SAT考情分析之2019年5月SAT亚太卷考情回顾分析
--SAT考试考情分析库
2019年5月4日亚太SAT考情回放实录
【美盟SAT考试辅导网 】2019年五月SAT考试亚太卷分析及考情回顾：本次亚太SAT考试全卷难度中等稍上。2019年的第二场SAT考试于2019年5月4日今天上午结束了，乘着还有SAT考卷的热度，美盟SAT培训中心老师和大家一起看看这次SAT亚太区考试考情如何。
一，本次SAT考试难度考情总结：难度相对不太难，但要考出高分不易。
本次考试真题难度中等，只有阅读部分题目难度中等偏上一点，整体对大陆考生而言，难度适中，和去年10月，12月，以及今年3月难度保持一致，可见CB目前对试题难度的掌控已经非常精准。
根据这几次考试情况而言，CB的出题难度在未来一段时间内都不会有太大的波动，考生只要认真备考，理论上都可以取得理想的成绩。
针对考前押题以及幻想考题重复的现像，都是对自己的不服责任，也是对SAT考试本身没有看清。很多机构押注会重复19年4月美国高中的SchoolDay试题，但事实上这次押注失败了，但有老师反馈说写作部分重复2018年6月(H卷)，目前尚未证实，就算重复，对本次考试也没有影响。
至于评分curve如何，大家暂时不要考虑那么多，也没必要像大神似的去预测，没什么意义。
二，本次同比考生人数有所减少
表现在考试香港亚博馆开放3个场馆，预计有4000人左右，而3月份有近5000人的规模，与去年五月的5000多人相比也是下降的，换句话说，今天的考生人数下降的很不正常。
有同学说有一部分人在备考AP，放弃了5月份的SAT考试，但大家回想一下，去年也有同学报考AP考试，所以这个因素不能作为今年5月下降的解释。
此外，5月份考试不设置年龄限制，也就是很多培训机构的老师也可以参加考试，所以实际真实考生人数比我们看到的数字还要少。
而这次考生不仅包含当季申请的11年级学生，还包括10年级试水的学生，整体而言，当季申请人数下降已经非常明显了。
为什么会出现这个情况呢？
1、美国大学整体申请人数有所下滑。美本申请人数从去年就开始有下滑趋势了，而随着贸易战等不确定因素的影响，安全问题，签证问题都影响着家长们的决策，一部分原定的美国申请者，转向其他英澳等国。
2、美国名校申请竞争加剧。以藤校录取为例，8所藤校中有6所藤校录取率连续多年下滑。TOP30的院校录取率大多数也呈下滑趋势，竞争难度可想而知。并且越来越倾向美高大陆学生，这必然导致大陆的牛娃寻找更安全的升学途径。
3、美国大学招生丑闻不断。中介业务本身就是基于信息不对称，随着家长们对留学申请的认知加深，对于美国大学的申请难度有了更理性的认识，加上这半年沸沸扬扬的招生丑闻事件，对中国学生的申请更加不利，学生和家长们在国别选择上趋于保守。
三 ，本次SAT考题卷面回顾
1、SAT阅读部分
这次考试阅读整体难度中等偏上，考点非常规整，历史类文章相对难一些。题型方面，词汇、信息目的、逻辑推理、独立寻证、回应互联、图表题等常见题型均有考察。
Passage 1 文学
The passage adapted from Edith Wharton Mrs Manstey’s view
文章内容：
主要描述了一个生活比较乏味的老太太Mrs Manstey的事情。她在窗前度过的长时间里，并不空闲。她读了一点书，但是并不多；优美的风景环绕着她，塑造了她的生活，就像大海环绕着孤岛一样。曼斯泰太太的来访者不多，比起了解她的来访者们的趣闻轶事，她对园中的花花草草，喂猫的女仆等等一系列景象更感兴趣。
四月的某一天，曼斯泰太太的女房东桑普森太太来拜访她，尽管她对其的来访并不感兴趣，当她注意到园中的magnolia盛开时，她向桑普森太太说道“ 今年的木兰花比往年开得早一些了，桑普森夫人。”曼斯泰太太知道这是一个不太可能吸引她的访客的话题。显然，桑普森夫人对这个话题并不感兴趣，并回答道自己从来不知道园中还有magnolia的存在。
随后，桑普森夫人告诉了曼斯泰太太房屋将被扩建的消息， 曼斯泰太太为之一惊，因为这意味着她眼前的景象将会被一道砖和灰泥的屏障与之隔离；不久，连尖顶也将消失，坐在窗前的她很难再看到园中的景象。
这篇文章是非常典型的SAT文学作品考察两者关系的文章，整体难度不大，不过比较有意思的是，除了两道循证题，这个在以前不多见。
词汇题主要考查idle，absorbing；细节题Mrs. Sampson 宣布了什么消息；询证题装修房子的态度等。
【英文原文】：
Mrs. Manstey, in the long hours which she spent at her window, was not idle. She read a little, and knitted numberless stockings; but the view surrounded and shaped her life as the sea does a lonely island. When her rare callers came it was difficult for her to detach herself from the contemplation of the opposite window-washing, or the scrutiny of certain green points in a neighboring flower-bed which might, or might not, turn into hyacinths, while she feigned an interest in her visitor's anecdotes about some unknown grandchild. Mrs. Manstey's real friends were the denizens of the yards, the hyacinths, the magnolia, the green parrot, the maid who fed the cats, the doctor who studied late behind his mustard-colored curtains; and the confidant of her tenderer musings was the church-spire floating in the sunset.
One April day, as she sat in her usual place, with knitting cast aside and eyes fixed on the blue sky mottled with round clouds, a knock at the door announced the entrance of her landlady. Mrs. Manstey did not care for her landlady, but she submitted to her visits with ladylike resignation. To-day, however, it seemed harder than usual to turn from the blue sky and the blossoming magnolia to Mrs. Sampson's unsuggestive face, and Mrs. Manstey was conscious of a distinct effort as she did so.
