导读：由于新sat考试取消了2018年1月场的考试，明年考试在3、5、6、10、12月，明年的申请者如果要准备AP和SAT2考试的话，一定要合理规划好时间，否则考试都赶一起很难考出理想成绩的。 再回来说今天的考试，从考生出来的反馈看，普遍觉得试题简单，每一科都没有遇到特别难度的考点，但尽管如此，试题
由于新sat考试取消了2018年1月场的考试，明年考试在3、5、6、10、12月，明年的申请者如果要准备AP和SAT2考试的话，一定要合理规划好时间，否则考试都赶一起很难考出理想成绩的。
再回来说今天的考试，从考生出来的反馈看，普遍觉得试题简单，每一科都没有遇到特别难度的考点，但尽管如此，试题简单更考验考生的细心程度，平时模考不高，但细心的同学这次可能会有意外的惊喜。
一起来回顾下今天的考题吧。内容有点长，请耐心看完！
阅读部分
第一篇Maya’s notebook Isabel Allende
选自一本比较新的小说(2013年出版)， Maya‘s notebook by Isabel Allende.从孙女的视角叙述祖父母(Popo & Nini)如何相遇相识。祖父是非洲长大的天文学家，自小生活在非洲。巨石(megaliths)上的图案激起了研究天文的兴趣，特别是执迷于寻找invisible plant。祖父来多伦多讲学的时候，祖母刚好被安排为他的司机。
祖母在智利长大，南美国家，很适合观察星象，祖母对astrology很有兴趣。祖父也曾经去智利研究天文，而且恰好他去的那天可能跟祖母离开智利是同一天。作者猜测他们当时可能碰到，但祖父母否认，祖父说他会认得出这么美丽的女生，祖母说几十年前的智利机场，一个黑人应该很明显。
祖父虽然科学知识丰富，但却是个生活白痴。两个渐渐互相吸引，最后祖母觉得atronomy和astrology好像是天注定要相遇。
题目：
第一题，考两处出现的elusive的作用，一个是祖父研究的planet和祖母找寻的爱人。
答案：体现两者相通。
第二题：问poetic calculation和leaps of imagination起到的作用，说明祖父研究行星的方法特点。
第三题，细节题，问fellow scientists对祖父的看法。
respected & with many accomplishment。
第四题，祖父对magaliths的看法。
答案：能帮助纪年。
第五题：细节题，考察祖父母可能在智利机场相遇有什么特点。
答案：不符合一个现实情况(应该能认出来)。
第六题：针对第五题证据题。
第七题：祖父有什么特点，选缺少生活能力。
第八题：针对第七证据题。
第九题：问祖母性格特点：更有决断力。
第二篇阅读：the stones of Venice
文章摘自https://paesaggisensibili.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/ruskin_-the-stone-of-venice.pdf 第六章
History Study。选自John Ruskin的文章The Stone of Venice 写于1853年，作者成长与工业革命飞速发展的年代，目睹了大量的英国人走进工厂。
文章立意为人性的重要意义，作者开篇即言明:You can either make a tool of creature or a man of him. You can't make them both. 的观点，批判工业化把人变得像机器一样，坚持认为制造业生产并非工业革命真正意义所在，如果单纯为了生产出零件而忽视了其中的人类精神和智慧的美丽，也便失去了对人性的尊重，所谓unhumanize them。 因此好的工业制造品无论在色泽工艺用料都应该是对人性的完美体现。
后面提了从三个角度做产品：
1、如果没有必要就不要做这个东西;
2、如果还没比较完善就不要结束;
3、如果不是为了保存就不要去复制。
最后举例玻璃柱的故事，生产玻璃柱根本没有用，男人去生产就像机器一样，女人去买就是承认奴役制，雇佣工人去做生产玻璃这件没有意义的事。但是提到水杯等漂亮的物品除外，因为这些是有工艺欣赏价值的。最后表达的是不要生产没有价值，没有意义的东西还把人搞的像机器一样。
题目：
11、主旨题 问作者对于industrial labour的看法。
12、目的题 问第一段中比较的作用。
13、细节题 问factory work 太过怎样。
14、推断题 问作者对于mass production的看法。
15、循证题 结合前一题。
16、细节提 问作者对于our manufacture cities的看法。
17、词汇题 问broad的意思。
18、词汇题 问end的意思。
19、推断题 问作者认为consumer应该追捧什么样的beautiful things。
20、循证题 结合前一题。
第三篇阅读：moths remember what they learn as caterpillars
文章原文：
The transformation from caterpillar to butterfly or moth is one of the most beguiling in the animal world. Both larva and adult are just stages in the life of a single animal, but are nonetheless completely separated in appearance, habitat and behavior. The imagery associated with such change is inescapably beautiful, and as entrancing to a poet as it is to a biologist.
