2017.5 SAT考试阅读原文完整回忆版
PASSAGE 1
Two boys were playing carrom on the steps of a small, painted shed which had the following words on its wall in large, black letters: NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SPORTSMEN. A single table-tennis table inside the shed could be glimpsed through the window. The boys interrupted their game to give Chhotomama directions to the house in a series of sporadic, enthusiastic gestures. Oh yes, they knew the old couple. And yes, their son and daughter in-law had arrived last night with their first child."
'Is it a girl or a boy?' asked Mamima, rolling down the window."
'A girl ' said the boy."
Mamima rolled up her window before the mosquitoes came in. The two boys vanished behind them. When they reached the house, they found that the old man was waiting on the verandah with a lantern in his hand. Moths were shuddering round and round the lantern, though the old man was oblivious to them. He had come out because he had heard the throbbing of the engine in the distance. The night had been silent except for the questioning cry of an owl and the continual orchestral sound of crickets in the bushes. The throbbing of the engine had, therefore, travelled through the silence to the old man's listening ear. and to his wife's ear. even when the car was relatively far away and beyond their range of vision. They had pondered over the sound, and finally, he had lit the lantern and shuffled out. 'I told her,' he said, referring to his wife. 'I told her that I heard the car, I knew it was the car, I told her you were coming.'
Once they were inside, Mamima gave the pot of yoghurt and the pot of sweetmeats to the old lady. 'There was no need,' she said. 'Oh really,' she said. 'This is too much,' she insisted, with the air of one who has just received the Kohinoor diamond as a birthday present. 'Come, come, come,' said Chhotomama, with the air of someone who has just given the Kohinoor diamond as a birthday present, and refuses to be overawed by his own generosity. 'It's nothing.' It was nothing, of course, only Ganguram's sweets and yoghurts, but they fussed and fussed and created the illusion that it was something, something unique and untasted and unencountered.
The son and the daughter-in-law emerged shyly from the anteroom. They both stooped gently to touch Chhotomama's feet, and Sandeep's aunt's and his mother's feet, a traditional greeting and a mark of obeisance towards one’s elders.
'Oh no no no,' said Chhotomama, struggling to keep the son's hand away from his feet. 'There's no need for all this.' This was half a token gesture towards modesty, and half towards the new, 'modern' India-Nehru's secular India, free of ritual and religion.
'I have not met you for two years, Dada,' said the son, struggling to get his hands near Chhotomama's toes. 'You must not stop me.' This was half a token gesture towards modesty, and half towards the old, 'traditional' lndia Gandhi’s India of ceremony and custom.
Sandeep, meanwhile, had come to the conclusion that the grown-ups were mad, each after his or her own fashion. Simple situations were turned into complex, dramatic ones; not until then did everyone feel important and happy. Will they never grow up? thought Sandeep irately. He glanced around him. A single blue, fluorescent tube was burning on the wall. It was not a big room.
Despite its bareness, the impression it gave was of austerity rather than poverty. It made one remember that poverty meant displacement as well as lack, while austerity meant being poor in a rooted way, within a tradition and culture of sparseness, which transformed even the lack, the paucity, into a kind of being.
PASSAGE 2
Knowing your own reputation can be surprisingly difficult. Consider, for instance, a study that analyzed a set of published experiments all sharing the same basic design.4 In these experiments, people working in a group would be asked to predict how the other group members would rate them on a series of different traits. Researchers then compared these predicted ratings to the other group members’ actual ratings on the very same traits. The traits varied from one experiment to another and included qualities like intelligence, sense of humor, consideration, defensiveness, friendliness, and leadership ability. The groups varied in familiarity, with the members of some groups being fairly unfamiliar with one another (such as having met only once, in a job interview) and the members of other groups being very familiar with one another (such as having lived together for an extended time as roommates). If people knew exactly what others were thinking, then there would be a perfect correspondence between predicted and actual ratings. If people were clueless, then there would be no correspondence between the two. Statistically speaking, you measure relationships like these with a correlation, where perfect correspondence yields a correlation of 1 and no correspondence yields a correlation of 0. The closer the correlation is to 1, the stronger the relationship.
First, the good news. These experiments suggested that people are pretty good, overall, at guessing how a group of others would evaluate them, on average. The overall correlation in these experiments between predicted impressions and the average actual impression of the group was quite high (.55, if you are quantitatively inclined). To put that in perspective, this is roughly the same magnitude as the correlation between the heights of fathers and the heights of sons (around .5). It is not perfect insight, but it is also very far from being clueless. In other words, you probably have a decent sense of what others generally think of you, on average.
