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2021 年 4 月 ACT 考題回顧:所有 4 篇閱讀文章!

2021年4月ACT回顧

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:

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!


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