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SAT阅读考题重点考察考生的美国大学教材的快速阅读能力、理解能力及判断能力。SAT阅读除了检测考生的词汇量外，还要考察考生的理解及判断的综合能力。下面来看一篇阅读材料：A Brief History of Western Music。 Western music is generally broken down into six periods. Each of these periods have certain characteristics which have shaped it and remained with it throughout its duration. However, lesser characteristics may change within any given period, and so you have works which fall into, say, the early Romantic period as opposed to the late Romantic. The Medieval Period Prior to about 900, nearly all the music we have any record of is a simple, one line structure called a plainchant. This was made up of one melodic line sung in unison by everybody. More complex music existed, but as it was secular and not sacred, we have very few, if any, written accounts of it. Gradually, over the next 500 years, people began to expand on this simple structure by adding voices. At first, these voices sung a fixed interval1 above or below the original line. This was called an organum. At some point, someone got the idea of having two different lines moving at the same time but not having a fixed interval. Usually the higher of these lines would be fairly florid, while the lower was a slower, pre-existing plainchant2. | 