Now the bad news. These experiments also assessed how well people could predict the impression of any single individual within a given group. You may know, for instance, that your coworkers in general think you are rather smart, but those coworkers also vary in their impression of you. Some think you are as sharp as a knife. Others think you are as sharp as a spoon. Do you know the difference?
Evidently, no. The accuracy rate across these experiments was barely better than random guessing (an overall correlation of .13 between predicted and actual evaluations, only slightly higher than no relationship whatsoever). Although you might have some sense of how smart your coworkers think you are, you appear to have no clue about which coworkers in particular find you smart and which do not. As one author of the study writes, “People seem to have just a tiny glimmer of insight into how they are uniquely viewed by particular other people.”5
But perhaps this is holding your mind-reading abilities to too high a standard? It’s hard, after all, to define traits like intelligence and trustworthiness precisely, so it might not be so surprising that we have difficulty guessing how others will evaluate us on these ambiguous traits. What about predicting something simpler, such as how much other people like you? Surely you are better at this. You learn over time to hang around people who smile at you and avoid those who spit at you. You must have a much better sense of who likes you and who hates you within a group. Yes?
I’m afraid not. These studies found that people are only slightly better than chance at guessing who in a group likes them and who does not (the average correlation here was a meager .18). Some of your coworkers like you and others do not, but I wouldn’t count on you knowing the difference. The same barely-better-than-guessing accuracy is also found in experiments investigating how well speed daters can assess who wants to date them and who does not, how well job candidates can judge which interviewers were impressed by them and which were not, and even how well teachers can predict their course evaluations. Granted, it’s rare that you are completely clueless about how you are evaluated. Accuracy tends to be better than chance in these experiments, but not necessarily by very much.
PASSAGE 3
【Ceres sits in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter - yet its composition suggests it formed in the icy realm of Pluto.】（此段原文有，考试时疑无）
DOES Pluto have a wayward cousin lurking in the inner solar system? The dwarf planet Ceres - and other icy chunks - may have been born in the same realm as Pluto, but travelled all the way to the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. If so, it would be further evidence that a massive upheaval rearranged the early solar system.
At 950 kilometres in diameter, Ceres is by far the largest object in the asteroid belt. And that's not the only reason it doesn't quite fit in with many of its companions, according to William McKinnon of Washington University in St Louis, who presented his idea at the Asteroids, Comets, Meteors (ACM) meeting this week in Baltimore, Maryland.
McKinnon points out that Ceres has a low density, which suggests it is 25 to 30 per cent water ice. That's a high proportion for an asteroid, but closely matches Pluto and other icy objects native to the outer solar system, known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). What's more, a dip in Ceres's light spectrum may be a sign of ammonium-rich clay at the surface. This material has never been found in the fragments of asteroids that have fallen to Earth, but fits the expected ammonia-rich composition of a TNO.
So if Ceres formed in Pluto's neighbourhood, how did it end up 2 to 4 billion kilometres away? Some researchers think that the orbits of the planets were once unstable. According to this idea - known as the Nice model- Uranus and Neptune went rampaging through the outer solar system around 3.9 billion years ago (New Scientist, 28 November 2006, p 40). As a result, many of the icy objects that formed in the outer solar system were pulled inward by the gravity of the two planets, and some ended up joining the rocky asteroids that were born in the asteroid belt. Ceres would simply be the largest of these immigrants. "The odds for this seem low, but it is not inconceivable," says Bill Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.
Bottke and Hal Levison of SwRI led a pair of studies also presented at the ACM meeting, which support the idea of refugees from the outer solar system orbiting in the asteroid belt. They focused on the so-called D and P-type asteroids that comprise 20 per cent of the population in the outer part of the belt. These objects are a dark reddish colour that suggests they are covered in carbon-rich gunk - just the sort of residue that might have been left behind on an icy object that had its outermost layers vaporised in the bright sunlight of the inner solar system. Bottke and Levison's computer simulations show that the observed number of objects is about right if they are immigrants, though they have assumed many of them broke up after transport.
Thomas McCord of the Bear Fight Center in Winthrop, Washington, who was not involved in any of the three studies, agrees that the asteroid belt probably hosts some small refugees from the outer solar system, but says there is no reason to believe Ceres is a stranger there. Its ice-to-rock ratio matches the expected composition of the raw materials that would have been available at its current position early on, he says. What's more, objects of its size are expected to have formed in the inner solar system. New measurements of Ceres's composition by NASA's Dawn mission, for which McCord is a team member, could help pin down its birthplace when the mission arrives in 2015.