"The magnolia is out earlier than usual this year, Mrs. Sampson," she remarked, yielding to a rare impulse, for she seldom alluded to the absorbing interest of her life. In the first place it was a topic not likely to appeal to her visitors and, besides, she lacked the power of expression and could not have given utterance to her feelings had she wished to.
"The what, Mrs. Manstey?" inquired the landlady, glancing about the room as if to find there the explanation of Mrs. Manstey's statement.
"The magnolia in the next yard -- in Mrs. Black's yard," Mrs. Manstey repeated.
"Is it, indeed? I didn't know there was a magnolia there," said Mrs. Sampson, carelessly. Mrs. Manstey looked at her; she did not know that there was a magnolia in the next yard!
"By the way," Mrs. Sampson continued, "speaking of Mrs. Black reminds me that the work on the extension is to begin next week."
"The what?" it was Mrs. Manstey's turn to ask.
"The extension," said Mrs. Sampson, nodding her head in the direction of the ignored magnolia. "You knew, of course, that Mrs. Black was going to build an extension to her house? Yes, ma'am. I hear it is to run right back to the end of the yard. How she can afford to build an extension in these hard times I don't see; but she always was crazy about building. She used to keep a boarding-house in Seventeenth Street, and she nearly ruined herself then by sticking out bow-windows and what not; I should have thought that would have cured her of building, but I guess it's a disease, like drink. Anyhow, the work is to begin on Monday."
Mrs. Manstey had grown pale. She always spoke slowly, so the landlady did not heed the long pause which followed. At last Mrs. Manstey said: "Do you know how high the extension will be?"
"That's the most absurd part of it. The extension is to be built right up to the roof of the main building; now, did you ever?"
"Mrs. Manstey paused again. "Won't it be a great annoyance to you, Mrs. Sampson?" she asked.
"I should say it would. But there's no help for it; if people have got a mind to build extensions there's no law to prevent 'em, that I'm aware of." Mrs. Manstey, knowing this, was silent. "There is no help for it," Mrs. Sampson repeated, "but if I am a church member, I wouldn't be so sorry if it ruined Eliza Black. Well, good-day, Mrs. Manstey; I'm glad to find you so comfortable."
So comfortable -- so comfortable! Left to herself the old woman turned once more to the window. How lovely the view was that day! The blue sky with its round clouds shed a brightness over everything; the ailanthus had put on a tinge of yellow-green, the hyacinths were budding, the magnolia flowers looked more than ever like rosettes carved in alabaster. Soon the wistaria would bloom, then the horse-chestnut; but not for her. Between her eyes and them a barrier of brick and mortar would swiftly rise; presently even the spire would disappear, and all her radiant world be blotted out.
Passage 2 历史
节选自1906年Theodore Roosevelt的演讲 “The Man with the Muck Rake”
文章内容：
所谓Muckraker，也称黑幕揭发记者/运动，是指美国19世纪末20世纪初掀起的一股新闻报道浪潮，一些记者和报刊致力于深入调查报道黑幕，揭发丑闻，对社会阴暗面进行揭示。
1906年4月14日，罗斯福总统在美国众议院办公大楼奠基典礼上发表了演讲，他用班扬小说《天路历程》里的扒粪者，来比喻那些揭黑的媒体和记者：“那人手拿着粪耙，目无旁视，只知朝下看;他被赠予天国王冠以替换他的粪耙，但他既不抬眼望天，也无视王冠，却仍继续耙那地上的秽物。”在罗斯福看来，扒粪者是“那种一生中总是拒绝正视美好的事物，只是心情严肃地将目光集中在那些卑鄙可耻的事物上的典型人物”，而这种人“会迅速成为对社会无益、于行善无助的潜伏最深的罪恶势力之一。”
在演讲中，他还说到：现在，我们不要在看到那些卑鄙和贬低的东西时退缩。地板上有污物，必须用耙子把它刮掉；在有些时候和某些地方，这种服务是所有能提供的服务中最需要的。但是，一个什么都不做的人，不思考，不说话，也不写作的人，除了用粪耙的本领以外，很快就变成了邪恶的力量之一。
政治上、经济上和社会上有许多严重的罪恶，迫切需要对他们进行最严厉的战争。应该毫不留情地揭露和打击每一个罪恶的人，不管是政治家还是商人，每一种罪恶的行为，不管是在政治、商业还是社会生活中。每一个作家或演说家，每一个在讲台上，在书刊杂志或报纸上，毫不留情地进行如此猛烈攻击的人，只要他总是记得攻击是绝对真实的，我就为他们欢呼。
我刚才说的话很容易被误解。有些人实在不明白，痛斥污损人，并不等于赞同；而那些有兴趣的人，以及那些喜欢泼泥的人，都喜欢助长这种思想。
我想再重复一遍，我的请求不是要豁免，而是要揭露那些背叛自己的政客、那些通过不正当的或腐败的方式赚得或花掉他的财富的大商人。应该把每一个这样的人从他的耻辱地位上赶走。揭露罪行，追捕罪犯；但要记住，即使是在犯罪的情况下，如果以耸人听闻的、耸人听闻的、不真实的方式攻击，这种攻击对公众的心理造成的伤害可能比犯罪本身更大。
英文原文：
Over a century ago Washington laid the corner stone of the Capitol in what was then little more than a tract of wooded wilderness here beside the Potomac. We now find it necessary to provide by great additional buildings for the business of the government.
This growth in the need for the housing of the government is but a proof and example of the way in which the nation has grown and the sphere of action of the national government has grown. We now administer the affairs of a nation in which the extraordinary growth of population has been outstripped by the growth of wealth in complex interests. The material problems that face us today are not such as they were in Washington's time, but the underlying facts of human nature are the same now as they were then. Under altered external form we war with the same tendencies toward evil that were evident in Washington's time, and are helped by the same tendencies for good. It is about some of these that I wish to say a word today.
In Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck Rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.
In "Pilgrim's Progress" the Man with the Muck Rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing.
Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck rake, speedily becomes, not a help but one of the most potent forces for evil.
There are in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, business, or social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform or in a book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.
The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth.
An epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon character does no good, but very great harm. The soul of every scoundrel is gladdened whenever an honest man is assailed, or even when a scoundrel is untruthfully assailed.
Now, it is easy to twist out of shape what I have just said, easy to affect to misunderstand it, and if it is slurred over in repetition not difficult really to misunderstand it. Some persons are sincerely incapable of understanding that to denounce mud slinging does not mean the endorsement of whitewashing; and both the interested individuals who need whitewashing and those others who practice mud slinging like to encourage such confusion of ideas.
One of the chief counts against those who make indiscriminate assault upon men in business or men in public life is that they invite a reaction which is sure to tell powerfully in favor of the unscrupulous scoundrel who really ought to be attacked, who ought to be exposed, who ought, if possible, to be put in the penitentiary. If Aristides is praised overmuch as just, people get tired of hearing it; and over-censure of the unjust finally and from similar reasons results in their favor.
Any excess is almost sure to invite a reaction; and, unfortunately, the reactions instead of taking the form of punishment of those guilty of the excess, is apt to take the form either of punishment of the unoffending or of giving immunity, and even strength, to offenders. The effort to make financial or political profit out of the destruction of character can only result in public calamity. Gross and reckless assaults on character, whether on the stump or in newspaper, magazine, or book, create a morbid and vicious public sentiment, and at the same time act as a profound deterrent to able men of normal sensitiveness and tend to prevent them from entering the public service at any price.
As an instance in point, I may mention that one serious difficulty encountered in getting the right type of men to dig the Panama canal is the certainty that they will be exposed, both without, and, I am sorry to say, sometimes within, Congress, to utterly reckless assaults on their character and capacity.
At the risk of repetition let me say again that my plea is not for immunity to, but for the most unsparing exposure of, the politician who betrays his trust, of the big business man who makes or spends his fortune in illegitimate or corrupt ways. There should be a resolute effort to hunt every such man out of the position he has disgraced. Expose the crime, and hunt down the criminal; but remember that even in the case of crime, if it is attacked in sensational, lurid, and untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public mind than the crime itself.
It is because I feel that there should be no rest in the endless war against the forces of evil that I ask the war be conducted with sanity as well as with resolution. The men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the well being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them, to the crown of worthy endeavor. There are beautiful things above and round about them; and if they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck, their power of usefulness is gone.
If the whole picture is painted black there remains no hue whereby to single out the rascals for distinction from their fellows. Such painting finally induces a kind of moral color blindness; and people affected by it come to the conclusion that no man is really black, and no man really white, but they are all gray.
In other words, they neither believe in the truth of the attack, nor in the honesty of the man who is attacked; they grow as suspicious of the accusation as of the offense; it becomes well nigh hopeless to stir them either to wrath against wrongdoing or to enthusiasm for what is right; and such a mental attitude in the public gives hope to every knave, and is the despair of honest men. To assail the great and admitted evils of our political and industrial life with such crude and sweeping generalizations as to include decent men in the general condemnation means the searing of the public conscience. There results a general attitude either of cynical belief in and indifference to public corruption or else of a distrustful inability to discriminate between the good and the bad. Either attitude is fraught with untold damage to the country as a whole.
The fool who has not sense to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is well nigh as dangerous as the man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad. There is nothing more distressing to every good patriot, to every good American, than the hard, scoffing spirit which treats the allegation of dishonesty in a public man as a cause for laughter. Such laughter is worse than the crackling of thorns under a pot, for it denotes not merely the vacant mind, but the heart in which high emotions have been choked before they could grow to fruition. There is any amount of good in the world, and there never was a time when loftier and more disinterested work for the betterment of mankind was being done than now. The forces that tend for evil are great and terrible, but the forces of truth and love and courage and honesty and generosity and sympathy are also stronger than ever before. It is a foolish and timid, no less than a wicked thing, to blink the fact that the forces of evil are strong, but it is even worse to fail to take into account the strength of the forces that tell for good.
Hysterical sensationalism is the poorest weapon wherewith to fight for lasting righteousness. The men who with stern sobriety and truth assail the many evils of our time, whether in the public press, or in magazines, or in books, are the leaders and allies of all engaged in the work for social and political betterment. But if they give good reason for distrust of what they say, if they chill the ardor of those who demand truth as a primary virtue, they thereby betray the good cause and play into the hands of the very men against whom they are nominally at war.
In his Ecclesiastical Polity that fine old Elizabethan divine, Bishop Hooker, wrote:
He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favorable hearers, because they know the manifold defects whereunto every kind of regimen is subject, but the secret lets and difficulties, which in public proceedings are innumerable and inevitable, they have not ordinarily the judgment to consider.
This truth should be kept constantly in mind by every free people desiring to preserve the sanity and poise indispensable to the permanent success of self-government. Yet, on the other hand, it is vital not to permit this spirit of sanity and self-command to degenerate into mere mental stagnation. Bad though a state of hysterical excitement is, and evil though the results are which come from the violent oscillations such excitement invariably produces, yet a sodden acquiescence in evil is even worse.
At this moment we are passing through a period of great unrest-social, political, and industrial unrest. It is of the utmost importance for our future that this should prove to be not the unrest of mere rebelliousness against life, of mere dissatisfaction with the inevitable inequality of conditions, but the unrest of a resolute and eager ambition to secure the betterment of the individual and the nation.
So far as this movement of agitation throughout the country takes the form of a fierce discontent with evil, of a determination to punish the authors of evil, whether in industry or politics, the feeling is to be heartily welcomed as a sign of healthy life.
