第一篇：小說
1835年，選自小說“The Mysterious Portrait”，作者Nicolai Gogol，文章共4段文章主要講述一個年輕的畫家為擺脫現實生活的窮困窘境，而取悅大眾和維持高水準的藝術創作標準之間的矛盾。
第一段：簡要概括藝術家的創作風格和才華
第二段：教授對年輕藝術家的告誡，教授首先肯定藝術家的才華，但是又警告他要把心思放在賺錢和取悅大眾，追求流行上，教授已經發現了年輕藝術家有這方面的端倪，對此表示遺憾。認為別的畫家可以為賺錢流於俗套，但是Nchartkoff是有天賦的人，應該更耐心地把精力花在創作上。
第三段：Narrator陳述了藝術家的生活和心境。此人在繪畫時會廢寢忘食，而且有很高的藝術鑒賞力和才華。但是當沒錢付房租的時候，他也會羡慕那些既有錢又有名氣的畫家們。
第四段：Narrator 帶我們走進了藝術家的內心糾結，他用了一系列的反問句來表現心裡的矛盾和痛苦。他的那些嚴肅作品即使全部賣出，別人也不會給他多少錢。若不出名，那些人能瞭解他而買他的畫作嗎？教授讓自己耐心，但是耐心能讓他脫離這種貧困生活嗎？
Young Chartkov was an artist with a talent that promised much: in flashes and moments his brush bespoke power of observation, understanding, a strong impulse to get closer to nature.
"Watch out, brother," his professor had told him more than once, "you have talent; it would be a sin to ruin it. But you're impatient. Some one thing entices you, some one thing takes your fancy—and you occupy yourself with it, and the rest can rot, you don't care about it, you don't even want to look at it. Watch out you don't turn into a fashionable painter. Even now your colors are beginning to cry a bit too loudly. Your drawing is imprecise, and sometimes quite weak, the line doesn't show; you go for fashionable lighting, which strikes the eye at once. Watch out or you'll fall right into the English type. Beware. You already feel drawn to the world: every so often I see a showy scarf on your neck, a glossy hat. . . It's enticing, you can start painting fashionable pictures, little portraits for money. But that doesn't develop talent, it ruins it. Be patient. Ponder over every work, drop showiness—let the others make money. You won't come out the loser."
The professor was partly right. Sometimes, indeed, our artist liked to carouse or play the dandy—in short, to show off his youth here and there. Yet, for all that, he was able to keep himself under control. At times he was able to forget everything and take up his brush, and had to tear himself away again as if from a beautiful, interrupted dream. His taste was developing noticeably. He still did not understand all the depth of Raphael, but was already carried away by the quick, broad stroke of Guido, paused before Titian's portraits, admired the Flemish school. 6 The dark surface obscuring the old paintings had not yet been entirely removed for him; yet he already perceived something in them, though inwardly he did not agree with his professor that the old masters surpassed us beyond reach; it even seemed to him that the nineteenth century was significantly ahead of them in certain things, that the imitation of nature as it was done now had become somehow brighter, livelier, closer; in short, he thought in this case as a young man thinks who already understands something and feels it in his proud inner consciousness. At times he became vexed when he saw how some foreign painter, a Frenchman or a German, sometimes not even a painter by vocation, with nothing but an accustomed hand, a quick brush, and bright colors, would produce a general stir and instantly amass a fortune. This would come to his mind not when, all immersed in his work, he forgot drinking and eating and the whole world, but when he would finally come hard up against necessity, when he had no money to buy brushes and paints, when the importunate landlord came ten times a day to demand the rent. Then his hungry imagination enviously pictured the lot of the rich painter; then a thought glimmered that often passes through a Russian head: to drop everything and go on a spree out of grief and to spite it all. And now he was almost in such a situation.