According to popular belief, within the pupa, the caterpillar’s body is completely overhauled, broken down into a form of soup and rebuilt into a winged adult. Richard Buckmister Fuller once said that “there is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” Indeed, as the butterfly or moth quite literally flies off into a new world, it is tempting to think that there is no connection between its new life and its old existence as an eating machine.
But not so. A new study has provided strong evidence that the larval and adult stages are not as disparate as they might seem. Adult tobacco hookworms – a species of moth – can remember things that it learned as a caterpillar, which means that despite the dramatic nature of metamorphosis, some elements of the young insect’s nervous system remain intact through the process.
Using some mild electric shocks, Douglas Blackiston from Georgetown University trained hookworm caterpillars (Manduca sexta) to avoid the scent of a simple organic chemical – ethyl acetate. The larvae were then placed in the bottom end of a Y-shaped tube, with the scent of ethyl acetate wafting down one arm and fresh air coming down the other. Sure enough, 78% of the trained caterpillars inched down the odour-free arm.
As the caterpillar moulted their way through the larval stage, their aversion to ethyl acetate remained. Blackiston allowed them to pupate and emerge as full-grown moths, before testing them again, about a month after their initial ‘electric’ education. Bear in mind that a tobacco hornworm lives for about 30 to 50 days, so a month is very close to its entire lifespan.
Amazingly, 77% of the adult moths also avoided the ethyl acetate-scented arm of the Y-shaped tube and the vast majority of these were the adult versions of the same larvae that had correctly learned the behaviour originally. Clearly, the larvae had learned to avoid the chemical and that memory carried over into adulthood.
Even so, Blackiston was careful to rule out alternative explanations. For a start, ethyl acetate isn’t naturally foul-smelling. It’s actually rather reminiscent of pear drops and when larvae are exposed to it in the absence of electric shocks, neither they nor the adults they become learn to avoid it.
Another possible explanation hinges on the fact that adults emerging from the pupa usually experience a similar milieu of smells to their caterpillar selves. This chemical legacy’ could explain why adults and larvae react similarly to some odours. But when Blackiston applied ethyl acetate gel to the pupae of untrained caterpillars, the adults did not shrink away from the chemical. Nor did washing the pupae of trained caterpillars, to get rid of any lingering traces of ethyl acetate, have any effect.
Blackiston was convinced that some aspect of the caterpillar’ nervous system was carried over into adulthood. However, he also found that this only happened if caterpillars are trained at the last possible stage before they pupate – the ‘fifth instar’. Any earlier, and the memories don’t stick.
The fruitfly Drosophila suggests why this might happen. In its brain, memories of smells are located in mushroom bodies, brain structures that consist of three lobes. The gamma lobe develops very early while the alpha and beta lobes develop just before the pupal stage.
Blackiston thinks that long-lasting larval memories are writ into the alpha and beta lobes, whose neural networks are kept around while the rest of the caterpillar breaks down. If the larvae are too young, these areas haven’t developed yet and any learned information is stored in the gamma lobe and lost when its connections are trimmed back in the pupa.
But why bother? After all, the entire advantage of metamorphosis rests on the very different lifestyles and habitats of caterpillars and moths, which allow them to avoid competing with each other. Nonetheless, moths and butterflies must still return to the right sort of plant in order to lay their eggs and Blackiston suggests that their larva-hood memories may help them to do so.