If, on the other hand, it turns into a mere crusade of appetite against appetite, of a contest between the brutal greed of the "have nots" and the brutal greed of the "haves," then it has no significance for good, but only for evil. If it seeks to establish a line of cleavage, not along the line which divides good men from bad, but along that other line, running at right angles thereto, which divides those who are well off from those who are less well off, then it will be fraught with immeasurable harm to the body politic.
We can no more and no less afford to condone evil in the man of capital than evil in the man of no capital. The wealthy man who exults because there is a failure of justice in the effort to bring some trust magnate to account for his misdeeds is as bad as, and no worse than, the so-called labor leader who clamorously strives to excite a foul class feeling on behalf of some other labor leader who is implicated in murder. One attitude is as bad as the other, and no worse; in each case the accused is entitled to exact justice; and in neither case is there need of action by others which can be construed into an expression of sympathy for crime.
It is a prime necessity that if the present unrest is to result in permanent good the emotion shall be translated into action, and that the action shall be marked by honesty, sanity, and self-restraint. There is mighty little good in a mere spasm of reform. The reform that counts is that which comes through steady, continuous growth; violent emotionalism leads to exhaustion.
It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in business. We should discriminate in the sharpest way between fortunes well won and fortunes ill won; between those gained as an incident to performing great services to the community as a whole and those gained in evil fashion by keeping just within the limits of mere law honesty. Of course, no amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in making them.
As a matter of personal conviction, and without pretending to discuss the details or formulate the system, I feel that we shall ultimately have to consider the adoption of some such scheme as that of a progressive tax on all fortunes, beyond a certain amount, either given in life or devised or bequeathed upon death to any individual-a tax so framed as to put it out of the power of the owner of one of these enormous fortunes to hand on more than a certain amount to any one individual; the tax of course, to be imposed by the national and not the state government. Such taxation should, of course, be aimed merely at the inheritance or transmission in their entirety of those fortunes swollen beyond all healthy limits. Again, the national government must in some form exercise supervision over corporations engaged in interstate business-and all large corporations engaged in interstate business-whether by license or otherwise, so as to permit us to deal with the far reaching evils of overcapitalization.
This year we are making a beginning in the direction of serious effort to settle some of these economic problems by the railway rate legislation. Such legislation, if so framed, as I am sure it will be, as to secure definite and tangible results, will amount to something of itself; and it will amount to a great deal more in so far as it is taken as a first step in the direction of a policy of superintendence and control over corporate wealth engaged in interstate commerce; this superintendence and control not to be exercised in a spirit of malevolence toward the men who have created the wealth, but with the firm purpose both to do justice to them and to see that they in their turn do justice to the public at large.
The first requisite in the public servants who are to deal in this shape with corporations, whether as legislators or as executives, is honesty. This honesty can be no respecter of persons. There can be no such thing as unilateral honesty. The danger is not really from corrupt corporations; it springs from the corruption itself, whether exercised for or against corporations.
The eighth commandment reads, "Thou shalt not steal." It does not read, "Thou shalt not steal from the rich man." It does not read, "Thou shalt not steal from the poor man." It reads simply and plainly, "Thou shalt not steal."
No good whatever will come from that warped and mock morality which denounces the misdeeds of men of wealth and forgets the misdeeds practiced at their expense; which denounces bribery, but blinds itself to blackmail; which foams with rage if a corporation secures favors by improper methods, and merely leers with hideous mirth if the corporation is itself wronged.
The only public servant who can be trusted honestly to protect the rights of the public against the misdeeds of a corporation is that public man who will just as surely protect the corporation itself from wrongful aggression.
If a public man is willing to yield to popular clamor and do wrong to the men of wealth or to rich corporations, it may be set down as certain that if the opportunity comes he will secretly and furtively do wrong to the public in the interest of a corporation.
But in addition to honesty, we need sanity. No honesty will make a public man useful if that man is timid or foolish, if he is a hot-headed zealot or an impracticable visionary. As we strive for reform we find that it is not at all merely the case of a long uphill pull. On the contrary, there is almost as much of breeching work as of collar work. To depend only on traces means that there will soon be a runaway and an upset.
The men of wealth who today are trying to prevent the regulation and control of their business in the interest of the public by the proper government authorities will not succeed, in my judgment, in checking the progress of the movement. But if they did succeed they would find that they had sown the wind and would surely reap the whirlwind, for they would ultimately provoke the violent excesses which accompany a reform coming by convulsion instead of by steady and natural growth.
On the other hand, the wild preachers of unrest and discontent, the wild agitators against the entire existing order, the men who act crookedly, whether because of sinister design or from mere puzzle headedness, the men who preach destruction without proposing any substitute for what they intend to destroy, or who propose a substitute which would be far worse than the existing evils-all these men are the most dangerous opponents of real reform. If they get their way they will lead the people into a deeper pit than any into which they could fall under the present system. If they fail to get their way they will still do incalculable harm by provoking the kind of reaction which in its revolt against the senseless evil of their teaching would enthrone more securely than ever the evils which their misguided followers believe they are attacking.
More important than aught else is the development of the broadest sympathy of man for man. The welfare of the wage worker, the welfare of the tiller of the soil, upon these depend the welfare of the entire country; their good is not to be sought in pulling down others; but their good must be the prime object of all our statesmanship.
Materially we must strive to secure a broader economic opportunity for all men, so that each shall have a better chance to show the stuff of which he is made. Spiritually and ethically we must strive to bring about clean living and right thinking. We appreciate that the things of the body are important; but we appreciate also that the things of the soul are immeasurably more important.
The foundation stone of national life is, and ever must be, the high individual character of the average citizen.
Passage 3 科学双篇
Passage 1：Tracey Peake, "Pigment or Bacteria? Researchers Reexamine the Idea of "color" in Fossil Feathers".