“Yes! be patient, be patient!" he said with vexation. "But patience finally runs out. Be patient! And on what money will I have dinner tomorrow? No one will lend to me. And if I were to go and sell all my paintings and drawings, I'd get twenty kopecks for the lot. They've been useful, of course, I feel that: it was not in vain that each of them was undertaken, in each of them I learned something. But what's the use? Sketches, attempts—and there will constantly be sketches, attempts, and no end to them. And who will buy them, if they don't know my name? And who needs drawings from the antique, or from life class, or my unfinished Love of Psyche, or a perspective of my room, or the portrait of my Nikita, though it's really better than the portraits of some fashionable painter? What is it all, in fact? Why do I suffer and toil over the ABC's like a student, when I could shine no worse than the others and have money as they do?”
第二篇：社會學科
一篇相對簡單直白的社會學科科研型文章，科研型文章的要素基本都有，諸如research question / experimental design / results / evaluation等。
Remember That? No You Don’t. Study Shows False Memories Afflict Us All Even people with extraordinary memories sometimes make things up without realizing it
It’s easy enough to explain why we remember things: multiple regions of the brain — particularly the hippocampus — are devoted to the job. It’s easy to understand why we forget stuff too: there’s only so much any busy brain can handle. What’s trickier is what happens in between: when we clearly remember things that simply never happened.
The phenomenon of false memories is common to everybody — the party you’re certain you attended in high school, say, when you were actually home with the flu, but so many people have told you about it over the years that it’s made its way into your own memory cache. False memories can sometimes be a mere curiosity, but other times they have real implications. Innocent people have gone to jail when well-intentioned eye witnesses testify to events that actually unfolded an entirely different way.
What’s long been a puzzle to memory scientists is whether some people may be more susceptible to false memories than others — and, by extension, whether some people with exceptionally good memories may be immune to them. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences answers both questions with a decisive no. False memories afflict everyone — even people with the best memories of all.
(MORE: Creating False Memories in Mice’s Brains — and Yours)
To conduct the study, a team led by psychologist Lawrence Patihis of the University of California, Irvine, recruited a sample group of people all of approximately the same age and divided them into two subgroups: those with ordinary memory and those with what is known as highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). You’ve met people like that before, and they can be downright eerie. They’re the ones who can tell you the exact date on which particular events happened — whether in their own lives or in the news — as well as all manner of minute additional details surrounding the event that most people would forget the second they happened.
To screen for HSAM, the researchers had all the subjects take a quiz that asked such questions as “[On what date]did an Iraqi journalist hurl two shoes at President Bush?” or “What public event occurred on Oct. 11, 2002?” Those who excelled on that part of the screening would move to a second stage, in which they were given random, computer-generated dates and asked to say the day of the week on which it fell, and to recall both a personal experience that occurred that day and a public event that could be verified with a search engine.
“It was a Monday,” said one person asked about Oct. 19, 1987. “That was the day of the big stock-market crash and the cellist Jacqueline du Pré died that day.” That’s some pretty specific recall. Ultimately, 20 subjects qualified for the HSAM group and another 38 went into the ordinary-memory category. Both groups were then tested for their ability to resist developing false memories during a series of exercises designed to implant them.
(MORE: This is Your Brain on Fairness)
In one, for example, the investigators spoke with the subjects about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and mentioned in passing the footage that had been captured of United Flight 93crashing in Pennsylvania — footage, of course, that does not exist. In both groups — HSAM subjects and those with normal memories — about 1 in 5 people “remembered” seeing this footage when asked about it later.
“It just seemed like something was falling out of the sky,” said one of the HSAM participants. “I was just, you know, kind of stunned by watching it, you know, go down.”
Word recall was also hazy. The scientists showed participants word lists, then removed the lists and tested the subjects on words that had and hadn’t been included. The lists all contained so-called lures — words that would make subjects think of other, related ones. The words pillow, duvet and nap, for example, might lead to a false memory of seeing the word sleep. All of the participants in both groups fell for the lures, with at least eight such errors per person—though some tallied as many as 20.Both groups also performed unreliably when shown photographs and fed lures intended to make them think they’d seen details in the pictures they hadn’t. Here too, the HSAM subjects cooked up as many fake images as the ordinary folks.
“What I love about the study is how it communicates something that memory-distortion researchers have suspected for some time, that perhaps no one is immune to memory distortion,” said Patihis.