PASSAGE 4
第一篇:
If a wrong step be now made, the republic may be lost forever. If this new government will not come up to the expectation of the people, and they shall be disappointed, their liberty will be lost, and tyranny must and will arise. I repeat it again, and I beg gentlemen to consider, that a wrong step, made now, will plunge us into misery, and our republic will be lost. It will be necessary for this Convention to have a faithful historical detail of the facts that preceded the session of the federal Convention, and the reasons that actuated its members in proposing an entire alteration of government, and to demonstrate the dangers that awaited us.
If they were of such awful magnitude as to warrant a proposal so extremely perilous as this, I must assert, that this Convention has an absolute right to a thorough discovery of every circumstance relative to this great event. And here I would make this inquiry of those worthy characters who composed a part of the late federal Convention. I am sure they were fully impressed with the necessity of forming a great consolidated government, instead of a confederation. That this is a consolidated government is demonstrably clear; and the danger of such a government is, to my mind, very striking. I have the highest veneration for those gentlemen; but, sir, give me leave to demand, What right had they to say, We, the people? My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask, Who authorized them to speak the language of, We, the people, instead of, We, the states? States are the characteristics and the soul of a confederation. If the states be not the agents of this compact, it must be one great, consolidated, national government, of the people of all the states.
I have the highest respect for those gentlemen who formed the Convention, and, were some of them not here, I would express some testimonial of esteem for them. America had, on a former occasion, put the utmost confidence in them — a confidence which was well placed; and I am sure, sir, I would give up any thing to them; I would cheerfully confide in them as my representatives. But, sir, on this great occasion, I would demand the cause of their conduct. Even from that illustrious man who saved us by his valor, I would have a reason for his conduct: that liberty which he has given us by his valor, tells me to ask this reason; and sure I am, were he here, he would give us that reason. But there are other gentlemen here, who can give us this information. The people gave them no power to use their name. That they exceeded their power is perfectly clear. It is not mere curiosity that actuates me: I wish to hear the real, actual, existing danger, which should lead us to take those steps, so dangerous in my conception. Disorders have arisen in other parts of America; but here, sir, no dangers, no insurrection or tumult have happened; every thing has been calm and tranquil. But, notwithstanding this, we are wandering on the great ocean of human affairs. I see no landmark to guide us. We are running we know not whither. Difference of opinion has gone to a degree of inflammatory resentment in different parts of the country, which has been occasioned by this perilous innovation.
The federal Convention ought to have amended the old system; for this purpose they were solely delegated; the object of their mission extended to no other consideration. You must, therefore, forgive the solicitation of one unworthy member to know what danger could have arisen under the present Confederation, and what are the causes of this proposal to change our government.
第二篇
Mr. Chairman, my worthy friend (Mr. Henry) has expressed great uneasiness in his mind, and informed us that a great many of our citizens are also extremely uneasy, at the proposal of changing our government...
But an objection is made to the form: the expression, We, the people, is thought improper. Permit me to ask the gentleman who made this objection, who but the people can delegate powers? Who but the people have a right to form government? The expression is a common one, and a favorite one with me. The representatives of the people, by their authority, is a mode wholly inessential. If the objection be, that the Union ought to be not of the people, but of the state governments, then I think the choice of the former very happy and proper. What have the state governments to do with it? Were they to determine, the people would not, in that case, be the judges upon what terms it was adopted.
But the power of the Convention is doubted. What is the power? To propose, not to determine. This power of proposing was very broad; it extended to remove all defects in government: the members of that Convention, who were to consider all the defects in our general government, were not confined to any particular plan. Were they deceived? This is the proper question here. Suppose the paper on your table dropped from one of the planets; the people found it, and sent us here to consider whether it was proper for their adoption; must we not obey them? Then the question must be between this government and the Confederation. The latter is no government at all. It has been said that it has carried us, through a dangerous war, to a happy issue. Not that Confederation, but common danger, and the spirit of America, were bonds of our union: union and unanimity, and not that insignificant paper, carried us through that dangerous war. “United, we stand divided, we fall!” echoed and re-echoed through Americafrom Congress to the drunken carpenterwas effectual, and procured the end of our wishes, though now forgotten by gentlemen, if such there be, who incline to let go this stronghold, to catch at feathers; for such all substituted projects may prove.
