakers
for half a century. But they also promoted newer, truer
discoveries, including the first cartographic depiction
of all five Great Lakes.
Even when new maps were published showing
California attached to the mainland, the island kept on
appearing. In the end, though, it was killed off by a
royal decree issued by Ferdinand VII of Spain in 1747,
which denied the possibility of this Northwest Passage
with the reasonably clear statement: “California is
not an Island.” Yet news traveled slowly. California
appeared as an island on a map made in Japan as late as
1865.
And how did it all begin? The cartographical point
zero has been tracked to a Carmelite friar named
Antonio de la Acensión who sailed with Sebastian
Vizcaino along the West Coast in 1602–3 and kept a
journal. Two decades later he is believed to have
mapped his trip on paper, which featured California as
an island nation. The map was sent to Spain, but the
ship on which it traveled was captured by the Dutch,
and it ended its journey in Amsterdam. In 1622, Henry
Briggs wrote of seeing this map of California in
London. And shortly afterward, the map drawn from
the one “taken by Hollanders” was set in copper and
began its journey through the world.
“Pocket Map: California as an Island”, copyright © 2013 by Simon Garfield, from ON THE MAP: A MIND EXPANDING EXPLORATION OF THE WAY THE WORLD LOOKS by Simon Garfield. Used by permission of Gotham Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC
Passage 3
This passage is from the book Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans.
I never thought of ballet as anything but contemporary,
a here-and-now art. Even the oldest of ballets
are of necessity performed by young people and take on
the look of their generation. Besides, unlike theater or
music, ballet has no texts and no standardized notation,
no scripts or scores, and only the most scattered written
records; it is unconstrained by tradition and the past.
Choreographer George Balanchine encouraged this
idea. In countless interviews he explained that ballets
are here and gone, like flowers or butterflies, and that
dance is an ephemeral art of the present; carpe diem.
The point, he seemed to be saying, was not to bring
back old musty dances such as Swan Lake: it was to
“make it new.” For the dancers, however, this was a
paradoxical injunction: history was all around us—in
our teachers and the dances, but also in Balanchine’s
own ballets, many of which were suffused with memories
and a Romantic ethos. But we nonetheless made a
cult of never looking back, of setting our sights resolutely
on the present.
And yet it is because ballet has no fixed texts,
because it is an oral and physical tradition, a story-
telling art passed on, like Homer’s epics, from person to
person, that it is more and not less rooted in the past.
For it does have texts, even if these are not written
down: dancers are required to master steps and variations,
rituals and practices. These may change or shift
overtime, but the process of learning, performing, and
passing them on remains deeply conservative. When an
older dancer shows a step or a variation to a younger
dancer, the ethics of the profession mandate strict obedience
and respect: both parties rightly believe that a
form of superior knowledge is passing between them. I
never for a moment, for example, questioned the steps
or style Alexandra Danilova conveyed when she taught
us variations from The Sleeping Beauty: we clung to her
every movement. The teachings of the master are
revered for their beauty and logic, but also because they
are the only connection the younger dancer has to the
past—and she knows it. It is these relationships, the
bonds between master and student, that bridge the centuries
and give ballet its foothold in the past.
Ballet, then, is an art of memory, not history. No
wonder dancers obsessively memorize everything:
steps, gestures, combinations, variations, whole ballets.
It is difficult to overstate this. Memory is central to the
art, and dancers are trained, as the ballerina Natalia
Makarova once put it, to “eat” dances—to ingest them
and make them part of who they are. These are physical
memories; when dancers know a dance, they know it in
their muscles and bones. Recall is sensual and brings
back not just the steps but also the gestures and feel of
the movement, the “perfume,” as Danilova said, of the
dance—and the older dancer. Thus ballet repertory is
not recorded in books or libraries: it is held instead in
the bodies of dancers. Most ballet companies even
appoint special “memorizers”—dancers whose prodigious
recall sets them apart from their peers—to store
its works: they are ballet’s scribes (and pedants) and
they keep whole oeuvres in their limbs, synchronized
(usually) to music that triggers the muscles and helps to
bring back the dance. But even dancers with superlative
memories are mortal, and with each passing generation,
ballet loses a piece of its past.
As a result, the ballet repertory is notoriously thin.
The “classics” are few and the canon is small. We have
only a handful of past ballets, most of which originated
in nineteenth-century France or late Imperial Russia.
The rest are relatively new: twentieth- and twenty-first-
century works. There is some record of seventeenth-
century court dances, but the notation system recording
these dances died out in the eighteenth century and have
never been fully replaced. These court dances are thus
an isolated snapshot; the before and after are missing.
The rest is spotty and full of holes. One might suppose
that French ballet would be well preserved: the funda-
mental precepts of classical ballet were codified in
seventeenth-century France and the art form has
enjoyed an unbroken tradition there to the present day.
