留园文化新SAT测试题

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2024年6月8日发(作者：)

SAT Practice Test 17 Passage1

Reading Test

Questions 1-10 are based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from MacDonald Harris,

The Balloonist. ©2011 by The Estate of Donald Heiney.

During the summer of 1897, the narrator of this story, a

fictional Swedish scientist, has set out for the North Pole

in a hydrogen-powered balloon.

My emotions are complicated and not

readily verifiable. I feel a vast yearning that is

simultaneously a pleasure and a pain. I am certain

of the consummation of this yearning, but I don’t

know yet what form it will take, since I do not

understand quite what that yearning desires.

For the first time there is borne in upon me the full

truth of what I myself said to the doctor only an hour

ago: that my motives in this undertaking are not

entirely clear. For years, for a lifetime, the machinery

of my destiny has worked in secret to prepare for this

moment; its clockwork has moved exactly toward

this time and place and no other. Rising slowly from

the earth that bore me and gave me sustenance, I am

carried helplessly toward an uninhabited and hostile,

or at best indifferent, part of the earth, littered with

the bones of explorers and the wrecks of ships, frozen

supply caches, messages scrawled with chilled fingers

and hidden in cairns that no eye will ever see.

Nobody has succeeded in this thing, and many have

died. Yet in freely willing this enterprise, in choosing

this moment and no other when the south wind

will carry me exactly northward at a velocity of

eight knots, I have converted the machinery of my

will. What I don’t understand is why I

am so intent on going to this particular place. Who

wants the North Pole! What good is it! Can you eat

it? Will it carry you from Gothenburg to Malmö like

a railway? The Danish ministers have declared from

their pulpits that participation in polar expeditions is

beneficial to the soul’s eternal well-being, or so I read

in a newspaper. It isn’t clear how this doctrine is to

be interpreted, except that the Pole is something

difficult or impossible to attain which must

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

55

nevertheless be sought for, because man is

condemned to seek out and know everything

whether or not the knowledge gives him pleasure. In

short, it is the same unthinking lust for knowledge

that drove our First Parents out of the garden.

And suppose you were to find it in spite of all, this

wonderful place that everybody is so anxious to stand

on! What would you find? Exactly nothing.

A point precisely identical to all the others in a

completely featureless wasteland stretching around it

for hundreds of miles. It is an abstraction, a

mathematical fiction. No one but a Swedish madman

could take the slightest interest in it. Here I am. The

wind is still from the south, bearing us steadily

northward at the speed of a trotting dog. Behind us,

perhaps forever, lie the Cities of Men with their

teacups and their brass bedsteads. I am going forth of

my own volition to join the ghosts of Bering and

poor Franklin, of frozen De Long and his men.

What I am on the brink of knowing, I now see, is not

an ephemeral mathematical spot but myself. The

doctor was right, even though I dislike him.

Fundamentally I am a dangerous madman, and what

I do is both a challenge to my egotism and a

surrender to it.

1．Over the course of the passage, the narrator’s attitude shifts from

A) fear about the expedition to excitement about it.

B) doubt about his abilities to confidence in them.

C) uncertainty of his motives to recognition of them.

D) disdain for the North Pole to appreciation of it.

答案：C，情感态度题（需要用瞬时记忆解题或是查看下一题是否为Command of Evidence

题）。原文25-27行(“What …Pole!”)对应uncertainty；原文54-55行(What …myself.”)对应

recognition

disdain vt. 蔑视（新SAT核心词）

appreciation n. 欣赏（托福核心词）

2．Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

A) Lines 10-12 (“For . . . moment”)

B) Lines 21-25 (“Yet . . . will”)

C) Lines 40-42 (“And . . . stand on”)

D) Lines 54-55 (“What . . . myself”)

答案：D，Command of Evidence题

3．As used in lines 1-2, “not readily verifiable” most nearly means

A) unable to be authenticated.

B) likely to be contradicted.

C) without empirical support.

D) not completely understood.

答案：D，词汇题

authenticate vt. 证实（新SAT核心词）

contradict vt. 否定（新SAT核心词）

empirical adj. 经验的（新SAT核心词）

4．The sentence in lines 10-13 (“For years . . . other”) mainly serves to

A) expose a side of the narrator that he prefers to keep hidden.

B) demonstrate that the narrator thinks in a methodical and scientific manner.

C) show that the narrator feels himself to be influenced by powerful and independent forces.

D) emphasize the length of time during which the narrator has prepared for his expedition.

答案：C，修辞目的题，本题表面是推理题，本质却是一道细节题。10-13的文章清晰的表

达出了一个观点---作者到北极去，是受到一股力量（命运destiny）的指引

5．The narrator indicates that many previous explorers seeking the North Pole have

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