What the study doesn’t do, Patihisadmits, is explain why HSAM people exist at all. Their prodigious recall is a matter of scientific fact, and one of the goals of the new work was to see if an innate resistance to manufactured memories might be one of the reasons. But on that score, the researchers came up empty.
“It rules something out,” Patihis said. “[HSAM individuals] probably reconstruct memories in the same way that ordinary people do. So now we have to think about how else we could explain it.” He and others will continue to look for that secret sauce that elevates superior recall over the ordinary kind. But for now, memory still appears to be fragile, malleable and prone to errors — for all of us.
第三篇：自然科學
文章標題：beans’ talk 2013年，economist newspaper limited。
第一段：提出一個現象「植物可能是相互聯繫的」，當一個植物受到攻擊或者影響，就會向其他植物發出報警信號，就像 local Wi-Fi 一樣。有一個理論被提出「是不是當有蚜蟲攻擊植物，植物就會通過一些 fungi 給鄰居植物發出信號呢？」
第二段：調查者通過之前對於該現象的研究發現，植物受到攻擊就會通過 irritate發出相關信號去吸引wasp，基於這個結果，調查者要去進一步通過實驗，調查到底是不是通過 fungi 發出的信號， fungi 到底是不是資訊傳播者。
第三段：講解實驗的一些基本情況，例如分為8個小組，每個實驗小組有5株植物，然後對於不同的植物進行不同的變數控制。
第四段：講解對於不同的實驗組進行變數控制之後出現的不同反應。
第五段：開始總結實驗結果和推理實驗結論，本段講解的是 infested 的植物是可以通過 fungi 發送信號給隔壁植物，並且吸引黃蜂，消滅蚜蟲的。
第六段：講解 uninfected 的植物所反應出來的實驗結果，其結果也同樣讓人驚訝。
最後一段：論述在植物中的細菌，菌類和植物之間的關係，其中正向情感詞 help 可以有效幫助解題。
Beans’ talk 2013年，economist newspaper limited
THE idea that plants have developed a subterranean internet, which they use to raise the alarm when danger threatens, sounds more like the science-fiction of James Cameron’s film “Avatar” than any sort of science fact. But fact it seems to be, if work by David Johnson of the University of Aberdeen is anything to go by. For Dr. Johnson believes he has shown that just such an internet, with fungal hyphae standing in for local Wi-Fi, alerts beanstalks to danger if one of their neighbors is attacked by aphids.
Dr. Johnson knew from his own past work that when broad-bean plants are attacked by aphids they respond with volatile chemicals that both irritate the parasites and attract aphid-hunting wasps. He did not know, though, whether the message could spread, tomato-like, from plant to plant. So he set out to find out—and to do so in a way which would show if fungi were the messengers.
As they report in Ecology Letters, he and his colleagues set up eight “mesocosms”, each containing five beanstalks. The plants were allowed to grow for four months, and during this time every plant could interact with symbiotic fungi in the soil.
Not all of the beanstalks, though, had the same relationship with the fungi. In each mesocosm, one plant was surrounded by a mesh penetrated by holes half a micron across. Gaps that size are too small for either roots or hyphae to penetrate, but they do permit the passage of water and dissolved chemicals. Two plants were surrounded with a 40-micron mesh. This can be penetrated by hyphae but not by roots. The two remaining plants, one of which was at the center of the array, were left to grow unimpeded.
Five weeks after the experiment began, all the plants were covered by bags that allowed carbon dioxide, oxygen and water vapor in and out, but stopped the passage of larger molecules, of the sort a beanstalk might use for signaling. Then, four days from the end, one of the 40-micron meshes in each mesocosm was rotated to sever any hyphae that had penetrated it, and the central plant was then infested with aphids.
At the end of the experiment Dr. Johnson and his team collected the air inside the bags, extracted any volatile chemicals in it by absorbing them into a special porous polymer, and tested those chemicals on both aphids (using the winged, rather than the wingless morphs) and wasps. Each insect was placed for five minutes in an apparatus that had two chambers, one of which contained a sample of the volatiles and the other an odorless control.
