What is on the act
The questions are not ordered by difficulty, so it’s fine to choose your own order as long as you’re not wasting valuable time trying to decide where to start. Some students skip around so they can answer questions about their favorite subjects first. (For more information on how the ACT is scored, check out this article.) If you feel much more confident about reading about the natural sciences than about social studies, for example, you might choose to locate that passage in your Reading section and do that one first. Not only can that help boost your confidence, it can ensure that you’re answering as many questions as you can correctly. The essay was taken from Audiences and Intentions: A Book of Arguments (1994). This passage is adapted from “A Poem of One’s Own,” an essay by Mary Jo Salter in which she discusses feminist literary critics’ recent reappraisal of women’s writing. This passage is adapted from the novel The Men of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor (1998).Īrchitecture, art, dance, ethics, film, language, literary criticism, music, philosophy, radio, television, and theater Short stories, excerpts from novels, memoirs, or personal essays In this selection, the term neuron refers to a specialized cell of the nervous system, and tomography refers to a method of producing three-dimensional images of internal structures. This passage is adapted from the article “How to Build a Baby’s Brain” by Sharon Begley (1997 by Newsweek, Inc.). Atkinson (1981).Īnatomy, astronomy, biology, botany, chemistry, ecology, geology, medicine, meteorology, microbiology, natural history, physiology, physics, technology, and zoology This passage is adapted from the chapter “Personality Disorders” in Introduction to Psychology, edited by Rita L. Passage SubjectĪnthropology, archaeology, biography, business, economics, education, geography, history, political science, psychology, and sociology As you can see with the Natural Sciences passage, the blurb might define any subject-specific words that you might need to know to understand the text.Ī typical social studies passage might be taken from a textbook, a natural sciences passage from a scientific article, a literary narrative direct from a novel, and a humanities passage from an essay or memoir. Since these topics can cover a large number of subtopics, this chart breaks it down a little more specifically, along with some examples of passage sources from sample ACT Reading questions that introduce passages and help you put them into context. Everything you need to know to answer the questions will be right there in the text. You’re not expected to have any preexisting knowledge about any of the passage topics. The five passages on the ACT Reading section always come from these four topic areas: humanities, social studies, natural sciences, and prose fiction/literary narrative. Let’s take a look at the subject areas from which the passages are taken. Just like the order of sections, the ACT Reading section is consistent in what kinds of passages it presents to you. This can be really good timing, as the first two sections get you warmed up and then you have a quick break to refresh and refocus. In terms of the entire test, the Reading section is the third section you do, right after you have a break. This is a doable task, but you’ll want to spend some time working on the best ways to manage your time. While you theoretically have 52 seconds to answer each multiple choice question, in actuality, it will be considerably less since you’ll be spending a portion of your time reading. This chart shows the breakdown of the time allotment per question on the ACT Reading section: Section Each of these questions has four answer choices, A, B, C, and D (or F, G, H, J). Since there are four different categories of passage, this means 10 questions after each one. There are three single passages and one set of paired passages (usually either in the Prose Fiction or Humanities subject areas). The ACT Reading section asks 40 questions in 35 minutes. This article breaks down exactly what’s on this section of the ACT so you can plan your best approach.įirst, let’s consider how the ACT Reading section is formatted. Just like the ACT has four different sections, the ACT Reading section has four different types of passages for you to read.