過去這一週末學生考了 2021 年 4 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 4 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 4 月 (美國/北美) SAT 考試閱讀文章
Passage 1
This passage is adapted from The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies. ©2016 by Peter Ho Davies. The passage is set in 1935. Anna, an actress, is working with Newsreel, a photographer, to create a short documentary film.
Anna speaks Cantonese—with an American
accent, her father has always said—but no Mandarin
or Shanghainese. Now she requires an interpreter to
tell her hosts how delighted she is to visit her
homeland. It’s just as well the newsreel is silent, she
thinks, the announcer’s voice-over to be added later.
Besides, didn’t she do some of her best work in silent
pictures?
Newsreel films her at Yu Gardens framed by a
I moon gate. He films her on the Nanking Road,
shopping and turning heads. In the Sincere
Department Store she is delighted to learn that the
onomatopoeic Chinese word for the pneumatic tube
system is pung. He films her on the Bund pointing
out junks1, rubbing the paw of the bronze lion
outside the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank for luck.
There are more cars than she expected—though she
must try a rickshaw—more telephones, more
streetlights. Overhead the telegraph lines make a net
I against the sky.
A pair of trams cross in front of her, parting like
curtains. She marvels blithely at the modernity.
“Why, it reminds me of Berlin. I was expecting old
Cathayl2 But it looks nothing like Grauman’s
Theatre.”
Mostly, though, there are more Chinese than she
ever imagined—compradors in tang jackets, black-
and-white amahs, monks in their yellow robes—
crowding everywhere, more than she’s ever seen.
And this she keeps to herselfi secretly she feels like an
extra again, is glad of her chic Western wardrobe,
Chanel suits, for helping her stand out.
The Mayfair Mannequin Academy of New York
named her the “World’s Best-Dressed Woman” in
1934. Not bad for a laundryman’s daughter, she wrote
to her father at the time, but he didn’t reply.
She finds herself waiting for Newsreel to say
“Action!” Pausing at the edge of the frame, her
weight tipped forward, but catching herself. They
laugh when she explains it to him. Yet she still wants
him to tell her what to do. “Was that good?” She asks
after a take, and he says, “Sure.” She feels naked
without stage makeup, lighting. She asks to redo a
moment when she bumps into someone. “If you
like.” She repeats a particular gesture, a little turn of
the wrist as if she’s presenting the scene around her,
practicing between takes and then repeating to make
sure he captures it, until he looks up and over the
camera and asks, “What are you doing?”
Newsreel’s Eyemo camera runs for twenty
seconds, fully wound, and she begins pacing her
movements to his rhythms. From the taxi to the hotel
lobby, twenty seconds. Greeting a fan, twenty
seconds. Admiring a bolt of silk, twenty seconds. And
then it’s time to change the reel.
She feels as if he’s winding her up like a tin toy.
Finally, she leans on a rail overlooking the river,
waiting for him, and when he raises up, she lifts her
own Leica to take a picture of him.
“You look like a tourist,” he tells her, and she
frowns. On the Whangpoo the sails of junks unfurl
like fans, raised as if in modesty to hide them from
gaze.
She outfits herself with a new wardrobe. She sheds
her Western dresses and suits for sleek qipao. The
milky-eyed tailor who measures her wraps a knotted
string around her waist and hips. She used to work as
a seamstress at her father’s laundry when she was a
child, she says, and he nods when someone translates.
Afterward she shows off her new gowns for the
camera. “Going native,” she tells Newsreel. He
touches a finger to the knot of his bowtie as if it were
a button.
She blends in better, at least until people address
her in Mandarin. She can’t recall the last time she felt
invisible like this. But she fears getting lost in the
crowd. She relies on Newsreel to pick her out, on the
camera to make her stand out.
In later years she’ll wear those dresses in movies
and charge the studios an extra fee to rent her
wardrobe.
1 Flat bottomed boats
2 Another term for China
Passage 2
This passage is adapted from Christian Jarrett, “We Have an Ingrained Anti-Profit Bias that Blinds Us to the Social Benefits of Free Markets.”©2017 by the British Psychological Society.
According to a new paper in Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, most of us have an instinctual
anti-profit bias. We view for-profit companies and
industries—upon which capitalism is based—with
inherent distrust, assuming that the more profitable
they are, the more harm they do to society. In fact,
research shows the opposite is true: companies that
make greater profits actually tend to contribute more
value to society, for example in terms of their
environmental responsibility and corporate
philanthropy.