研究羽毛化石的古生物学家提出，羽毛内部某些显微结构的形状可以告诉我们古代鸟类的颜色。但北卡罗来纳州立大学的新研究表明，目前还无法判断这些结构。黑色素小体是一种小的充满色素的囊，位于脊椎动物的细胞和其它色素沉着组织中。它们含有黑色素，能使羽毛颜色从棕红色到灰色到纯黑色不等，黑色素小体是长方形或圆形的。
但是，黑素小体并不是唯一可能出现在羽毛化石中的圆形和长方形显微结构上。
北卡罗莱纳州古生物学博士候选人艾莉森·莫耶想知道这些结构是可以被确定为黑素小体还是微生物。莫耶在黑色和棕色的鸡毛上面，种植了细菌。她用三种不同的显微镜来检查生物膜的生长模式，然后将这些结构与她切开的鸡毛内的黑素小体进行比较。
最后，她将微生物和真正的黑色素小体与甘肃玉门白羽毛化石（一种生活在1.2亿年前的鸟类恐龙）的结构进行了比较，她的发现：这些结构对于鸟类来说可能是原始的，黑素小体嵌在角蛋白中，角蛋白是一种非常坚硬的蛋白质，所以除非有一些降解作用，否则很难看到它们。但是这些细菌正在进行降解，所以这可能是我们所看到的，而不是黑素小体本身。
英文原文：
Paleontologists studying fossilized feathers have proposed that the shapes of certain microscopic structures inside the feathers can tell us the color of ancient birds. But new research from North Carolina State University demonstrates that it is not yet possible to tell if these structures – thought to be melanosomes – are what they seem, or if they are merely the remnants of ancient bacteria.
Melanosomes are small, pigment-filled sacs located inside the cells of feathers and other pigmented tissues of vertebrates. They contain melanin, which can give feathers colors ranging from brownish-red to gray to solid black. Melanosomes are either oblong or round in shape, and the identification of these small bodies in preserved feathers has led to speculation about the physiology, habitats, coloration and lifestyles of the extinct animals, including dinosaurs, that once possessed them.
But melanosomes are not the only round and oblong microscopic structures that might show up in fossilized feathers. In fact, the microbes that drove the decomposition of the animal prior to fossilization share the same size and shape as melanosomes, and they would also be present in feathers during decay.
Alison Moyer, a Ph.D. candidate in paleontology at NC State, wanted to find out whether these structures could be definitively identified as either melanosome or microbe. Using black and brown chicken feathers – chickens are one of the closest living relatives to both dinosaurs and ancient birds – Moyer grew bacteria over them to replicate what we see in the fossil record. She used three different types of microscopy to examine the patterns of biofilm growth, and then compared those structures to melanosomes inside of chicken feathers that she had sliced open. Finally, she compared both microbes and actual melanosomes to structures in a fossilized feather from Gansus yumenensis, an avian dinosaur that lived about 120 million years ago, and to published images of fossil “melanosomes” by others. Her findings led to more questions.
“These structures could be original to the bird, or they could be a biofilm which has grown over and degraded the feather – if the latter, they would also produce round or elongated structures that are not melanosomes,” Moyer says. “Melanosomes are embedded in keratin, which is a very tough protein, so they’re hard to see unless there’s been some degradation. But the bacteria are doing the degrading, and so that may be what we’re seeing, rather than the melanosome itself. It’s impossible to say with certainty what these structures are without more data, including fine scale chemical data.”
Passage 2 Sarah Fecht, "The True colors of Ancient Reptiles Revealed".
许多化石，被一层暗沉积物所覆盖。在很长一段时间里，科学家们无法确定这种物质是什么，也不知道它是从哪里来的。在显微镜下，这种物质内藏着微小的卵状结构，看起来像黑素小体——一种分泌色素到动物皮肤的细胞器。其他科学家认为这些结构可能是细菌。
以前的研究依赖于对这些卵形黑色素体的视觉识别。为了鉴别这些黑色的沉积物，林格伦的研究表明这些结构实际上是黑素小体，而不是细菌细胞。
林德格伦的研究小组推测，黑色的颜色有助于鱼龙、石龟和古代棱皮龟吸收额外的热量。这将是有益的。而奥尔预测，这项工作只是研究化石色素形成的冰山一角，现在可以开始将颜色模式与不同的生态联系起来，并研究爬行动物的颜色是如何随着时间演变的。
考查词汇 drive，determine，establish等。
英文原文：
Lots of fossils, such as the ichthyosaur shown here, are outlined or shellacked with a mysterious dark deposit. For a long time, scientists couldn't be sure what the material was or where it came from. Under the microscope, the material housed tiny egg-shaped structures that looked like melanosomes—the cell organelles that secrete pigments into an animal's skin. Other scientists thought the structures might be bacteria.
By studying the molecular composition of the pigments, the scientists in this study not only concluded that the deposits are pigment remains, but also determined what those pigments were. They say that three fossilized marine reptiles they studied—a 190-million-year-old ichthyosaur, an 86-million-year-old mosasaur, and a 55-million-year-old leatherback turtle—probably had blackish skin like the modern-day leatherback turtle.
"This is the first time that we're reporting pigments, the animal's own biomolecules from reptile skin," says Johan Lindgren, a geologist at Lund University and the lead author on the new study.
Previous studies relied on a visual identification of those egg-shaped melanosomes. Lindgren's team went a step further by analyzing the chemistry of the structures and pigments in the samples. The molecule that causes black coloring, called eumelanin, had degraded over time but remained largely intact. It was enough to provide the first unequivocal evidence of pigmentation in the skin of a fossilized animal, says Maria McNamara, a paleontologist with the University of Bristol who was not involved in the study.
To identify the dark deposits, Lindgren's team fired a beam of ions at samples of the material. The ions broke up the material and sent fragments flying into a detector, which analyzed their chemical composition and confirmed that the dark deposits were eumelanin. Under the microscope, Lindgren's team showed that concentrations of eumelanin peaked in areas with the highest density of the tiny egg-shaped structures—suggesting the structures were indeed melanosomes, not bacterial cells.