The researchers found, as they expected from their previous work, that when the volatiles came from an infested plant, wasps spent an average of 3½ minutes in the chamber containing them and 1½ in the other chamber. Aphids, conversely, spent 1¾ minutes in the volatiles’ chamber and 3¼ in the control. In other words, the volatiles from an infested plant attract wasps and repel aphids.
Crucially, the team got the same result in the case of uninfected plants that had been in uninterrupted hyphae contact with the infested one, but had had root contact blocked. If both hyphae and roots had been blocked throughout the experiment, though, the volatiles from uninfected plants actually attracted aphids (they spent 3½ minutes in the volatiles’ chamber), while the wasps were indifferent. The same pertained for the odor of uninfected plants whose hyphae connections had been allowed to develop, and then severed by the rotation of the mesh.
Broad beans, then, really do seem to be using their fungal symbionts as a communications network, warning their neighbors to take evasive action. Such a general response no doubt helps the plant first attacked by attracting yet more wasps to the area, and it helps the fungal messengers by preserving their leguminous hosts.
第四篇：雙篇文章
這次雙篇文章觀點並不是完全相反的，而是都反對一個Banks Labor Policy，但是觀點方面側重有些不同。作者1說到Banks Labor Policy其實還是奴隸制度，並沒有真正的解放黑人，黑人需要利用內戰之後和解放奴隸宣言的這個政治機會，繼續努力爭取真正的解放和完全平等和自由。作者2先對比了古代奴隸制度和美國奴隸制度的不同，然後說到解放奴隸宣言宣佈之後黑人的狀況，依然沒有各方面的政治權利，然後呼籲改變。
1-4題考查第一篇文章
5-7題考查第二篇文章
8-11考查雙篇
第五篇：自然科學
簡單的自然學科科研型文章。
文章主旨 (研究問題)：Finch（某種鳥）頭的顏色（red vs black）跟personality（aggression/risk-taking/喜歡novelty）有關。
核心假設：紅頭鳥攻擊行為高於黑頭鳥，合理的推測是紅頭鳥更愛risk-taking和novelty的事物，但因為黑頭鳥在覓食上不佔優勢（被紅頭鳥打壓），所有黑頭鳥為了食物的需求也要risk-taking和喜歡novelty。
通過一些精巧的實驗，實驗結果：紅頭鳥果然攻擊行為高於黑頭鳥，但是risk-taking和對novelty興趣都低於黑頭鳥。為了保證準確性，這個實驗再一周後又重複了一次。裡面有提到每個鳥的個體行為還是比較consistent（出了一道細節加證據）。
最後說risk-taking和對novelty成對出現很正常，特別是有覓食壓力的黑頭鳥。
Title-Gouldian finches’ head color reflects their personality
What this suggests is that behavioral characteristics, such as aggression and other traits, may be correlated with particular head color morphs meaning that head color is indicative of different personality types. This idea has been tested in a new paper by Leah Williams and her colleagues.
In order to determine if head color really does indicate personality traits in Gouldian finches Williams and her colleagues tested a number of predictions. First they looked at pairs of black-headed birds which were expected to show less aggression towards each other than pairs of red-headed birds, this makes sense since red-headed birds had previously been found to exhibit higher levels of aggression.
The second prediction was that red-headed birds should be bolder, more explorative and take more risks than black-headed birds. This hypothesis is based on previous studies of other species that have shown a correlation between aggression and these behavioral characteristics. However, there is another possibility, red-headed birds could take fewer risks for two reasons; first, they may be more conspicuous to predators due to their bright coloration and second, it may pay black headed birds to take more risks and be more explorative so they find food resources before the dominant red-headed birds do.
In order to test the first prediction paired birds of matching head color were moved into an experimental cage without food. After one hour of food deprivation a feeder was placed into the corner of the cage where there was only enough room for one bird to feed at a time. Aggressive interactions such as threat displays and displacements were then counted over a 30 minute period.
The results as shown in the figure below were striking. Red-headed birds were significantly and consistently more aggressive than black-headed birds.