文章概述：
文章是要介绍了毛毛虫(caterpillar)变成butterfly或者moth后，原有的记忆可以被保存下来。之后学者做了实验，训练caterpillar能够躲开特定的化学气味(ethyl acetate)，当caterpillars从幼虫阶段(larval stage)变形后，他们对于气味的厌恶被保留下来了。这种厌恶，一直被带到了他们的成年阶段。
之后，研究者开始做了一些实验，排除一些其他的可能性。他们发现，当没有“ electric shocks”，这些caterpillars不会厌恶那些化学元素( neither they nor the adults they become learn to avoid it)。他们也发现，尽管一些成年和幼虫( adults and larvae)都会对一些气味有厌恶，但是没有被训练过的caterpillars不会有厌恶。
之后，研究人员们也发现， larvae 如果太年轻，是无法保留这种厌恶的。“If the larvae are too young, these areas haven’t developed yet and any learned information is stored in the gamma lobe and lost when its connections are trimmed back in the pupa.”
最后一段，作者阐述了这种保留幼虫阶段记忆能力的作用。比如可以帮助他们避免同类的竞争，也可以帮助他们找到正确的地方去“lay eggs”。
题目：
第一题：问这篇本来主要用了什么证据支持;
第二题：词汇，问“form of soup”中“form”的意思;
第三题第四题：询证题，问作者选择特定hornworm caterpillars，是因为这些caterpillars有什么样的特征和优势;
第五题第六题：询证题，问香气(ethyl acetate)有什么样的特点;选 wild 的moth没有记忆不能avoid的选项;
第七题：词汇题，问“aspect” 的意思，选 “part”的那个;
第八题：问最后一段的作用，选能表示这种记忆的capabilities。
最后两道是图表题，结合选文选择即可。
第四篇 社会科学类
文章原文：
COLUMBUS, Ohio—When it comes to buying things, our brains can’t see the big, black-and-white forest for all the tiny, colorful trees.
That’s the conclusion of a study at The Ohio State University, which found that people who were shown product images in color were more likely to focus on small product details—even superfluous ones—instead of practical concerns such as cost and functionality.
The findings, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, mesh well with notions of how vision evolved in the brain, and suggest that viewing objects in black and white helps our brains focus on what’s most important.
“Color images help us notice details,” said Xiaoyan Deng, an author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at Ohio State. “But black-and-white images let us see the ‘big picture’ without getting bogged down by those details.”
The findings also suggest how marketers can strategically use color—or its absence—to change how we feel about a product.
“Marketers may take it for granted that color is always the best presentation format for advertising,” Deng added. “This study shows that while color is desirable in most situations, it’s not desirable in all situations.”
If a product has broad features that set it apart from the competition, then black-and-white images will help customers cast aside minor details and focus on those key features, the researchers found. If a product’s details are what set it apart, color images will make those details stand out.
In one part of the study, 94 college students were asked to imagine that they were traveling to a remote campsite where they could receive only one radio station. There, the campsite manager offered two radios for rent: a basic analog radio for $10 a day, or a fancy digital radio with many station preset buttons for $18 a day. Not only was the digital radio more expensive, but its preset buttons would be useless at the campsite.
Students who saw pictures of the radios in black and white tended to make the practical choice—the analog radio. Only 25 percent chose the digital radio.
But among students who saw the radios in color, twice as many chose the digital radio. In that scenario, 50 percent of students were willing to pay a higher price for a radio with features that they could not use.
“Color drew their focus away from the most important features to the less important features, and their choice shifted to the more expensive radio,” Deng said. “I think that’s surprising—that just by manipulating whether the product presentation is in color or black and white, we can affect people’s choice.”
Color also proved to be a distraction when study participants were asked to sort objects into groups. The researchers recruited people through Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service that provides online study participants.
The 287 participants were shown pictures of shoes and asked to sort them. Each grouping contained two types of shoes that differed greatly in form and function, such as open-toe high heels and rain boots. In that particular example, half of the high heels and the boots were a solid red color, and the other half were red with white polka dots.
When people viewed the shoes in black and white, they sorted the high heels into one group and the rain boots into another 97 percent of the time. But when they saw the shoes in color, that number dropped to 89 percent, with 11 percent sorting the solid-color high heels and boots into one group and the polka-dot heels and boots into another.
The polka dots were clearly visible in black and white, but they had more impact on participants’ decision-making when they were seen in color.