Most studies up to now have tried to learn the coloration of ancient organisms by studying fossilized feathers, because feathers are tougher and more resistant to decay and their melanosomes are more densely packed than in skin. Lindgren's study opens the door to reconstruct coloration in a wider range of species, including nonfeathered dinosaurs.
That's important because an animal's color can say a lot about its behavior. Color can be used as camouflage, to signal to mates, or to flash a warning to potential aggressors. Lindgren's team hypothesizes that the black coloration helped ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, and ancient leatherback turtles to absorb extra heat. That would be helpful if, like modern-day leatherbacks, the large reptiles ranged into the icy waters of the Arctic Circle.
The distribution of dark pigment around the fossil ichthyosaur suggested the animal was uniformly dark-colored. "That's pretty neat, because most marine animals have a dark back and a white belly," Lindgren says. "If you look at sperm whales today, they have a uniform coloration. Ichthyosaurs are also inferred deep divers, so it's an interesting similarity."
There appears to be a limit to how well scientists can reconstruct ancient coloration. Some non-melanic pigments (which can be responsible for red, yellow, and blue coloration) don't preserve as well as melanin-based pigments. Still, "the glass is half-full as opposed to half-empty," says Patrick Orr, who studies fossil preservation at University College Dublin. "We're now getting data that, a decade ago, would have been impossible."
Orr predicts that this work is just the tip of the iceberg for fossil pigmentation studies, which can now begin to link coloration patterns with different ecologies and chart how reptile color evolved over time.
Anne Schulp, who studies mosasaurs at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands, called the new research exciting. "As a paleontologist at a museum, I'm always trying to take our visitors back on a trip through time, and the more details we have the better the story gets. We can now do a little paint job on the marine reptiles—a paint job that's actually based on real research."
Passage 4 社科
The passage adapted from The Surprising Benefits of Sarcasmwen
文章内容：
文章主要讲述了讽刺的作用，常用来幽默地表达含蓄的不赞成或轻蔑。早期关于讽刺的研究探索了人们如何解释陈述，并验证了讽刺使陈述听起来更为重要。在其他一些研究当中，同时也揭示了讽刺口吻很容易被人误解以及在创造性任务中，讽刺性言语会增强人的创造力和认知。
整体文章难度不是很大，话题也比较常见，这篇文章应该是一篇拿分的文章。
英文原文：
Sarcasm involves constructing or exposing contradictions between intended meanings. It is the most common form of verbal irony—that is, allowing people to say exactly what they do not mean. Often we use it to humorously convey disapproval or scorn. “Pat, don't work so hard!” a boss might say, for example, on catching his assistant surfing the Web.
And yet behavioral scientists Li Huang of INSEAD business school, Adam D. Galinsky of Columbia University and I have found that sarcasm may also offer an unexpected psychological payoff: greater creativity. The use of sarcasm, in fact, appears to promote creativity for those on both the giving and receiving end of the exchange. Instead of avoiding snarky remarks completely, our research suggests that, used with care and in moderation, clever quips can trigger creative sparks.
Early research into how people interpret sarcastic statements revealed, as one might expect, that most perceive such comments as critical compared with more direct utterances. In one study, published in 1997, 32 participants read scenarios in which, for instance, one person did something that could be viewed negatively, such as smoking, and a second person commented on the behavior to the first person, either literally (“I see you don't have a healthy concern for your lungs”) or sarcastically (“I see you have a healthy concern for your lungs”). Consistently, participants rated sarcasm to be more condemning than literal statements.
In 2000 University of Western Ontario researchers encouraged 66 students to read a scenario while imagining the perspective of a certain person in the story, such as the viewpoint of someone making a critical comment or the person receiving that comment. Although there was some disagreement on how these comments might affect the relationship between a speaker and listener, perspective taking did not alter anyone's understanding of the speaker's intentions, such as mockery or a desire to provoke anger.
And sarcasm can be easily misinterpreted, particularly when it is communicated electronically, according to a 2005 study by Jason Parker and Zhi-Wen Ng, both then psychologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and their colleagues. They gave 30 pairs of university students a list of statements, half of which were sarcastic and half serious. Some students relayed messages via e-mail and others via voice recordings. Participants who received the voice messages accurately gleaned the sarcasm (or lack thereof) 73 percent of the time, but those who received the statements via e-mail did so only 56 percent of the time, hardly better than chance.
The e-mailers had anticipated that 78 percent of the participants would pick up on the sarcasm inherent in their messages. That is, they badly overestimated their ability to communicate the tenor of these statements via e-mail. And the recipients of the sarcastic e-mails were even more overconfident. They guessed they would correctly interpret the tone of the e-mail messages about 90 percent of the time. They were much better at gauging their ability to interpret voice messages.
In 2015 my colleagues and I discovered an upside to this otherwise negative picture of sarcasm. In one study, we asked 56 participants to choose a script that was sarcastic, sincere or neutral and then engage in simulated conversation with another subject, who was unaware of the script.
Immediately after our participants enacted the dialogue, we presented them with tasks testing their creativity. For instance, they had to think of a word that was logically linked to a set of three provided words (for example, “manners,” “round” and “tennis” linked to “table”). We also presented them with a short questionnaire about their perceived sense of conflict during the conversation.
Not surprisingly, the participants exposed to sarcasm reported more interpersonal conflict than those in other groups. More interestingly, those pairs who had engaged in a sarcastic conversation fared better on the creativity tasks. This effect emerged for both the deliverer and recipient in the simulated conversation but only when the recipient had picked up on the sarcasm in the script.
Why might verbal irony enhance creativity? Sarcasm's challenge is that the message sounds serious but should not be taken literally. One way to overcome this is through tone—as when exaggerated speech indicates the facetiousness of a message. We need to think outside the box to generate and decipher ironic comments. That means sarcasm may lead to clearer, more creative thinking.
