To pursue a perfect or near-perfect score on the Reading Test, you have to employ superior critical thinking and time-management skills. To go from good to great, you have to be flexible, willing to try a variety of approaches and find the best strategy for you. The passages change on every ACT, so you have to be willing to adapt to variations and switch up strategies mid-test and even mid-passage when one isn’t working.
We’ll teach you how to evaluate the order you work the passages. We’ll also review strategies for working the passages and distinguishing among close answers, all to help you pursue perfection on the Reading Test.
On the Reading Test, you have 35 minutes to work though four passages and a total of 40 questions. The category, or genre, of the passages always appears in the same order: Prose Fiction, Social Science, Humanities, and Natural Science. The passages are roughly the same length, 800-850 words, and each is followed by 10 questions.
Within the four categories, ACT selects excerpts from books and articles to create one long passage or two shorter passages. For each test, they choose four new passages, but the topics are always chosen from the same content areas of study.
The passages can be excerpts from novels or short stories, or even short stories in their entirety. While there are occasionally uses of historical fiction, most passages are contemporary, emphasize diversity, and often center on family relationships.
Topics are drawn from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, biography, business, economics, education, geography, history, political science, psychology, and sociology.
These passages are nonfiction, but they are usually memoirs or personal essays that can read much like fiction. Topics include architecture, art, dance, ethics, film, language, literary criticism, music, philosophy, radio, television, and theater.
Content areas include anatomy, astronomy, biology, botany, chemistry, ecology, geology, medicine, meteorology, microbiology, natural history, physiology, physics, technology, and zoology.
The passages feature authors and topics that the ACT writers judge typical of the type of reading required in first-year college courses. And your goal, according to ACT, is to read the passages and answer questions that prove you understood both what was “directly stated” as well as what were the “implied meanings.”
If you are pursuing a perfect or near-perfect score, you likely are already doing a very good job of reading the passages and finding both the directly stated and implied meanings. To go from good to great, evaluate your current approach and determine whether (and how) it can be improved.
You can work the passages in the order ACT presents, if you like that order. But there is no rule that says you have to do them in ACT’s order, and we recommend working the passages in an order that works best for you and makes best use of the time constraints.
We recommend working first the passages you like best and/or typically perform best on. A tough passage can easily steal too much time from the others, and if you rush through the rest (or even run out of time), you’re giving up points you otherwise could have banked.
If you have already taken a fair number of practice tests, analyze your performance:
• Regardless of where it is in your order, do you consistently do the best on social science and natural science? If so, then consider starting with those two.
• Do you usually prefer the prose fiction and humanities to the social science and natural science? Do you consistently earn more points out of those passages? If so, consider completing both before tackling the other two.
• Do you rarely read fiction outside of school? If so, then the prose fiction is unlikely to be a smart choice to do first.
Here is some additional information about the four categories to help you reflect on your own Personal Order of Difficulty (POOD).
Facts may matter less than do the setting, the atmosphere, and the relationships between characters. The plot and dialogue may even be secondary to the characters’ thoughts and emotions, not all of which will be directly stated. In fact, the questions are more likely to involve identifying the implied meanings than what was directly stated.
If you like to read fiction for school assignments or for pleasure, you may find the prose fiction one of the easier passages. If you don’t like to read fiction, you may find the passages unclear and confusing.
Social science passages should remind you of the papers you write for school. The organization will flow logically with clear topic sentences and well-chosen transitions to develop the main idea. The author may have a point of view on the subject or may simply deliver informative facts in a neutral tone.
Humanities passages are nonfiction, but if they are memoirs or personal essays, they may feel similar to the fiction passages. The narrative may use a more organic development instead of a linear one, and the tone will be more personal and perhaps more emotional than the more objective tones found in social and natural science. In other cases, the Humanities passage has the same objective tone and organization as the science passages, differing only in featuring a topic related to the arts.
Natural science passages feature a lot of details and sometimes very technical
descriptions. Similar to the social science, the natural science passage features a linear organization with clear topic sentences and transitions to develop the main idea. The author may or may not have an opinion on the topic.
The next time you take a practice Reading Test, incorporate this analysis and adjust your order and analyze the results. With enough practice and self-analysis, you will be able to determine your Personal Order of Difficulty (POOD).
Each ACT features all new passages, and certain characteristics may vary enough to affect the difficulty of a passage. Pay attention to the particulars of each test and be willing to adapt your order for that day’s test.
• Paragraphs: smaller and many are better than big and few
• Questions: the more line references, the better
• Answers: short are better than long
The passages all run roughly the same number of words (800-850), and each features 10 questions followed by four answer choices. But the way the passages, questions, and answers look can provide valuable clues that you should use to determine that day’s order.
Which passage would you rather work, one with eight to 10 medium-sized paragraphs or one with three huge paragraphs? The overall length is the same, but the size and number of the paragraphs influences how easily you can navigate the passage and retrieve answers as you work the questions.
Some fiction passages can feature too many paragraphs, with each paragraph an individual line of dialogue. Too many paragraphs can make it just as difficult to locate the right part of the passage to find answers.
Ideally, a passage should feature eight to 10 paragraphs, with each paragraph made up of five to 15 lines.
The questions on the Reading Test don’t follow a chronological order of the passage, and not every question comes with a line reference. Line references (and paragraph references) are maps, pointing to the precise part of the passage to find the answer. You waste no time getting lost, hunting through the passage to find where to read. Therefore, a passage with only one or two line or paragraph reference questions will be more challenging than one that features four, five, six, or more (eight is the most we’ve ever seen).
Long answers usually answer harder questions, and short answers usually answer easier questions. A passage with lots of questions with short answers is a good sign of an easier passage.
