過去這個週末學生考了 2021 年 6 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 6 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, which includes an essay by Angie Cruz, is adapted from the unattributed article “First Addresses, Seared in Memory” (©2006 by The New York Times). In the full article “First Addresses, Seared in Memory,” several established writers respond to the quotation from Breakfast at Tiffany’s by exploring how their first apartments influenced them as writers.
In the introduction to his 1958 novella “Breakfast
at Tiffany’s,” no less a luminary than Truman Capote
wrote of his first New York apartment, a one-room
apartment in a brownstone in the East ’70s:
The walls were stucco, and a color rather like
tobacco-spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too,
there were prints of Roman ruins freckled
brown with age. The single window looked out
on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened
whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this
apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a
place of my own, the first, and my books were
there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything
I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.
With housing costs throughout the city more prohibitive
than ever, acquiring one’s first New York apartment is a far more
daunting task than it was even a decade ago. But there is
no question that the experience of one’s first place
in the city is a transforming rite of passage. Angie Cruz remembers
hers.
In 1997, I returned to the city from college
upstate to study creative writing at New York
University and found a sublet in my old neighborhood,
Washington Heights. It was a steal, $600 a month for an
L-shaped one-bedroom in a prewar building at 615 West 164th
Street. All the apartments faced the courtyard, and as if
watching a stage from a production booth, I saw my relatives
and longtime neighbors across the way from my second-floor
window.
Because I wanted color and to hide the defects
on the walls, I painted the bedroom an oceanic blue,
the living room the color of a mango, the bathroom a
leaf green. The apartment bore signs of its past and wasn’t
perfect. The dumbwaiter had been turned into a pantry.
The kitchen cabinets didn’t close all the way and the
wooden floors were hidden by beige industrial tiles.
Then there were the plumbing ghosts. My toilet flushed
randomly, all by itself, and the sink in the kitchen filled
up with bubbles when the lady upstairs did her wash.
I woke up in the morning with the sunlight, and
from my kitchen window, I often greeted my grandmother,
who lived across the courtyard, her asking me, “Are you
still studying up there?” That had been my explanation
when she asked me why didn’t I have a job with good benefits.
“Estudiando” is the one word that magically
answered all the questions from my relatives when I
locked myself up and didn’t pick up the phone, even
when they saw that my light was on. “We are estudiando,”
I said when my relatives stood at my front door holding plastic
containers filled with dinner and saw a group of women
crowded in the living room plotting an event, discussing politics,
sharing their writing.
Although my apartment was a snug 500 square
feet, filled with books, museum posters, and my very bad
but honest figurative paintings, the rooms seemed to swell
in size when other writers needed a place to stay. And so my
apartment was often full of people coming and going,
crammed with additional desks and beds for short-term stays.
There was always a fresh batch of iced tea in the fridge,
an answering machine to answer my calls, photographs on
my desk of all the people I love.
The wooden and ceramic dolls I collected from
different parts of the world watched over my laptop.
My desk faced the courtyard, a neglected garden
overgrown with weeds. In the late afternoon, I could see
if my sassy grandmother was home from her job
at the lamp factory in New Jersey, and when the radio next
door wasn’t at full blast, I could hear my aunt, who also lived
across the courtyard, yelling after my teenage nephew
from her window.
There were also moments when it was quiet,
when kids were at school, people were at work,
and the merengue-loving neighbors were
taking their afternoon siesta. In one of those
rare quiet moments, I remember having a revelation
while staring at a draft of my first novel
on my desk, that if I had waited to tell my story
until I had a room of my own, as opposed to a
place that always brimmed with people, I
would never have finished that novel.
But even more so, without all the family mem-
bers, who showed up with leftovers and slipped
$20 in my hand when I looked tired from long
nights at freelance jobs teaching, editing and
even window-designing while “estudiando” for
my master’s degree, I wouldn’t have had the
confidence that I was right to continue to live
my life as a writer. It was the spirit of all that
collective activity inside that apartment with
elastic walls that gave birth to my first novel.