But we have almost nothing. La Sylphide premiered in
Paris in 1832, but that version was soon forgotten: the
version we know today originated in Denmark in 1836.
Coppélia, from 1870, is in fact the only nineteenth-
century French ballet still widely performed in its
(more or less) original form.
Introduction: Masters and Traditions from APOLLO’S ANGELS: A HISTORY OF BALLET by Jennifer Homans, copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Homans. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Passage 4
Passage A is from the article “Just Add Water” by Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams. Passage B is from the article “Plate Tectonics Spotted on Europa” by Thomas Sumner.
Passage I
A look at our neighbors Mars and Venus shows
how lucky Earth has been. They too had surface water
in the early days, perhaps even large oceans. On frozen
Mars today we see ancient shorelines more than 3 bil-
lion years old, and detect clays formed in water. Soon,
though, Mars lost most of its atmosphere and protective
magnetic field, and its water vapor leaked away. Venus
is an inferno surrounded by suffocating clouds of sulphuric
acid now, but probe measurements show it too
once had abundant liquid water, until rising levels of
water vapor and carbon dioxide led to a runaway
greenhouse effect that boiled it off.
What made Earth different? The key is probably
plate tectonics. The movement of segments of Earth’s
uppermost layer is unique, we think, among the rocky
planets of the solar system. They crash against each
other, buckling, rising or driving down into the planet’s
hot mantle. There is some evidence such tectonics tried
to start up on Mars, but if so it didn’t last long. On
Earth, it has created natural depressions: ocean basins,
underlain by dense newly forming crust, that hold
deeper waters; and shallow seas on the lighter, more
ancient crust of the continents. The bottom of these
containers is cracked at the subduction zones where
water-soaked plates slide down into the mantle. That
water is mostly wrung back out to emerge as volcanic
steam in mountain ranges.
This constant cycling of water, and the unlikely
coexistence of wet and dry surfaces is, it turns out, crucial.
Water evaporating from the oceans condenses as
rain and chemically attacks the land, modulating atmospheric
composition and global temperature. The
atmosphere thus formed has a lid—a “cold trap” made
by the chill of the stratosphere—that freezes water
vapor out and stops it escaping into space. Below this
lid, almost uncannily, all three phases of water—solid,
liquid and gas—coexist almost all of the time: the only
planetary surface is known where this has been sustained
for any long period.
To complete this remarkable planetary machine,
plate tectonics itself needs water to function: water
lubricates descending tectonic plates and softens mantle
minerals so they melt more easily. Geochemist Francis
Albarède of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon,
France, thinks that water’s arrival from outer space
kick-started the plate-tectonic motor 3 billion years
ago.
Passage II
Plate tectonics churns the icy exterior of Jupiter’s
moon Europa, researchers reported in 2014. The finding
marks the first evidence of plate tectonics beyond
Earth.
“Earth is not unique—we’ve found another body in
the solar system with plate tectonics,” says planetary
scientist Simon Kattenhorn of the University of Idaho
in Moscow. “This tells us that this process can happen
on more than just rocky planets like Earth.”
Previous observations have seen surface reshaping,
such as volcanic activity, on other planetary bodies
including Saturn’s moon Titan. However, Kattenhorn
says, Europa is the first found with a patchwork of
drifting tectonic plates.
The rising and sinking ice slabs on Europa’s surface
may provide a mechanism for nutrients to move
from the moon’s surface to its subsurface ocean,
Kattenhorn argues. Such transport would bolster the likelihood
that this ocean hosts life. Astrobiologist
Britney Schmidt of Georgia Tech in Atlanta says the
mechanism is “very exciting for Europa’s chances for
supporting life.”
Though the moon formed over 4 billion years ago,
at the same time as the rest of the solar system,
Europa’s icy surface is surprisingly young. Based on
the moon’s small number of impact craters, scientists
estimate Europa’s surface to be just 40 million to
90 million years old. Dark bands crisscross the moon
where warm, fresh ice wells up to the frigid surface, but
a mystery remained: Where is the old material?
Two years ago, Kattenhorn and coauthor Louise
Prockter of Johns Hopkins University spotted some-
thing odd as they scoured a Louisiana-sized portion of
Europa was mapped by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 1998.
In the moon’s northern hemisphere, a 20,000-square-
kilometer hunk of landscape was missing. Like a torn
photograph placed so that the pieces overlap, Europa’s
crisscrossing surface fractures didn’t properly line up.
The researchers propose that this discrepancy
marks where two massive ice slabs smashed together,
with one sinking under the other and blending into the
moon’s warmer interior ice. The action resembles a
subduction zone on Earth, where one slab of crust—or
tectonic plate—slides beneath
another.
Passage A: © 2014 Reed Business Information - UK. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Passage B: Copyright © 2014. Reprinted with permission of Science News.
2021 年 6 月 ACT 考試閱讀題目
Ivy-Way 學生在上課的過程就會做到 2021 年 5 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！