PASSAGE 5
Lignin, the tough stuff so vital to the migration of plants from water to land, gets around
（此句原文有，考试时疑无）
A new discovery in a red alga is challenging some conventional wisdom about plant evolution.
As ancestors of land plants abandoned their aquatic nurseries for life on shore, they needed the means to seal in water and hold themselves up to thrive. Lignin, a strengthening and stiffening polymer common in woody plant cells, contributes to both extremely well.
Lignin production for those tasks was considered a key adaptive achievement of vascular plants, which descend from green algae. Now a University of British Columbia botanist and some highly specialized chemists have strong evidence for lignin in a red alga called Calliarthron cheilosporioides.
The finding suggests that a biological building block fundamental to the success of land plants has roots that stretch back far deeper—and maybe wider—through evolutionary time than was known. “This pathway is involved in the production of other secondary metabolites like pigments in plants. A lot of that is likely to be conserved pretty far back in the evolutionary history of algae,” says Patrick T. Martone, the botanist who led the study, published in January in Current Biology.
Martone, now an assistant professor, didn’t set out to locate lignin in algae while a graduate and postdoctoral student at Stanford University. The biomechanist simply wanted to better understand the toughness of C. cheilosporioides, which dwells in the harsh habitat of intertidal zones along rocky shores.
During high tides, waves pummel the alga with water velocities exceeding 20 meters per second and with forces that exceed those generated by hurricane winds. The calcified, or rigid-bodied, seaweed has multiple noncalcified joints that make it flexible yet strong enough to handle that setting.
When collaborator Jose Estevez at the Carnegie Institution for Science examined the joints for Martone with a transmission electron microscope, he saw secondary cell walls, features commonly found in land plants. That prompted Martone and Estevez to seek out experts in lignin, a molecule of great research interest right now because its toughness impedes the use of some plants as sources of biofuel and animal feed.
John Ralph and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center detected lignin in C. cheilosporioides. They found the same telltale components derived from radical coupling reactions of hydroxycinnamyl alcohols used to describe lignins in terrestrial plants.
At the Centre de Recherches sur les Macromolécules Végétales in France, Katia Ruel applied antibodies designed to locate lignin within land plants to samples of C. cheilosporioides. Her tests detected lignin in the seaweed too.
The amounts are much smaller than what is found in land plants. But lignin is most abundant in the parts of the seaweed that are most mechanically stressed, which suggests to Martone that there could be some environmental stimulation that increases production of the polymer in the organism. The puzzling thing is that it’s also present in calcified portions of the algae. “We don’t know what it’s doing there,” Martone says.
Martone’s working hypothesis is that the molecular pathways producing lignin emerged long before land plants evolved from green algae, back to some ancestor shared with red algae more than a billion years ago. Molecular evidence and comparisons of the biological gear the algae use to harvest light convince him that both red and green algae descend from one endosymbiotic event, when a eukaryote cell engulfed a photosynthesizing cyanobacterium and gained the ability to make its own food.
Karl J. Niklas, a Cornell University botanist and former editor of the American Journal of Botany, considers Martone’s evidence for lignin in C. cheilosporioides exceptionally strong. But he thinks that red and green algae evolved from separate endosymbiotic events. Still, the progenitors of the two algae may both have carried genes similar to those participating in the lignin production pathways seen today, he says. But they could have used them for different purposes, possibly to produce indigestible substances that protected against microbial attacks.
“This is a stunning example of convergent evolution,” Niklas says, comparable to birds, insects and bats developing winged flight independently.
Intrigued by all the mystery, Martone has stepped up his lignin studies.
He has sent a batch of different varieties of seaweeds, including kelps, to Ralph’s laboratory to see whether lignins reside there too. Martone’s lab is looking for genes in C. cheilosporioides that are homologous to genes linked to lignin production in land plants.
“People thought they knew what was going on,” says Martone. “But all that is changing.”—Catherine Clabby
说明：以上为江博教育SAT教研组整合的2017.5阅读五篇原文完整版。COLLEGEBOARD一般会对原文做部分删减，请同学们加入对答案群，踊跃回忆，谢谢。
附录：网传部分单词题目，请同学们补充。
这次考到的单词题有：
1.“air”2.“magnitude” 3.“raw” 4.“issue” 5.“handle”6.“strong”7.“simply”8.“merely”.
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