ACT阅读长难句

ACT 阅读长难句

1.In days gone by, when the only entertainment in town on a Wednesday night was to go to the county courthouse to listen to a prominent politician give a theatrical tirade against Herbert Hoover, an eloquent speaker could pack the courthouse and have five thousand people lined up to the railroad tracks listening to the booming loudspeakers.

2. Try sometime to explain the intricacies of a program budget, which basically involves solving a grand equation composed of numerous simultaneous

differential functions, to a reporter whose journalism school curriculum did not include advanced algebra, to say nothing of calculus.

3. Process and personalities, the way decisions are made and by whom, the level of perquisites, extramarital sexual relations, and in high offices, personal gossip dominate the public mind while interest in the substance of technical decisions is minimal.

4. When we recognize that in the federal government, with its millions of

employees, there are but five hundred and thirty-seven elected officials, put into office to carry out the \care less about the technical functioning of their government, the absurdity of the notion of rapid democratic responsiveness becomes clear.

5. I don’t wish to deny that the flattened, minuscule head of large-bodied

Stegosaurus houses little brain from our subjective, top-heavy perspective, but I do wish to assert that we should not expect more of the beast.

6. They knew my mother's slick bargaining skills, and she, in turn, knew how to navigate withgrace through their extravagant prices and rehearsed huffiness. 7. She preferred the improvisation of haggling to the conventional certainty of discount coupons, the primordial messiness and fish mongers' stink of the open-air market to the aroma-free order of individually wrapped fillets.

8. The most famous section of the Declaration of Independence, which has become the most quoted statement of human rights in recorded history as well as the most eloquent justification of revolution on behalf of them, went through the Continental Congress without comment and with only one very minor change.

9. All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness,

forecaste, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an

abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.\

10. This is an ingeniously double-edged explanation, for it simultaneously disavows any claims to originality and yet insists that he depended upon no specific texts or sources.

11. Given the character of the natural rights section of the Declaration, several generations of American interpreters have felt the irresistible impulse to bathe the scene in speckled light and cloudy mist, thereby implying that efforts to dispel the veil of mystery represent some vague combination of sacrilege and treason.

12. While it seems almost sacrilegious to suggest that the creative process that produced the Declaration was a cut-and-paste job, it strains credulity and

common sense to the breaking point to believe that Jefferson did not have these items at his elbow and draw liberally from them when drafting the Declaration. 13. Although television news programs helped focus the country on the rifts that had begun to percolate on campuses, in city streets, and around dining room tables, as a rule entertainment programming avoided conflict and controversy.

14. Goethe's color theory, his Farbenlehre (which he regarded as the equal of his entire poetic opus), was, by and large, dismissed by all his contemporaries and has remained in a sort of limbo ever since, seen as the whimsy, the pseudoscience, of a very great poet.

15. Color constancy, for him, was a special example of the way in which we achieve perceptual constancy generally, make a stable perceptual world from a chaotic sensory flux—a world that would not be possible if our perceptions were merely passive reflections of the unpredictable and inconstant input that bathes our receptors.

16. Maxwell... He formalized the notions of primary colors and color mixing by the invention of a color top (the colors of which fused, when it was spun, to yield a sensation of grey), and a graphic representation with three axes, a color triangle, which showed how any color could be created by different mixtures of the three primary colors.

17. These demonstrations, overwhelming in their simplicity and impact, were color \

neurological truth—that colors are not \

theory held) an automatic correlate of wavelength, but, rather, are constructed by the brain.

18. So she stood listening, in the same even breath and heart beat she kept when she spotted the wild pheasants with their long, lush tails trailing the grape arbor, picking delicately and greedily at the unpicked grapes in the early autumn light. 19. As to how the Martian valleys we see today might have formed without a warm atmosphere, it is suggested that the planet might have been covered by large expanses of ice and that the heat from Mars' interior could have thawed out hidden channels.

20. Breath held, Hattie watched him separate himself from the hopefuls and approach the stand, taking his time, moving with what almost seemed a deliberate pause between each Step.

21. Everett Payne took his time paying his respects to the tune as written, and once that was done, he hunched closer to the piano, angled his head sharply to the left completely closed the curtain of his gaze, and with his hands

commanding the length and breadth of the keyboard he unleashed a dazzling pyrotechnic of chords (you could almost see their colors), polyrhythms, seemingly unrelated harmonies, and ideas—fresh, brash, outrageous ideas. 22. There's a growing body of grim evidence to support our belief that the destruction of traditional downtowns and older neighborhoods—places that people care about—is corroding the very sense of community that helps bind us together as a people and as a nation.

23. By prohibiting mixed uses and mandating inordinate amounts of parking and unreasonable setback requirements, most current zoning laws make it impossible—even illegal—to create the sort of compact walkable environment that attracts us to older neighborhoods and historic communities all over the world.

24. Through the decades, filmi have tossed together everything from electro to salsa to surf music to funk with vocals that hint at ancient Indian traditions; there's a daring shamelessness to the way they steal from and one-up their sources.

25. But the spectacle of this man setting out in mid-winter to ride alone over an untracked distance of three thousand miles, the loyalty of this people, their peril from savages, as well as the cupidity of Great Britain, I count one of the finest on the page of pioneer history.

26. Two wild and strong streams of humanity, one from Oregon and the other from California, had glowed inharmoniously, tumultuously, together on and there, down in the deep canon that cleft the wide and wintry valley through the middle, this stream of life stopped, as a river that is frozen.

27. A Gallup poll recently reported that although most Americans feel

compassion for homeless men and women they encounter on the street, many are puzzled, not knowing how to react to this growing problem that seemed to emerge out of nowhere.

28. But many mentally ill homeless also come into contact with the criminal justice system asoffenders, arrested as they engage in such illegal activities as trespassing, petty theft, shoplifting, and prostitution—often crimes of survival under the most desperate of conditions, and a direct result of their mental illness.

29. Lieutenant Santierra, little more than a boy at the time, and unused as yet to the sanguinary imbecilities of a state of war, had lingered nearby, as if

fascinated by the sight of these men who were to be shot presently —\example\—as the Commandante had said.

30. The prisoners crowded towards the window, begging their guards for a drop of water; but the soldiers remained lying in indolent attitudes wherever there was a little shade under a wall, while the sentry sat with his back against the door smoking a cigarette, and raising his eyebrows philosophically from time to time.

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