2017年5月SAT亞太場考試重難點點評，附作文原文

5月SAT考試於今天落下帷幕，這次考試整體感覺閱讀偏難，語法超簡單，甚至說閉著眼睛全對都不過分，數學正常。下面以點評考試為主，並附上考題的簡要信息幫助大家了解此次考題狀況。

閱 讀

第一篇小說

A Strange And Sublime Address

第二篇社科

Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want

第三篇科學

Is dwarf planet ceres the wayward cousin of pluto

第四篇歷史雙篇

Speech Before Virginia Ratifying Convention

Speech at the Virginia Ratifying Convention

第五篇科學

A Tangled Tale of Plant Evolution

這次閱讀部分整體偏難。

小說：超級簡單，難度相當於或不超過1701北美第一篇。但這沒什麼好高興的，因為後面的科學和歷史都比較難。

科學/社科：三篇文章各有各的難點。比如第二篇社科文章還算容易理解，但附的柱狀圖很有迷惑性，圖表後面有三段註釋文字，對應圖中三組黑色灰色柱，且互相之間差異很微妙。整張圖的感覺類似於1611亞太第五篇Principles of animal behavior（老鼠的排外心理）的配圖。

這張圖當時有好多同學把灰色和黑色柱直接對應到橫軸，比如把第一組灰黑柱分別對應female和male，然後悲劇。今天的圖更邪惡......

第三篇需要注意的是有兩次反轉，前面一大半都是科學家提出理論和證據支持Ceres最初屬於Pluto，後面出現其他科學家反駁，最後又有人提出解決爭議的途徑，三塊內容需要分清。文章後面有一張大表格，列出太陽系多顆行星的四個數據，如距離太陽距離，密度，半徑等等，還算正常。

最後一篇A Tangled Tale of Plant Evolution科研邏輯比較難抓，加上時間壓力，有部分同學甚至整篇來不及做。

這次科學/社科三篇再次證明了一點，就是讀科學/社科類文章，如果抓不住核心的科研邏輯，那麼解題基本上是崩潰的，題目也最多是最多一些問局部的細節題。

第四篇歷史考察的是弗吉尼亞州的邦聯聯邦之爭（或者叫Confederation和Constitution之爭），沒有相關歷史背景會比較吃虧，好在可汗學院歷史類有多篇相關題材的文章，如P23/26/27（沃邦內部編號）。

語 法

之前說過，這次語法超級簡單，閉著眼睛滿分不是一個誇張的說法，比如去年5月亞太語法，簡直在難度上降了一個數量級。不過這似乎也從側面印證了前面閱讀的難度之高，個人猜測，官方可能是想用語法對沖一下。

寫 作

這次寫作題選自How To Increase the Number of Women Winning Nobel Prizes，作者Meredith Wadman，主論點是女性科研人員應該獲得更多的職場便利。全文如下：

The mother of tweens was folding laundry at 5 a.m. before going to an early spinning class when the phone rang. It was October 2009 and Carol Greider, a biologist at Johns Hopkins University, picked up and heard a voice from Stockholm. She had won that year』s Nobel Prize in medicine.

Despite Greider』s accomplishment – she earned the award for discovering telomerase, an enzyme of huge relevance to aging and cancer – it is this image of her making use of every waking minute that has stuck with me four years later. It is an image that I deeply identify with, not because I』m a scientist, but because I』m a woman juggling family and career. The mental picture helped me understand Greider as a flesh-and-blood mortal, not a superwoman whose lofty level of achievement I could never aspire to.

Unfortunately, Greider remains a rarity in the pantheon of Nobel scientists. And that』s partly because we haven』t done enough to help young female scientists balance the demands of academic research with the pull of family responsibility. That needs to change.

Admittedly, today』s situation is better than it was when Greider entered grad school in the early 80s, never mind in the dark days of the preceding decades. Then, when women were scarcely to be found at undergraduate lab benches, the results in the rarefied reaches of Stockholm couldn』t help but be dismal. Since the awards were launched in 1901, two physics laureates have been women: Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963. In chemistry, four of the 165 winners have been women. (Marie Curie was one of them, in 1911; she is the only woman to have won two Nobels.) Women have won 5 percent of the coveted awards in physiology or medicine. And it was 2009 before Elinor Ostrom, of Indiana University and Arizona State University, became the first-ever female laureate in economics.