Passage 5 科学
The passage adapted from City Rabbits, Like Humans, Live in Smaller Homes
文章内容：
捕猎、栖息地丧失和疾病使西欧国家的欧洲兔子数量减少。然而，在德国的一些城市，兔子的数量却上下浮动。
法兰克福大学的研究人员在法兰克福的九个城市公园里搜寻兔子洞，另外还有四个郊区公园和三个附近的农村地区。他们总共发现了191个洞穴。他们发现，在黎明和黄昏，是兔子最活跃的时候。随着“都市化”的增加，兔子洞穴变得越来越常见。与乡村相比，城市的洞穴更小，也更简单。城市兔子可能会像在农村那样，最终聚集成大洞穴 。一个原因可能是热。另一个原因是，当兔子的资源有限时，它们往往以兔群的形式生活，了解野兔的栖息习惯对于人类保护他们非常重要。
英文原文：
Imagine you’re on a particularly boring leg of a road trip and you start counting houses. You pass through long stretches of country without counting anything. When you do see houses, they’re clustered into towns, and may have spacious yards with tire swings. As you approach a city (finally!), rows of houses appear at regular intervals instead of clumping. And in the heart of the city they shrink into little apartments that go by too fast for you to count. European rabbits, it turns out, build their homes in a similar way—and since these animals are disappearing in the countryside, understanding their urban planning strategy matters to humans trying to conserve them.
Hunting, habitat loss, and disease have driven down populations of European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) in the countrysides of western Europe. Yet rabbit populations in some German cities are, well, hopping. Madlen Ziege, a graduate student at the University of Frankfurt, and her coauthors wanted to know how rabbits are taking advantage of urban areas. They chose the city of Frankfurt, where European rabbits have lived alongside humans since at least 1930.
The researchers scoured nine city parks in Frankfurt for rabbit burrows, along with four more suburban parks and three nearby rural sites. In all, they found 191 burrows. Then they rated each site for its “urbanity,” a measure that included three variables: How many people live within half a kilometer of the burrow site? How many pedestrians, bikers, or dogs pass by at dawn and dusk, when rabbits are most active? And how much of the ground is covered by something artificial, such as pavement or playground turf?
Like census-takers, albeit with a serious language barrier, the researchers tried to count how many rabbits lived in each burrow. For a few dozen burrows, they did this by tagging along with a regular hunting group that flushed the rabbits from their holes with trained ferrets. At other sites, the researchers staked out burrows at dawn and dusk and tallied how many rabbits came and went. They also counted burrow entrances to estimate how big each home was.
As “urbanity” increased—as sites became less rural and more city-like—rabbit burrows became more common. Urban burrows were smaller and simpler, like studio apartments compared to country estates. And while rural burrows were spread out and clumped, like the rural houses on our imaginary road trip, urban burrows were spaced out more evenly.
Ziege writes that the results could easily have been the opposite. Since cities cover up more ground up with pavement and buildings, breaking potential habitat into fragments, city rabbits might end up clustered into big burrows like they do in the countryside. Instead, they’re spread out into small homes.
One reason might be heat. Big groups of rabbits keep their burrows toastier in the winter—but cities are a little warmer to begin with, so living with a lot of warm bodies might not be as important. In the countryside, large burrows with many entrances and escape routes also help protect rabbits from predators. But in the city, there are fewer predators.
Finally, rabbits tend to live in large groups when their resources are limited. In German cities, they may be spreading out because there’s no shortage of food or burrowing space. Country life may mean hunger and hunting ferrets, but for urban rabbits, life is (so far) good.
2、SAT语法部分
语法部分难度中等，基础语法部分涉及到的重难点及易错考点主要有run-on sentence, logical comparison, verb usage之时态和主谓一致, 句中标点之逗号、分号、冒号、破折号、撇号的考查。主要还是考查学生是否细心。
Passage 1
Movable books: Precursor for Pop-ups
中世纪晚期，很多新颖的发明出现。movable books就是比较出彩的发明之一。比如，有些打开书之后有小窗能看到隐藏的插画等。有位德国的插画家做了一本书，书中会跳出一只纸质的小狮子提醒孩子们读书时要特别小心，不要破坏书中的各种小机关。一按书中的小标签等就会出现可活动的插画和场景。书里面有八首诗，对应八种不同的可移动设计。这位德国插画家会把详细的操作指南写出来指导制作，由于这个过程需要很高的技术水平，所以这种书当时仅限于富人阶层，但是由于因特网的盛行，现在人们可以从网上看到了。
Passage 2
Monopolizing: the Landlord Board Game
1935年monopoly（地产大亨或大富翁）游戏发明以后，就深受大家喜爱，这种游戏中，人们进行买卖挣钱，并付房租等交易活动，赢家获得一切，这种反映了资本主义经济中的残酷的竞争。伊丽莎白麦基对这种游戏不太认同，因为她认为这游戏体现了公共财产（比如土地）私有化的罪恶，少数人获取大量利益，大部分人只能分得少量。她改进设计了landlord board game，比如允许分享财产，并允许玩家根据自己兴趣形成自己的游戏版本。这时一位叫Charles的年轻人抓住机会，在此基础上建立一套标准的游戏模式，被原发明收购版权，两者获得百万利润，而这件事正好体现了麦基所反对的资本主义的少数者拥有大量财富。
Passage 3
The insulation work is heating up
这是一篇职业类型的文章。隔热层能够节省一部分能量，insulation成为大家比较热衷的新兴产业，并且大家喜欢的是环境友好，并且摒弃了不可持续的一种foam材料，用了环保的物质，可持续的隔层材料，而这样的材料的应用是labor-consuming的，于是两种insulating workers(一种是家用的隔热材料安装的工人，一种是商业的隔热材料安装工人)的职业前景无比光明，在2020 年前的需求都有大量增长。
Passage 4
Neither wind nor ice nor gloom of the night
这篇是关于在mountain Washington 一次自然天气事件记录的文章。由于大西洋的高压系统和五大湖的低压系统在华盛顿山这里聚集，造成了打风暴雪天气。在附近的观测台的检测设备开始被暴风雪损坏，后来安装好新的之后，监测到风速136m/h，一名叫Stephenson的工作人员，看到数据后，根据窗外的风速看，风速应比监测数据要大，于是他自己到户外用传统仪器测到了164m/h的分速。最后最高风速有213m/h。这是人工检测的最高时速。
3、SAT数学部分
Section 3
数学非计算器部分一如既往的较为简单，对考生基本构不成威胁。
涉及到的知识点：
1、一元一次函数和二元一次函数依然是考试的重点，以应用题和带图表的选择题居多。
2、一次函数中斜率知识点的考察依旧是重点。
