本书收录近年SSAT的回忆版真题，依照阅读的实际考查方向，分为12个专题，分别是：盎格鲁-撒克逊时期，中世纪，英国的文艺复兴，灵感，批判与讽刺，继续生活，自然与幻想，真与美，情感的回应，永久的印象，幻觉与幻灭，现代视角这种细致的分类，可以更好地帮助考生理解阅读文章，开阔眼界，陶冶情操，提升文化修养。另外，在每个专题下配以阅读练习和与真题难度想当的经典阅读文章，并附有参考答案（电子版）。

通过阅读本书，考生们在提升语言技能的同时，也可以学到历史上的一些思想和哲理精华。掌握一门语言，并不仅仅是张口蹦出几句流行语，或是见了外国人寒暄几句就可以了。一门语言象征着一个民族，也代表着这个民族看待与诠释世界的方式。毫无疑问，学习英语的真正目的是发掘与之相关的民族的历史文化。

Chapter 1 The Anglo-Saxon Period

Beowulf

Chapter 2 The Middle Ages

Geoffrey Chaucer

Chapter 3 The English Renaissance

Thomas More

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Henry Howard

Sir Edmund Spenser

Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Francis Bacon

Christopher Marlowe

Sir Walter Raleigh

William Shakespeare

Chapter 4 Inspirations

Thomas Campion

John Donne

Ben Jonson

Robert Herrick

Sir John Suckling

Richard Lovelace

George Herbert

Andrew Marvell

John Milton

Henry Vaughan

John Bunyan

Chapter 5 Criticism and Satire

John Dryden

Aphra Behn

Jonathan Swift

Alexander Pope

Joseph Addison

Chapter 6 Life Goes On

Daniel Defoe

Thomas Gray

Samuel Johnson

James Boswell

Chapter 7 The Natural and the Fantastic

Sir Walter Scott

Samuel Richardson

William Blake

Robert Burns

Mary Wollstonecraft

William Wordsworth

Dorothy Wordsworth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Robert Southey

Mary Shelley

Walter de La Mare

 Chapter 8 Truth and Beauty

George Gordon Lord Byron

Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Keats

Chapter 9 Emotional Responses

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Charles Lamb

Jane Austen

William Hazlitt

Charles Dickens

Charlotte Bronte

Emily Bronte

William Makepeace Thackeray

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Robert Browning

Matthew Arnold

Lewis Carroll

Christina Georgina Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

George Meredith

John Masefield

George Eliot

William Wilkie Collins

Chapter 10 Lasting Impressions

Charles Darwin

Thomas Hardy

Robert Louis Stevenson

Gerard Manley Hopkins

A. E. Housman

W. H. Hudson

Edward Morgan Forster

G. K. Chesterton

Chapter 11 Illusion and Disillusion

George Bernard Shaw

Rupert Brooke

Wilfred Owen

Siegfried Sassoon

Joseph Conrad

William Butler Yeats

Saki (Hector Hugh Monroe)

D. H. Lawrence

James Joyce

T. S. Eliot

Virginia Woolf

Stevie Smith

Katherine Mansfield

Bessie Head

Winston Churchill

Agatha Christie

W. W. Jacobs

Israel Zangwill

Chapter 12 Modern Perspectives

John Boynton Priestley

Bertrand Russell

Dorothy Sayers

Stephen Spender

Henry Reed

Dylan Thomas

George Orwell

Ted Hughes