The ACT: This, Too, Shall Pass(age) - Sailing Through the Reading Test

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Facing Forty (Questions): The Reading Test

The Reading Test consists of four passages.  Each passage is supposed to be similar in difficulty to materials you encounter during your freshman year of college.  The test contains one passage on each of the following topics:

Humanities: This passage can be about music, dance, theater, art, architecture, language, ethics, literary criticism, and even philosophy.  Most students tend to like these passages because (believe it or not) they are actually interesting.

Social studies: The social studies passage covers sociology, anthropology, history, geography, psychology, political science, and economics.  That's an incredibly wide range of topics when you think about it.  The history passage usually are pretty good; some of the psychology ones can be intense.

Natural sciences: This passage is what most people think about when they say "science." The natural science passage can cover chemistry, biology, physics, and other physical sciences.

Are you panicking right now, screaming, "I haven't taken physics!  No fair!" Not to worry.  The questions don't require you to know any particular subjects.  Everything you'll need to answer the questions is right here in the passages, and you can go back to the passages as often as you like.

Prose fiction: The fiction passage can be taken from a novel or can be a short story.  Some of these are very fun to read.  But don't expect that you'll have read them before.  In all the years I've been teaching, I've only had one student tell me she remembers having read the passage before in a novel.  The ACT test-makers obviously don't want to test you on what you are familar with (and maybe have even discussed in class), but on how well you evaluate a passage that is new to you.

Each passage has 10 questions, for a grand total of 40 questions.

Timing

The Reading Test is 35 minutes long.  Assuming you live to an average age of 72, the Reading Test, therefore, is only about 1/1,081,975th of your life.  Now that doesn't seem so bad, does?

Scoring

You get three reading scores.  One is the total score, based on all 40 questions.  Then you get two subscores: one in natural sciences/social studies (based, obviously, on those two passages) and one on arts/literature (based on those two passages).

Reading Strategies

You've been reading since you were about 5 years old.  It's a little late for me to teach you the basics. What I can do, however, is teach you how to make the best use of your time in this test. (After all, 35 minutes for four passages and 40 questions means you have only about 8 or 9 minutes per passage.  That's not a great deal of time for most people).

1. Preview

You are naturally going to like one type of passage more than the others.  Look for it and do it first, being extremely careful to shade in the correct bubbles on your answer grid.  (When you skip around, it's easy to mess up the grid).

What happens if your brain takes a little vacation and you suddenly find you've filled in the bubbles all wrong?  Maybe you started off by reading passage 2, with questions 11-20, but you filled in the bubbles for questions 1-10?  Hey, you laugh now, but that's easy to do.  The first reaction usually is panic: first you erase all your answers, and then you try to remember what they were.  Bad move,  Here's how to handle this problem: As you answer a question, first circle the correct response in your booklet, and then fill in the bubble for that response on the answer grid.  This way, if you mess up and have to erase your answer grid, you can just glance at your answer booklet and find the right answers again.