这部分题目大部分比较简单，但是一元一次函数中有一道关于加速度的应用题作为填空题目出现，难度较高，主要因为题面意思较难理解，很多同学可能因为读不懂题目而失分。
题目翻译过来大概是这样的：在地球上物体的加速度是Mercury上的三倍还少1.3，给出Mercury上物体的加速度，求地球上的对应数据。
3、指数函数题目和三角函数比较简单，三角函数出了一道题：在直角三角形中已知sin A的值，求sin B
Section 4
跟我们一直以来强调的比较一致，SAT数学的考点难度没有变化，但是题干部分越来越长，变相的考察学生的阅读能力。
重点关注：
1、第四部分相比三月份难度简单一些， 不过对许多同学来说难点可能在两道box plot 选择题上，其中一道是看图选中位数。
2、三次函数考了一道选择题，看图像选择函数表达式。
3、散点图考察lines of best fit 依旧是老考点，好在这次非常简单，出了一个选择题，看图把数据带入y=kx+b 就可以。
此外，知识点方面，统计推断，3M，统计推断也有出现和考察，而且整体难度不高。
4、SAT写作部分
这次写作的文章题目依然取材于纽约时报，关于性别薪酬的问题，这类文章比较贴近考生日常学习，写起来相对容易。
Adapted from Joanne Lipman “Let’s Expose the Gender Pay Gap” © 2015 The New York Times Company. Originally published Aug. 13, 2015
1 HOW serious are we, really, about tackling income equality? . . .
2 More than a half-century after President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the gap between what men and women earn has defied every effort to close it. And it can’t be explained away as a statistical glitch, a function of women preferring lower-paying industries or choosing to take time off for kids.
3 Claudia Goldin, a labor economist at Harvard, has crunched the numbers and found that the gap persists for identical jobs, even after controlling for hours, education, race and age. Female doctors and surgeons, for example, earn 71 percent of what their male colleagues make, while female financial specialists are paid just 66 percent as much as comparable men. Other researchers have calculated that women one year out of college earn 6.6 percent less than men after controlling for occupation and hours, and that female M.B.A. graduates earn on average $4,600 less than their male classmates for their first jobs.
4 It’s not that men are intentionally discriminating against women—far from it. I’ve spent the past year interviewing male executives for a book about men and women in the workplace. A vast majority of them are fair-minded guys who want women to succeed. They’re absolutely certain that they don’t have a gender problem themselves; it must be some other guys who do. Yet they’re leaders of companies that pay men more than women for the same jobs.
5 Women are trying mightily to close that chasm on their own. Linda Babcock, an economist at Carnegie Mellon and co-author of the book “Women Don’t Ask,” has found that one reason for the disparity is that men are four times more likely to ask for a raise than women are, and that when women do ask, we ask for 30 percent less. And so women are told we need to lean in, to demand to be paid what we’re worth. It’s excellent advice—except it isn’t enough.
6 There is an antidote to the problem. Britain recently introduced a plan requiring companies with 250 employees or more to publicly report their own gender pay gap. It joins a handful of other countries, including Austria and Belgium, that have introduced similar rules. (In the United States, President Obama last year signed a presidential memorandum instructing federal contractors to report wage information by gender and race to the Department of Labor.) The disclosures “will cast sunlight on the discrepancies and create the pressure we need for change, driving women’s wages up,” Prime Minister David Cameron said last month.
7 Critics of the British plan protest that it’s too expensive and complex. Some contend that it doesn’t address the root of the problem: systemic issues that block women from higher-paying industries, and social issues like unconscious bias.
8 But real-world results suggest otherwise. Last year, the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers voluntarily released its gender pay gap in Britain, one of five firms in the country, including AstraZeneca, to do so. Simply saying the number out loud “created much more momentum internally” to close it, Sarah Churchman, who runs the firm’s British diversity and inclusion efforts, told me.
9 PricewaterhouseCoopers’s analysis showed that most of its 15.1 percent pay disparity (compared with a Britain-wide gap of more than 19 percent) reflected a lack of women in senior jobs. So the firm focused on whether it was promoting fairly. In 2013, the grade just below partner was 30 percent female, yet only 16 percent of those promoted to partner were women. A year later, the percentage of women promoted to partner had more than doubled. . .
10 The potential cost savings of publishing the gender wage gap are enormous. About 20 percent of large companies now train employees to recognize unconscious bias, spending billions of dollars to try to stamp out unintentional discrimination. Paying for a salary analysis is cheaper and potentially more effective. Evidence also suggests that less secrecy about pay results in greater employee loyalty and lower turnover. . . .
11 Political realities being what they are, the chances of achieving [full] transparency are slim; even the tepid C.E.O. pay gap rule took the S.E.C. five years to push through, in the face of fierce industry opposition.
12 But why would we not want a measure that will settle the controversy over the pay gap with quantifiable facts? Shining some much-needed sunlight on the gender wage gap will make a difference for every one of us, men and women, right now.
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