Passage 2
This passage is adapted from the book The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean (©2010 by Sam Kean). Aluminum is the British spelling of aluminum.
A number of brilliant chemists devoted their
careers to aluminum throughout the 1800s, and it’s
hard to judge whether the element was better or worse
off afterward. A Danish chemist and a German chemist
simultaneously extracted this metal from the ancient
astringent alum around 1825. (Alum is the powder car-
toon characters like Sylvester the cat sometimes swallow
that makes their mouths pucker.) Because of its
luster, mineralogists immediately classified aluminum
as a precious metal, like silver or platinum, worth hun-
dreds of dollars an ounce.
Twenty years later, a Frenchman figured out how
to scale up these methods for industry, making alu-
minium available commercially. For a price. It was still
more expensive than even gold. That’s because despite
being the most common metal in the earth’s crust—
around 8 percent of it by weight, hundreds of millions
of times more common than gold—aluminum never
appears in pure, mother lode-al form. It’s always
bonded to something, usually oxygen. Pure samples
were considered miracles. The French once displayed
Fort Knox–like aluminum bars next to their crown
jewels, and the minor emperor Napoleon III reserved a
prized set of aluminum cutlery for special guests at
banquets. (Less favored guests used gold knives and
forks.) In the United States, government engineers, to
show off their country’s industrial prowess, capped the
Washington Monument with a six-pound pyramid of
aluminum in 1884. A historian reports that one ounce
of shavings from the pyramid would have paid a day’s
wages for each of the laborers who erected it.
Aluminum’s sixty-year reign as the world’s most
precious substance was glorious, but soon an American
chemist ruined everything. The metal’s properties—
light, strong, attractive—tantalized manufacturers and
its omnipresence in the earth’s crust had the potential to
revolutionize metal production. It obsessed people, but
no one could figure out an efficient way to separate it
from oxygen. At Oberlin College in Ohio, a chemistry
professor named Frank Fanning Jewett would regale his
students with tales of the aluminum El Dorado that
awaited whoever mastered this element. And at least
one of his students had the naïveté to take his professor
seriously.
In his later years, Professor Jewett bragged to old
college chums that “my greatest discovery was the discovery
of a man”—Charles Hall. Hall worked with
Jewett on separating aluminum throughout his under-
graduate years at Oberlin. He failed and failed and
failed again, but failed a little more smartly each time.
Finally, in 1886, Hall ran an electric current from hand-
made batteries (power lines didn’t exist) through a
liquid with dissolved aluminum compounds. The
energy from the current zapped and liberated the pure
metal, which collected in minute silver nuggets on the
bottom of the tank. The process was cheap and easy,
and it would work just as well in huge vats as on the lab
bench. This had been the most sought-after chemical
prize since the philosopher’s stone, and Hall had found
it. The “aluminum boy wonder” was just twenty-three.
Hall’s fortune, however, was not made instantly.
Chemist Paul Héroult in France stumbled on more or
less the same process at the same time. (Today Hall and
Héroult share credit for the discovery that crashed the
aluminum market.) An Austrian invented another separation
method in 1887, and with the competition bearing down on Hall,
he quickly founded what became the Aluminum Company of America,
or Alcoa, in Pittsburgh. It turned into one of the most successful
business ventures in history.
Aluminum production at Alcoa grew at exponential rates.
In its first months in 1888, Alcoa eked out 50 pounds of aluminum
per day; two decades later, it had to ship 88,000 pounds per day
to meet the demand. And while production soared, prices plummeted.
Years before Hall was born, one man’s breakthrough had
dropped aluminum from $550 per pound to $18 per
pound in seven years. Fifty years later, not even adjusting for inflation,
Hall’s company drove down the price to 25 cents per pound.
And thanks to Hall, aluminum became the utterly blasé metal
we all know, the basis for pop cans and pinging Little League bats
and airplane bodies. (A little anachronistically, it still sits atop
the Washington Monument, too.) I suppose it depends on your
taste and temperament whether you think aluminum was
better off as the world’s most precious or most productive metal.