The authors of the new paper, led by Amit
Bhattacharjee at Erasmus University, believe this
anti-profit bias leads many voters and politicians to
endorse anti-profit policies that are likely to lead to
the very opposite outcomes for society that they want
to achieve. “Erroneous anti-profit beliefs may lead to
systematically worse economic policies for society,
even as they help people satisfy their social and
expressive needs on an individual level,” they said.
Through seven separate studies involving
hundreds of online participants, the researchers
present evidence that the anti-profit bias arises
because we think about for-profit motives in a
somewhat superficial, ego-centric fashion. Because
the desire for profit is seen as based on selfish intent,
we extrapolate to assume that the activities of
for-profit companies and industries must be bad for
society, disregarding the reality that selfish intents
can have positive consequences.
We also refer to our own mundane “zero sum”
experiences, such as buying a car, in which the seller’s
profitable gain inevitably comes at our loss. We fail to
consider how market forces operate on a massive
scale, in which for-profit companies (competing in a
free market with informed customers) need to
innovate, behave fairly and develop a good reputation
in order to be profitable over the long term.
For instance, in the first study, participants rated
Fortune 500 companies in terms of how profitable
they thought they were and how much they thought
they engaged in bad business practices, such as
operating at the expense of others with no concern
for society. There was a clear pattern: the more
profitable participants thought a company was, the
more they assumed that it engaged in bad business
practices. In fact, expert assessments of the firms
show the opposite pattern.
In another study, participants were presented with
vignettes of different companies and either told they
operated for-profit or not-for-profit. Participants
rated the exact same companies, engaging in the
same business activities, as more likely to cause social
harm, and less likely to bring social benefit, if they
were described as for-profit rather than not-for-
profit.
Bhattacharjee and his team found that they could
attenuate their participants’ anti-profit bias if they
prompted them to think about how a long-term
profit motive could encourage greater product
innovation and quality, better treatment of staff, and
more concern for reputation. However, thinking this
way doesn’t seem to come naturally. Participants’
baseline judgments about for-profit companies were
the same as when they were actively encouraged to
assume that customers face few choices and have no
information about firms’ reputations (which isn’t the
case in a free market, profit-driven economy).
The findings of an ingrained anti-profit bias
generally held regardless of participants’ economic
knowledge or political leanings. This was a US study
so it remains to be seen if the same anti-profit bias
will be found in other cultures.
Passage 3
This passage is adapted from Chris Brodie, “No Use Moving the Cheese.” ©2004 by Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society.
Superman has super-hearing. Spider-Man has an
uncanny “spider-sense.” But truth can be stranger
than fiction. The newest superhero doesn’t wear a
cape or mask. It’s a mouse, and it looks just like its
normal brethren. Its super power is its amazing…
nose. In a paper published in Neuron, collaborators at
Florida State University and Yale University describe
what they call “super-smeller” mice. These
exceptional creatures have noses that are 1,000 to
10,000 times more sensitive than those of ordinary
mice.
The superhero origin of these rodents involves the
deletion, or knockout, of a gene. This technique
usually generates mice that are quite sick, as nearly all
mutations are harmful. Yet it doesn’t seem to be true
for this gene, Kv1.3, which encodes a protein that acts
as a channel to let potassium ions (r) into cells. This
particular ion channel is found in immunological
T-cells and neurons in the hippocampus and the
olfactory bulb—the part of the brain that gets
information from odor receptors in the nose.
In neurons, K+ channels such as Kv1.3 can act like
governors on an engine, restricting the firing rate of
the electrical spikes known as action potentials. The
deletion of Kv1.3 removes this block. Using mice
generated in the Yale lab of Richard Flavell, a team at
Florida State led by Debra Fadool discovered that the
loss of the channel caused one type of olfactory
neuron, the mitral cell, to fire at lower thresholds and
higher frequencies. Furthermore, the mutant cells
were insensitive to chemical messages that normally
rein in the flow of electrical current during an action
potential. According to coauthor Leonard
Kaczmarek, whose group at Yale studies the ion-
channel biology of sensation, these changes resulted
in greater excitability and better timing—effectively
“phase locking’ the output of the mitral cells, and
thereby increasing the coherence of olfactory signals.
