Chapter 4

Mastering the English Test

In This Chapter

Knowing what skills the English Test tests

Understanding the way the ACT presents English questions

Avoiding falling for the ACT traps … or creating your own

When you open your ACT booklet, the first thing you see is the English Test. Your still-half-asleep brain and bleary eyes encounter 5 passages and 75 questions. Somehow, you’re to read all the passages and answer all the questions within 45 minutes. That may seem like a lot of questions in a little bit of time, but the English questions really aren’t super time-consuming. You’ll be fine. Just take a deep breath, and read on to discover everything you need to know to succeed on the English Test.

Figuring Out What the English Questions Want You to Know

The questions on the English Test fall into the following two categories:

• Usage and mechanics: A little more than half of the questions cover the ever-popular English topics of usage and mechanics. These questions include sentence structure (whether a sentence is a fragment or a run-on), grammar and usage (just about everything most people think of as English, such as adverbs, adjectives, and so on), and punctuation (don’t worry — this isn’t super hard; it’s mostly just commas and semicolons). In Chapter 5 we review the rules you need to know to master usage and mechanics questions.
• Rhetorical skills: Just less than half of the questions test rhetorical skills, such as organization (reordering the sentences in the passage), style (which expression, slang or formal, is appropriate within the passage), and strategy (“This passage would be most appropriate in which of the following types of books … ?”). Chapter 6 provides the tips and techniques you need to ace these questions.

Some questions are much more doable than others. For example, most students would agree that a simple grammar question asking about a pronoun reference or subject/verb agreement is easier to answer than an organization question expecting you to reposition a paragraph within the entire passage.

Seeing Is Believing: The Test’s Format

The ACT English Test passages look like standard reading comprehension passages — you know, the kind you’ve seen on tests for years. The difference is that these passages have many underlined portions. An underlined portion can be an entire sentence, a phrase, or even just one word. (You may want to take a quick look right now at the practice passage and questions in Chapter 7 to see what an English Test passage looks like. We’ll wait.)

Okay, you’re back. Here are the details about what information you get on the English Test and what you’re expected to do with it.

The passages

The five passages cover a variety of topics. You may get a fun story that’s a personal anecdote — someone talking about getting a car for his 16th birthday, for example. Or you may encounter a somewhat formal scientific passage about the way items are carbon-dated. Some passages discuss history; some, philosophy; others, cultural differences among nations. One type of passage is not necessarily more difficult than another. You don’t need to use specific reading techniques for these passages (as you do with standard reading comprehension passages). Just read and enjoy — and be prepared to answer the questions that accompany the passages (see the next section for details).

Although these English passages aren’t reading comprehension passages per se, you do need to pay at least a little attention to content instead of just focusing on the underlined portions. Why bother? Because a few of the questions are reading comprehension–type questions that ask you about the purpose of the passage or what a possible conclusion might be. More about those appears in Chapter 6

The question types

The English Test has few questions in the standard interrogatory form. You won’t see anything like “Which of the following is an adjective?” or “The purpose of the subjunctive is to do which of these?” Instead, you analyze underlined portions of passages and choose the answer that presents the underlined words in the best way possible. Thrown into the mix are several standard questions that ask you for the best writing strategy or the best way to organize sentences or paragraphs.

Analyzing underlined words

The majority of the test is about examining underlined words in a sentence. Your job is to determine whether the underlined portion is correct as is or whether one of the three alternate answer choices is preferable. The answer choices are (A), (B), (C), and (D) for the odd-numbered questions and (F), (G), (H), and (J) for the even-numbered questions. Choices (A) and (F) are often NO CHANGE. You select that choice if the original is the best of the versions offered. Occasionally, Choice (D) or (J) says, OMIT the underlined portion. Choose that answer when you want to dump the whole underlined portion and forget that you ever saw it. (And no, you can’t do that with the entire test!)

Approach these types of questions methodically:

1. Look for the obvious error or errors in the underlined words. Chapter 4 summarizes the kinds of errors to look for, such as pronoun or punctuation problems, word choice issues, redundancy, and subject/verb agreement mistakes.
2. Eliminate answer choices that don’t correct the error. If more than one choice corrects the error, choose the one that doesn’t create a new error.
3. If you don’t see an error, examine the answer choices to make sure you haven’t missed something. If none of the alternatives are better than the original, choose NO CHANGE.
4. Reread the sentence with the answer you’ve chosen inserted. Don’t skip this step. You may overlook a problem with your answer until you see how it works in the complete sentence.

Here’s an example to demonstrate how to use this approach.

A full case of sodas, when opened by a horde of thirsty athletes who have been running laps, don’t go very far.