To test the birds willingness to take risks they were deprived of food for one hour before their feeder was replaced. After the birds had calmly begun to feed a silhouette of an avian predator was moved up and down in front of the cage to scare the birds from the feeder. The time it took for them to return to the feeder was taken as a measure of their willingness to take risks, birds that returned quickly were considered to be greater risk takers than those that were more cautious.
This time the results were surprising. Red-headed birds were considerably more cautious than those with black heads at returning to the feeder after a “predator” had been introduced. As the figure below shows they took on average 4x longer to begin feeding again than the less aggressive black-headed birds.
Finally, the authors investigated the birds interest in novel objects or “object neophilia” which is defined in the paper as “exploration in which investigation is elicited by an object’s novelty“. To do this a bunch of threads was placed on a perch within the cage, the time taken for the birds to approach the threads within one body length and to touch them were recorded over a one hour period. In line with the results from the risk taking experiment it was found that the aggressive red-headed birds showed less interest in novel objects than did black-headed birds. The difference is not so striking as the previous experiments but was statistically significant nonetheless.
These experiments were repeated after a two month interval and showed that different birds differed in their responses but the responses of individual birds were consistent over time. Head color was found to predict the behavioral responses of the birds. Red-headed birds were more aggressive than black-headed birds but took fewer risks and were not explorative.
What is surprising about these results is that aggression does not correlate with risk taking behavior, however, the authors do provide a convincing explanation, suggesting that…
Interestingly boldness and risk taking behaviors were found to be strongly correlated, regardless of head color they always occurred together forming a “behavioral syndrome”. This implies that there is selection in favor of specific combinations of traits and of head color in relation to those traits. Selection favors aggression in red-headed birds and the boldness/risk taking behavioral syndrome in black-headed birds. This makes sense when you consider the high risk of predation faced by red-headed birds if they take too many risks and the need for black-headed birds to find food away from the dominant red heads which occupy the safest foraging locations.
Williams and her colleagues suggest that if red-headed birds are aggressive, and black-headed birds take more risks, this could lead to differences in foraging tactics. For example, black headed birds could increase their foraging opportunities by feeding at more risky sites away from interference by the dominant red-headed birds which feed in safer locations. The lower conspicuousness of their black heads means they are at less risk of predation at exposed sites that red-headed birds would be.
The results of this fascinating study strongly support the hypothesis that head color does indeed signal personality in Gouldian finches. I would love to see some more research in this area. The authors themselves suggest that more research is needed to find out what roles head colors play in social situations. It would also be interesting to find out how widespread this phenomenon is, given that birds frequently use plumage coloration as signals it seems likely to me that color may indicate personality in other avian species.
本文選自2014年New York Times，文章淺顯易懂，歌頌的是 “分享經濟”，鼓勵更多的pharmaceutical companies分享臨床試驗資料，互通有無，分享相關試驗資料，提高研發新藥的速度，減少藥物的副作用，為社會做出更多的貢獻。
這篇文章的evidence部分主要運用的是medical evidence 和典型案例分析(case study)，並且用業內的leader做role model，增強persuasiveness；Reasoning的部分來說，主要的是contrast和cause-effect analysis，此外還有pre-emptive counter argument；emotional appeals主要集中在文章的最後，用sense of duty/responsibility/ Samaritan spirit（好人精神）來uplift social morale.
Give the Data to the People
第一篇
Bejamn Banneker : marking time
本文主要寫了作者通過對鐘錶的研究，進而研究天體運動，將時間精確。通過自身的學習鑽研，最終幫助美國選定了capital。他本人也得到廣大人民群眾尊重和紀念。
第二篇
Energy storage under pressure
本文講述了新型能源如何有效利用，說明風力能源的優缺點以及解決辦法。講述了風力的潛力和前景。
第三篇
A Man of Many Words
講一個作家自己要寫一本字典，一開始只是想要單純的寫字典，但是後來想要通過這本字典來產生一些影響。
第四篇
Retailers Benefiting from Paying Well
很多公司通過低價來吸引顧客，這個舉動會導致員工薪資的降低。但如果給員工加薪會帶來很多好處，比如減少員工辭職，避免使用沒有經驗的員工；其次也可以提高員工工作效率，使零售業者獲得更多的利益。
菁英SAT測驗教育中心