Passage 3
Passage A is adapted from the article “Dylan’s Electric Kiss-Off” by Damien Cave et al. (©2004 by Rolling Stone LLC). Passage B is adapted from American Popular Music: The Rock Years by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman (©2006 by Oxford University Press).
Passage I
The most notorious live performance in rock &
roll lasted about fifteen minutes: three songs played at
assaultive volume by a plugged-in blues band fronted
by the young poet-king of American folk music, at the
sacred annual congress of acoustic purists, the Newport
Folk Festival. In that quarter-hour, on the warm Sunday
evening of July 25th, 1965, at Freebody Park in New- port,
Rhode Island, Bob Dylan, 24—backed by the electric-Chicago
charge of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band—declared his
independence from the orthodoxy of the folk scene and
publicly unveiled his rock & roll heart.
Dylan paid for his daring. Some witnesses claimed
that he left the stage in tears—shocked by the shouting
and heckling from several members of the Newport
audience—before going back out to do penance:
two acoustic numbers. Butterfield guitarist Mike
Bloomfield said Dylan “looked real shook up.” But Al
Kooper, who joined the Butterfield Band that fateful
night as guest organist insists that the catcalls are a
myth: “It wasn’t ‘Boo, boo, boo.’ It was ‘More,
more, more.’
” When Dylan walked onstage at Newport, dressed
in black pants and a green shirt, it was the first time he
had appeared in public with an electric guitar since his
days with his Minnesota high school combo. A month
before Newport, Dylan cut his first Top Five hit, “Like
a Rolling Stone,” in New York with a group that
included Kooper and Bloomfield. Yet Dylan’s first performance
that weekend, at a Newport workshop on Saturday, was a
pair of older folk songs.
There is no apparent booing on the surviving
soundboard tape of the show. There is yelling. It has
been suggested that the audience was complaining
about the sound mix. Folk icon Pete Seeger admitted he
was so enraged by Dylan’s set he wanted to “chop the
microphone cord,” but only because Dylan’s voice was
so distorted. (On the tape, Dylan is front, center, and
bitingly clear.) The crowd was mostly upset because
Dylan, the top attraction at Newport, was on- and off-stage
in less time than it took some folkies to sing a ballad.
He was so rattled when he returned alone to sing
“It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” and “Mr. Tambourine
Man,” that he had the wrong harmonica for the latter
song. “Does anybody have an E harmonica—an E harmonica,
anybody?” Dylan asked the crowd. “Just throw ’em all up.” He got one.
The folk scene never recovered, rock & roll was
never the same, and Dylan knew he was responsible.
Passage II
Why was there such a shock wave produced by the
concept of Bob Dylan as a rock ’n’ roll star?
It probably had to do with the different cultural
roles assigned by most people to urban folk music on
the one hand and to rock ’n’ roll on the other. Urban
folk in the early 1960s was an increasingly topical,
political, socially conscious music. Even the singing of
traditional folk songs often carried with it a subtext of
political identification—with labor, with the poor, with
minority groups and other peoples seen as oppressed,
with a movement for international peace and under-
standing—depending on the nature and origins of the
particular songs chosen. Thus the words were of para-
mount importance in urban folk music, and the acoustic
guitar accompaniments enabled the words to be heard
clearly. Besides, acoustic guitars were easily portable,
readily accessible, and presented no elaborate barrier
between performers and audiences. It was a relatively
simple matter to bring an acoustic guitar along to a
political meeting or demonstration, and to set it up and
play it there when and if the occasion presented itself,
which surely cannot be said of rock ’n’ roll band equip-
ment. And of course rock ’n’ roll was identified as a
“fun” music, a music to accompany dancing, and other
socializing, whose lyric content was by definition light,
amusing, sometimes clever, often generic, but virtually
never serious.
By the mid-1960s changes within rock ’n’ roll
were already in the wind, but Bob Dylan’s electric style
and other manifestations of folk-rock had the effect of
an enormous injection of growth hormones into the pop
music scene. Suddenly, it was all right—expected,
even—for rock ’n’ roll to be as “adult” as its baby
boomer audience was now becoming itself, and rock ’n’
roll abruptly grew up into rock. Pop records on serious
subjects, with political and poetical lyrics, sprang up
everywhere; before long, this impulse carried over into
the making of ambitious concept albums. The later
1960s flowered into a period of intense and remarkable
innovation and creativity in pop music.