(A)NO CHANGE

(B)do not go

(C)doesn’t go

(D)doesn’t get to go

The underlined part of the sentence contains a verb. Problems with verbs usually involve tense or subject/verb agreement. All the answers are in present tense, so the issue is probably subject/verb agreement. Find the subject that goes with “don’t go.” When you sift through the clauses and prepositional phrases, you see that the subject is case. Because case is singular, it requires the singular verb doesn’t. Eliminate Choices (A) and (B) immediately because they don’t correct the error. Choices (C) and (D) correct the verb problem, but Choice (D) adds unnecessary words and makes the sentence seem silly. So Choice (C) is correct.

Did you see the trap in this sentence? Some students think that sodas, athletes, or laps — each of which is plural — is the subject of the sentence. (Laps is especially tricky because it’s right next to the verb.) In that case, they think the verb has to be plural, too, and choose Choice (A). You didn’t fall for that cheap trick, did you?

Dealing with “yes, yes, no, no” questions

A few of the questions in the English Test ask you to strategize about content, style, and organization. These questions usually come right out and ask you a question about the passage. The best way to approach these questions is by eliminating answer choices that can’t be right.

Sometimes the answer to a question is a simple yes or no. Two of the answer choices provide the yes option; the other two give you the no option. First, you decide whether the answer to the question is yes or no. Then you choose the answer that provides the best reason for the yes or no answer.

Here’s an example. Say that this question appears in an excerpt from a stuffy scientific journal article. Most of the passage is written in third person, but one paragraph suddenly switches to first person.

Given the topic and the tone of the passage, was the author’s use of the pronoun I in this paragraph proper?

(F)Yes, because the only way to express an opinion is by using first person.

(G)Yes, because he was projecting his personal feelings onto the topic.

(H)No, because the use of I is inconsistent with the rest of the passage.

(J)No, because using I prevents the readers from becoming involved with the topic.

In this case, you’re expected to get a feel for the tone of the passage as a whole. You may think the best way to approach this question is to determine whether the answer is yes or no, but it may be easier to eliminate answers based on the because statements. Get rid of any choices that are outright false. Usually two of them obviously are wrong. In this case, Choices (F) and (J) can't be right; it’s simply not true that using first person is the only way to express an opinion and that using first person prevents readers from getting involved.

Now you have a 50 percent chance of answering the question correctly. Examine the statements in Choices (G) and (H). Because most of the passage is in third person, the one paragraph in first person probably isn’t right. So the answer to the question is most likely no. Thus, the correct answer is (H).

Their Pain, Your Gain: Looking Out for Traps That Others Fall into

We’ve taught the ACT for a couple of decades now. By this point, we’ve seen students fall for every trap the test makers have thought of — and some they probably never considered! Watch out for these most commonly tumbled-into traps:

• Forgetting the NO CHANGE option: Because the first answer choice — Choice (A) for odd-numbered questions, Choice (F) for even-numbered questions — may be NO CHANGE, students tend to gloss over it. Don’t forget that you usually have the option to keep things exactly the way they are.
• Automatically choosing OMIT each time it shows up: Although you may be tempted to shorten this section by screaming, “Dump it! Just dump the whole stupid thing!” every chance you get, don’t fall into that habit. When you see the OMIT answer — usually either Choice (D) or Choice (J) — realize that it has the same one-in-four chance of being right as the other answers have. Consider it, but don’t make it a no-brainer choice.
• Automatically selecting the “other” word or grammar choice: When you see who in a sentence, you’re often tempted to change it immediately to whom. Yet if that same sentence said whom to begin with, you’d immediately change it to who. The temptation to do something, anything, is very strong. Don’t change just for the sake of change.
• Wasting time on the time-consuming questions: Some of the rhetorical questions, like the relevance ones (“Would this essay be appropriate for a group of university professors?”), can be quite simple. But others, such as the ones that ask you to reposition sentences or complete paragraphs, can be incredibly time-wasting and frustrating. You may have to read and reread a paragraph, changing and rearranging the sentences again and again. You may be able to get the question right, but at what price? How much time do you chew up? How many more of the easy questions could you have gotten right in that time?

• Ignoring the big picture: Some questions are style questions. A style question expects you to sense the overall picture, to know whether the tone of the passage is friendly so that you can appropriately use a slang expression (for example, totally lame) or whether you need to be a bit more formal (useless rather than totally lame). If you focus on only the underlined portions and don’t skim the passage as a whole, you can easily miss this type of question.

  Even if a question doesn’t seem to expect you to understand the entire passage, you should still read a few sentences ahead of the question. How you correct a run-on or a fragment, for example, may depend on how the next few sentences are structured.