The mutation also caused structural changes in
the olfactory bulb. In this part of the brain, olfactory
receptor cells connect to mitral cells in clusters called
glomeruli. The knockout mice had glomeruli that
were about half as large—but twice as abundant—as
normal. As a result, information from the nose went
to twice as many “processing units” as usual. Fadool
suggests this might increase the resolution of the
signal—meaning that a faint odor would be more
likely to be noticed above the jumble of background
smells.
Mutant mice could distinguish between complex
odors, such as peppermint and powdered food, with
nearly 15 times the sensitivity of normal mice. They
were also better at detecting subtle molecular
differences between odorants, such as some (but not
all) closely related alcohols. The most amazing
change was a huge increase in sensitivity: Mutant
mice were able to perceive an odor that was 1,000
times more dilute than what wild-type mice could
smell.
The super-smeller was definitely a surprise—none
of the investigators intended to create such a
creature. “We had no inkling,” states Kaczmarek.
“We were looking for an effect in the auditory
system.”
Passage 4
This passage Is adapted from a speech delivered in 1961 by Albert Luton, “Africa and Freedom.”©1960 by The Nobel Foundation. tutu!’ was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the struggle against apartheid, a system of Institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination in South Africa from 1948 to 1991, the year It was abolished.
In years gone by, some of the greatest men of our
century have stood here to receive this award, men
whose names and deeds have enriched the pages of
human history, men whom future generations will
regard as having shaped the world of our time. No
one could be left unmoved at being plucked from the
village of Groutville—a name many of you have
never heard before and which does not even feature
on many maps—to be plucked from banishment in a
rural backwater, to be lifted out of the narrow
confines of South Africa’s internal politics and placed
here in the shadow of these great figures….
This award could not be for me alone, nor for just
South Africa, but for Africa as a whole. Africa
presently is most deeply torn with strife and most
bitterly stricken with racial conflict. How strange
then it is that a man of Africa should be here to
receive an award given for service to the cause of
peace and brotherhood between men. There has been
little peace in Africa in our time. From the
northernmost end of our continent, where war has
raged for seven years, to the center and to the south
there are battles being fought out, some with arms,
some without…. Ours is a continent in revolution
against oppression. And peace and revolution make
uneasy bedfellows. There can be no peace until the
forces of oppression are overthrown.
Our continent has been carved up by the great
powers; alien governments have been forced upon
the African people by military conquest and by
economic domination; strivings for nationhood and
national dignity have been beaten down by force;
traditional economics and ancient customs have been
disrupted, and human skills and energy have been
harnessed for the advantage of our conquerors. In
these times there has been no peace; there could be
no brotherhood between men.
But now, the revolutionary stirrings of our
continent are setting the past aside. Our people
everywhere from north to south of the continent are
reclaiming their land, their right to participate in
government, their dignity as men, their nationhood.
Thus, in the turmoil of revolution, the basis for peace
and brotherhood in Africa is being restored by the
resurrection of national sovereignty and
independence, of equality and the dignity of man.
It should not be difficult for you here in Europe to
appreciate this. Your continent passed through a
longer series of revolutionary upheavals, in which
your age of feudal backwardness gave way to the new
age of industrialization, true nationhood, democracy,
and rising living standards—the golden age for which
men have striven for generations. Your age of
revolution, stretching across all the years from the
eighteenth century to our own, encompassed some of
the bloodiest civil wars in all history. By comparison,
the African revolution has swept across three
quarters of the continent in less than a decade; its
final completion is within sight of our own
generation. Again, by comparison with Europe, our
African revolution—to our credit—is proving to be
orderly, quick, and comparatively bloodless….
There is a paradox in the fact that Africa qualifies
for such an award in its age of turmoil and
revolution. How great is the paradox and how much
greater the honor that an award in support of peace
and the brotherhood of man should come to one who
is a citizen of a country where the brotherhood of
man is an illegal doctrine, outlawed, banned,
censured, proscribed and prohibited; where to work.
talk, or campaign for the realization in fact and deed
of the brotherhood of man is hazardous, punished
with banishment, or confinement without trial, or
imprisonment; where effective democratic channels
to peaceful settlement of the race problem have never
existed these 300 years; and where white minority
power rests on the most heavily armed and equipped
military machine in Africa. This is South Africa.