Study co-author Kentaro Fujita, associate professor of psychology at Ohio State, has an idea why. It has to do with the origin of our visual systems, and how our brains process night vision.
Of the light-sensitive rod and cone structures in the retina, it’s the cones that detect color and the rods that give us night vision, peripheral vision and motion detection. Rods outnumber cones in the eye 20 to 1, and at night, when the cones don’t receive enough light to let us distinguish colors properly, we rely on the rods to see what’s happening around us—in black and white.
This would have been especially true for early humans, who didn’t have sources of artificial light. At night, being able to tell the difference between objects by shape would have been key to survival.
“Our visual systems evolved to work in both optimal and suboptimal conditions,” Fujita explained. “Optimal conditions might be during the day, when I want to distinguish a red apple from a not-so-red apple. The form of the object tells me it’s an apple, but I can focus on the color because that’s what’s important to me. Suboptimal conditions might be at night, when I have to tell whether that object that’s moving toward me is my friend or a hungry lion. Then the form of the object is critical.”
He suspects that when our eyes see black-and-white images, our brains interpret them in ways similar to night vision: We focus on form and function, and tend to ignore details.
Deng pointed out another circumstance in which people “see” in black and white: when we imagine the distant future. Other studies have shown that people who are asked to think of an event from the near or distant future and then presented with a series of photographs tend to pick less colorful photos as most closely matching their vision.
“It’s almost like seeing in black and white is a vehicle for time travel,” she said. “When you need to visualize ambiguous, uncertain future events, you want to get away from all those details, to construct that future event in your mind in a meaningful way. Seeing in black and white allows you to construct that event.”
Marketers can take advantage of our ability to time travel, too. Deng said that black-and-white images would probably work well in ads for products that will be used in the distant future, such as retirement plans, investments or insurance.
Co-authors on the paper included marketing doctoral student Hyojin Lee, who performed this research for her dissertation, and H. Rao Unnava, senior associate dean and W. Arthur Cullman Professor of Marketing in Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business.
文章概述：
1、生活例子，再颜色纷繁的世界，人民大脑不能记住黑白颜色;
2、New study 表明 黑白颜色是important feature，彩色是details;
3-5、Deng的实验结论1 黑白颜色为重要特点，彩色为细节信息，结论2 在现在商场中，利用彩色增加销售，两个结论之后跟了一个让步，并非所有都是利用彩色，有一定使用范畴，如果 产品在竞争者中功能足够强大，不需要强调色彩，可使用黑白颜色，反之，利用色彩增加销售;
6-9、一次实验调查，两种radio出租，一种黑白 功能实用，另一种 彩色 功能偏多，学生首选黑白色功能实用的，看到靓丽色彩之后 实验结构反转，更多人选择彩色，实验结论-色彩改变人民的feeling;
10、最后 心理学家解释其原理-于visual system有关。在视觉系统中，rod负责侦测形状，移动;cone负责侦测色彩。Rod是cone 20倍。举例，红色苹果，白天情况下，色彩被更好侦测到。 距离，朋友和狮子，夜晚rod 更佳重要。
结论：黑白色更像night version。
题目：
第一题：主旨题，central idea;答案 关注色彩和黑白，反应不同的特点。其中错误选项添加比较关系。
第二题：细节题，问文章中两个专家 assumption of behavior;答案 找到了indicator。
第三题 询证题，上面题目双边都要提到。
第四题：问使用黑白颜色 在市场中属于何种策略?
答案 在能力上可以碾压竞争对手。
第五题：询证题，注意反向推理。
第六题：问radio实验段落的目的?描述 实验开始及过程。
第七题：词汇题 考察 manipulating ，原文语境为 是否被颜色 manipulate. Control。
第八题：词汇题 考察distinguish 搭配宾语为 color
第九题：功能题，问 a friend和a lion 作用是什么?答案 distinction in situation。
第十题：图标题，问 secondary，color 对应数值，6
第十一题：图文互联，问图标信息 支持了文章哪个观点; 答案：关注radio色彩的学生看中的 tail，关注黑白看中 important feature。
此次社科类考察的文章内容比较中规中矩。
第五篇 科学类
以下为原文，考试文章有改动;
The quotation about self-censorship appeared in a controversial 2006 article in Trends in Plant Science proposing a new field of inquiry that the authors, perhaps somewhat recklessly, elected to call “plant neurobiology.” The six authors—among them Eric D. Brenner, an American plant molecular biologist; Stefano Mancuso, an Italian plant physiologist; František Baluška, a Slovak cell biologist; and Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh, an American plant biologist—argued that the sophisticated behaviors observed in plants cannot at present be completely explained by familiar genetic and biochemical mechanisms. Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables—light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants—that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coördinate a plant’s behavioral response. The authors pointed out that electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals. They also noted that neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate have been found in plants, though their role remains unclear.