Passage 4
This passage is adapted from the article “The Hearing of the Barn Owl” by Eric I. Knudsen (©1981 by Scientific American, Inc.).
For the barn owl life depends on hearing. A nocturnal hunter,
the bird must be able to find field mice solely by the rustling
and squeaking sounds they make as they traverse runways
in snow or grass. Like predators that hunt on the ground,
the barn owl must be able to locate its prey quickly and
precisely in the horizontal plane. Since the bird hunts
from the air, it must also be able to determine its angle
of elevation above the animal, it is hunting. The owl has
solved this problem very successfully: it can locate
sounds in azimuth (the horizontal dimension) and elevation
(the vertical dimension) better than any other animal
whose hearing has been tested.
What accounts for this acuity? The answer lies in
the owl’s ability to utilize subtle differences between
the sound in its left ear and that in its right. The ears are
generally at slightly different distances from the source
of a sound, so that sound waves reach them at slightly
different times. The barn owl is particularly sensitive to
these minute differences, exploiting them to determine
the azimuth of the sound. In addition, the sound is perceived
as being somewhat louder by the ear that is closer to
the source, and this difference offers further
clues to horizontal location. For the barn owl, the difference
in loudness also helps to specify elevation because
of an unusual asymmetry in the owl’s ears. The right
ear and its opening are directed slightly upward; the left
ear and its opening are directed downward. For this
reason, the right ear is more sensitive to sounds from
above and the left ear to sounds from below.
These differences in timing and loudness provide
enough information for the bird to accurately locate
sounds both horizontally and vertically. To be of ser-
vice to the owl, however, the information must be organized
and interpreted. Much of the processing is
accomplished in brain centers near the beginning of the
auditory pathway. From these centers, nerve impulses
travel to a network of neurons in the midbrain that are
arranged in the form of a map of space. Each neuron in
this network is excited only by sounds from one small
region of space. From this structure, impulses are
relayed to the higher brain centers. The selection of
sensory cues and their transformation into a map of
space is what enables the barn owl to locate its prey in
total darkness with deadly accuracy.
The most visually striking anatomical feature of
the barn owl, and the one that plays the most important
role in its location of prey, is the face. The skull is relatively
narrow and small and the face is large and round,
made up primarily of layers of stiff, dense feathers
arrayed in tightly packed rows. The feathered structure,
called the facial ruff, forms a surface that is a very efficient
reflector of high-frequency sounds.
Two troughs run through the ruff from the fore-
head to the lower jaw, each about two centimeters wide
and nine centimeters long. The troughs are similar in
shape to the fleshy exterior of the human ear, and they
serve the same purpose: to collect high-frequency
sounds from a large volume of space and funnel them
into the ear canals. The troughs join below the beak.
The ear openings themselves are hidden under the
preaural flaps: two flaps of skin that project to the side
next to the eyes. The entire elaborate facial structure is
hidden under a layer of particularly fine feathers that
are acoustically transparent.
The barn owl is capable of locating the source of a
sound within a range of one to two degrees in both
azimuth and elevation; one degree is about the width of
a little finger at arm’s length. Surprisingly, until the barn
owl was tested, the man was the species with the
greatest known ability to locate the source of a sound;
human beings are about as accurate as of the owl in
azimuth but are three times worse in elevation.
The sensitivity of the barn owl’s hearing is shown
both by its capacity to locate distant sounds and by its
ability to orient its talons for the final strike. When the
owl swoops down on a mouse, even in a completely
dark experimental chamber, it quickly aligns its talons
with the body axis of the mouse. This behavior is not
accidental. When the mouse turns and runs in a different
direction, the owl realigns its talons accordingly.
This behavior clearly increases the probability of a successful
strike; it also implies that the owl not only identifies the
location of the sound source with extreme accuracy but also
detects subtle changes in the origin of the sound from
which it infers the direction of movement of the prey.
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 6 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！