In fact, 2009 was something of a banner year for women — Greider shared her award with her mentor, Elizabeth Blackburn, of the University of California at San Francisco; and Israel』s Ada Yonath shared the prize in chemistry. Since then, men have continued to sweep the science awards.

To be a female Nobel winner has not only required brilliance, but also preternatural determination in the face of cultural, social and political obstacles. The Italian neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini secretly conducted experiments in her bedroom in Mussolini』s Italy. Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, the Parisian who co-discovered the AIDS virus – and whose father thought a women』s place was in the home – was in the lab on her wedding day. Her fiancé had to call her to remind her to turn up at the ceremony. Barbara McClintock, the U.S. geneticist who won the prize in 1983, was nearly prevented from attending college by her mother. She was afraid higher education would make her daughter unmarriageable.

All of this was decades ago, before recent campaigns to encourage more young women to choose STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers; and, in the US, before the Civil Rights Act, affirmative action and Title IX. What』s the excuse in 2013?

One partial explanation for the bleak numbers: the awards often honor discoveries made decades earlier. Even today, that means spotlighting accomplishments from a time when female scientists were a rarity. Take the 2013 prize in physiology or medicine, which was awarded earlier this month to James Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas Südhof for their work teasing out the micro-mechanisms that allow cells to transport their molecular cargo to specific destinations. Their key papers in this area were published between 1979 and 1993.

Still, while it may be tempting to conclude that just a little more patience is required before a raft of lady laureates take Stockholm by storm, it』s important to note that promising numbers in biology where by 2010 U.S. women were collecting 53 percent of PhD』s don』t translate to other disciplines: that same year, women earned 39 percent of chemistry PhD』s, 34 percent of economics doctorates and 20 percent of PhD』s in physics.

What』s more, systemic issues are holding women back across the sciences, meaning that we may not see more female laureates by simply funneling more and more women through PhD programs. The hard truth is that women with brand new doctorates – so called post-doc』s — enter their prime childbearing years exactly as they encounter the make-or-break time when they must compete for tenure- track positions. The competition is brutal, the hours in the lab never-ending – and the attrition of women is far higher than that of men. A 2009 survey of post-doctoral scientists from all disciplines in the University of California system found that women who had children after they earned PhDs were twice as likely as male postdocs – or as women doctorates with no children and no plans to have them – to drop their goal of becoming a research professor.

What, specifically, should institutions do to offer such support? Universities can make meaningful policy changes, such as allowing women with young children to stop the tenure clock for a period of time — an option available at some but not all academic centers. They should ensure that young female scientists have dedicated, top-notch mentors. And they can guarantee paid maternity land parental leave—something that』s woefully lacking for junior scientists at most U.S. institutions.

Federal agencies also have a role to play. Big funders, led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have already implemented policies like no-cost grant extensions that allow scientists with family obligations extra time to complete a project, and others that allow fellowship periods to be extended or deferred for childcare purposes. But agencies can, and should, do more. One task the government is especially suited to is longitudinal data collection on those family-friendly policies. Such data isn』t being collected systematically, and without it we can』t know what policy changes are working, and which ones aren』t.

If we want top-drawer women to stay in science careers — and this country, beset by daunting, and growing, global science competition, could certainly use them – institutions of all stripes need to show a far more serious commitment to supporting them.

To put it another way, if we want to see more women celebrating in Stockholm, we should strive to build a world in which the likes of Carol Greider are hardly ever to be found folding the laundry at 5 in the morning.

朱敏琦老師

沃邦教育SAT教研組組長，十一年教齡，新SAT1510，老SAT2300，ACT寫作33分；翻譯碩士，譯協會員，100萬筆譯經驗，30萬字申請文書經驗，譯著《在大英博物館讀古希臘》。

原文地址：http://www.onebest.cn/show-86-4270-1.html