On some tests, the four passages are fairly uniform in the number and size of the paragraphs, in the number of questions with line reference features and short answers. However, on other tests, these characteristics can vary widely and the presence or absence of these features can indicate a more difficult passage.
Look at the passages to evaluate the paragraphs, line references, and answer choices. Don’t thoughtfully ponder and consider each element, and don’t read through the questions.
Use your eye to scan the paragraphs, look for numbers amidst the questions, and the length of answer choices. If you see lots of warning signs on what is typically your first passage, leave it for Later. If you see great paragraphs, line references, and lots of short answers on the passage you typically do Later, consider bumping it up to second, maybe first. This should take no more than two seconds.
In Chapter 20, we’ll teach you the basic approach of how to attack the passage and the questions, and in that lesson we’ll go into more depth about how to order the questions.
The only order you need to know now is the one we recommend avoiding: ACT’s. The questions aren’t in chronological order, nor are they in any order of difficulty from easiest to hardest. You shouldn’t work the questions in the order given just because ACT numbered them in order.
Work the questions in an order that makes sense for you.
Do Now questions that are easy to answer or easy to find the answer.
A question that is easy to answer often simply asks what the passage says, or as ACT puts it, what is directly stated. ACT in fact calls these “Referring questions,” requiring the use of your “referral skills” (ACT’s words, not ours) to find the right part of the passage. Referring questions don’t require much reasoning; the answer will be right there in the passage, waiting in black and white, and the correct answer will be barely paraphrased, if at all. Most answers are also relatively short: That’s why many questions with short answers reliably predict an easier passage.
A question with a line or a paragraph reference comes with a map, showing you where in the passage to find the answer. Some of these questions may be tough to answer, but as long as they come with line or paragraph references, they direct you where to read.
Questions that come with a great lead word can also make finding the answer easy. Lead words are the nouns, phrases, and sometimes verbs that are specific to the passage. They’re not the boilerplate language like “main idea” or “the passage characterizes.”
Look at the following questions. All the lead words have been underlined.
11. Mark Twain probably would have said that lawyers:
12. The author states that maritime law is unique in that:
13. According to the passage, the primary danger steamboats posed were:
35. Which of the following statements most accurately summarizes how the passage characterizes opiates and benzodiazepines?
Lead words are words and phrases that can be found in the passage.
Great lead words are proper nouns, unusual words, and dates.
Your eye can spot great lead words in the passage just by looking and without reading. They leap off the page. In Chapter 20, we’ll teach you how to use lead words as part of the basic approach.
Later questions are both difficult to answer and difficult to find the answer, like Question 31 in the last set of examples. Most questions that are difficult to answer require reasoning skills to “show your understanding of statements with implied meaning.”
Reasoning questions require more thought than do Referring questions, so they do not qualify as “easy to answer.” However, they should be tackled Later only if they don’t come with a line or paragraph reference, which makes the answer easy to find.
In its description of the Reading test, ACT lists the various tasks that reasoning skills must be applied to.
• determine main ideas
• locate and interpret significant details
• understand sequences of events
• make comparisons
• comprehend cause-effect relationships
• determine the meaning of context-dependent words, phrases, and statements
• draw generalizations
• analyze the author’s or narrator’s voice and method
Any insight into the test writers’ purpose and intent always benefits your preparation. However, you don’t need to name the specific task when you come across it in a question. During the actual exam, identify questions as Now or Later, and don’t forget that questions with a line or paragraph references are Now, regardless of the task assigned in the question.
It would be logical to assume that you should divide the 35 minutes evenly across four passages, spending precisely eight minutes and 45 seconds on each passage. In reality, you will likely spend more time on one or two of the passages and less time on the others. To earn a perfect or near-perfect Reading score, you can neither rush and risk misreading, nor can you belabor one or two questions when more are waiting, perhaps an entire passage.
Focus on the number of raw points you need, and don’t get stuck on one or two tough questions.
Don’t spend more than 10 minutes on one passage, and try to leave at least six minutes for the last passage. In later chapters, we’ll teach you different strategies to improve your time-management skills.
Flexibility is key to your ACT success, particularly on the Reading Test.
Get out of a passage on which you’ve already spent too much time, cutting yourself off at 10 minutes on any given passage. Force yourself to guess on the question you’ve been rereading for minutes, make smart and swift guesses on any questions still left, and move on.
We’re not saying this is easy. In fact, changing your own instinctual behavior is the hardest part of cracking the Reading Test. Everyone has made the mistake of ignoring that voice that’s screaming inside your head to move on, and we’ve all answered back “But I know I’m almost there and if I take just a little more time, I know l can get it.”
You may in fact get that question. But that one right answer likely cost you two to three others. And even worse, you had probably already narrowed it down to two answer choices. You were down to a 50-50 chance of getting it right, and instead you wasted more time to prove the one right answer.
In Chapters 18 and 20, we’ll show you how to use that time more effectively to begin with and what to do when you’re down to two. But both skills depend on the process of elimination, or POE.
POE is a powerful tool on a multiple-choice, standardized test. On the Reading Test, you may find several Now questions easy to answer and be able to spot the right answer right away among the four choices. There will be plenty of tough Reasoning questions, however, whose answers aren’t obvious, either in your own words or among the four choices. You can easily fall into the trap of rereading and rereading to figure out the answer. Wrong answers, however, can be more obvious to identify. They are there, after all, to hide the right answer. In fact, if you can cross off all the wrong ones, the right answer will be waiting there for you. Even if you cross off only one or two, the right answer frequently becomes more obvious.
We’ll spend more time with POE in the following chapters. You don’t get extra points for knowing the answer before you look at the answer choices. You get a point for a correct answer, and you need to get to as many questions as possible in order to answer them. Use POE to escape the death spiral questions that will hold you back.