Even here, where white rule seems determined not
to change its mind for the better, the spirit of Africa’s
militant struggle for liberty, equality, and
independence asserts itself. I, together with
thousands of my countrymen, have in the course of
the struggle for these ideals been harassed and
imprisoned, but we are not deterred in our quest for
a new age in which we shall live in peace and in
brotherhood.
Passage 5
Passage 1 is adapted from Joseph Castro, “How the Mars Moon Phobos Got Its Grooves.” ©2014 by Purch. Passage 2 is adapted from Elizabeth Zublitslcy, “Mars’ Moon Phobos Is Sim Falling Apart.” Published In 2015 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Passage I
Billions of years ago, Mars suffered from
numerous big impacts, and the resulting backwash
ultimately scarred the surface of Phobos, one of the
Red Planet’s two tiny moons, researchers say.
In 1976, images from NASA’s Viking orbiter
revealed that the surface of Phobos is covered in
numerous parallel, channel-like grooves. Over the
years, researchers have come up with many
hypotheses to explain the odd features, but the origin
of the satellite’s grooves is still heavily debated today.
In the new study, a pair of researchers reviewed
the evidence for the major hypotheses and concluded
that only one holds water: The grooves are chains of
secondary impacts, the landing sites of material
blasted to the Mars moon by impacts on the Red
Planet.
Using new data and images from the European
Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter, the scientists
also mapped the grooves in much greater detail than
ever before, and calculated that the amount of Mars
material needed to form all of Phobos’ grooves is
about two orders of magnitude lower than the total
ejecta from Mars’ craters.
“Everything fits in with this hypothesis,” said John
Murray, a planetary scientist at Open University in
the U.K., and lead author of the new study. “We can
even trace the ejecta that produced the grooves back
to [source areas] on Mars.”
Some scientists have previously speculated that
the grooves are fractures resulting from tidal forces,
the impact that created Phobos’ prominent Stickney
Crater or other sources.
“It hasn’t really been a generally accepted idea, or
one that has gained universal approval,” Murray said,
adding that there are several issues with all fracture
hypotheses for the origin of the grooves. For instance,
the near-perfect alignment of the grooves within each
family doesn’t fit with other fracture fields
throughout the solar system.
Other hypotheses posit that the grooves on
Phobos are the result of local impacts. According to
one idea, the meteor that created Stickney Crater
kicked up ejecta that showered Phobos, creating the
grooves; a related hypothesis proposes that rolling
boulders from the crater scarred Phobos. Or, the
grooves may have developed when Phobos was
hammered by orbiting debris, according to some
researchers.
But none of these ideas can explain all of the
so observed characteristics and patterns of the grooves,
Murray said.
Passage II
Phobos’ grooves were long thought to be fractures
caused by the impact that formed Stickney crater.
That collision was so powerful, it came close to
shattering Phobos. However, scientists eventually
determined that the grooves don’t radiate outward
from the crater itself but from a focal point nearby.
More recently, researchers have proposed that the
grooves may instead be produced by many smaller
impacts of material ejected from Mars. But new
modeling by NASA’s Terry Hurford and colleagues
supports the view that the grooves are more like
“stretch marks” that occur when Phobos gets
deformed by tidal forces.
The gravitational pull between Mars and Phobos
produces these tidal forces. Earth and our moon pull
on each other in the same way, producing tides in the
oceans and making both planet and moon slightly
egg-shaped rather than perfectly round.
The same explanation was proposed for the
grooves decades ago, after the Viking spacecraft sent
Images of Phobos to Earth. At the time, however,
Phobos was thought to be more-or-less solid all the
way through. When the tidal forces were calculated,
the stresses were too weak to fracture a solid moon of
that size.
The recent thinking, however, is that the interior
of Phobos could be a rubble pile, barely holding
together, surrounded by a layer of powdery regolith
about 330 feet (100 meters) thick.
An interior like this can distort easily because it
has very little strength and forces the outer layer to
readjust. The researchers think the outer layer of
Phobos behaves elastically and builds stress, but it’s
weak enough that these stresses can cause it to fail.
All of this means the tidal forces acting on Phobos
can produce more than enough stress to fracture the
surface. Stress fractures predicted by this model line
up very well with the grooves seen in images of
Phobos. This explanation also fits with the
observation that some grooves are younger than
others, which would be the case if the process that
creates them is ongoing.
2021年 4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2021年4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！