Hence the need for plant neurobiology, a new field “aimed at understanding how plants perceive their circumstances and respond to environmental input in an integrated fashion.” The article argued that plants exhibit intelligence, defined by the authors as “an intrinsic ability to process information from both abiotic and biotic stimuli that allows optimal decisions about future activities in a given environment.” Shortly before the article’s publication, the Society for Plant Neurobiology held its first meeting, in Florence, in 2005. A new scientific journal, with the less tendentious title Plant Signaling & Behavior, appeared the following year.
Depending on whom you talk to in the plant sciences today, the field of plant neurobiology represents either a radical new paradigm in our understanding of life or a slide back down into the murky scientific waters last stirred up by “The Secret Life of Plants.” Its proponents believe that we must stop regarding plants as passive objects—the mute, immobile furniture of our world—and begin to treat them as protagonists in their own dramas, highly skilled in the ways of contending in nature. They would challenge contemporary biology’s reductive focus on cells and genes and return our attention to the organism and its behavior in the environment. It is only human arrogance, and the fact that the lives of plants unfold in what amounts to a much slower dimension of time, that keep us from appreciating their intelligence and consequent success. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. By comparison, humans and all the other animals are, in the words of one plant neurobiologist, “just traces.”
Many plant scientists have pushed back hard against the nascent field, beginning with a tart, dismissive letter in response to the Brenner manifesto, signed by thirty-six prominent plant scientists (Alpi et al., in the literature) and published in Trends in Plant Science. “We begin by stating simply that there is no evidence for structures such as neurons, synapses or a brain in plants,” the authors wrote. No such claim had actually been made—the manifesto had spoken only of “homologous” structures—but the use of the word “neurobiology” in the absence of actual neurons was apparently more than many scientists could bear.
文章概述：
阅读第五篇自然科学双篇
Passage 1 is from the websites of plants signaling and behavior;
第一段：重点说明人们对于植物的认识应当更新，不应当只看到植物能进行光合作用，而是应当把植物当成有神经的生命个体;
第二段：介绍植物作为有生命的生命个体的四个特征，包括reactions to stimuli, use the cost-benefit analysis, territorial behavior;
第三段：对于植物的一些特征仍然有很多方面没有得到证明;
第四段：将植物和动物进行比较，说明植物同动物一样可以对周围的环境作出反应，但是反应很长，not as rapid as animals;
Passage 2 is adapted from Michael Pollen “the Intelligent Plant”;
Both of passages are talking about plants neurobiology.
题目：
第一题：细节题，涉及第一篇第一段内容人们对植物以往的看法及现在应当如何看待植物，应把植物当成有生命的个体;
第二题和第三题双询证题：第二题四个选项涉及到第一篇文章的第二段和第三段，植物的反应is not as rapid as animals;
第四题：细节题，涉及到第一篇文章第三段，讲的是植物的action需要漫长的时间;
第五题和第六题：双询证题，考查第二篇文章第一段针对Trends in Plant Science的批评;
第七题： 词汇题wild;
第八题：第一篇文章与第二篇文章的呼应题，现有的理论可以证明第一篇文章中描述的植物的特点;
第九题：考查两篇文章作者的相同观点，对于植物能对周围环境做出反应;
第十题和第十一题：涉及到Tai这个科学家的观点，Tai植物对于周围环境和刺激反应的原因一定会搞清楚的，与electronic and chemical方面的因素有关;
科学双篇按照文章题材看是不难的，但是出现在最后一篇，在基本没有时间的状态下去读完，比较有困难。
