ACT Reading Easy practice

Our city is about to vote on whether to keep the public library open until ten o'clock at night. I want to argue, as plainly as I can, that we should.

The case against late hours is mostly about cost. Lights stay on longer, a second librarian must be paid, and the heating bill in winter climbs. These costs are real, and I will not pretend otherwise. But cost is only half of a budget. The other half is what the spending buys, and what the late hours buy is access for people whose days are already spoken for.

Consider the night-shift nurse who finishes a twelve-hour shift at seven in the morning and sleeps until afternoon. By the time she is awake, fed, and able to help her son with his school project, the old closing time of six has already passed. Consider the warehouse worker who takes two buses home and arrives at seven thirty. Consider the high-school student who waits tables until nine. For all of them, a library that closes at six is a library that closes before they arrive.

Some opponents have suggested that these readers should simply use the internet at home. That suggestion assumes a reliable home connection, a quiet room, and a device that is not already in a sibling's hands. The library offers all three at once, for free, to anyone who walks through the door. To call that service a luxury is to misunderstand what a luxury is.

I will grant the budget hawks one point: if the city cannot afford every good thing, it must choose. So let us choose carefully. A library open four extra hours a night is not a frill. It is a quiet promise that the city's day belongs to its night-shift workers, too.

As it is used in the final paragraph, the word "frill" most nearly means:

Mira had not expected the porch swing to still be there. Twelve summers had come and gone since she last sat on it, and yet the chains held, the boards held, even the small chip in the left armrest where she had once dropped a glass jar of fireflies. She sat down carefully, the way one sits in a museum, and the swing groaned a familiar complaint.

Her grandmother's house behind her was sold now to strangers, the deed signed only that morning at a lawyer's office in town. Mira had asked to walk the grounds one final time before the new owners arrived. The realtor, who had her own children to fetch from school, had handed Mira the keys with a sigh and said she could leave them under the planter.

The garden was wild. Honeysuckle had swallowed the trellis. The peach tree her grandfather had planted the year Mira was born leaned dramatically toward the south fence, as if listening for something the rest of the yard could not hear. Mira tried to feel sad, the way she had felt sad in the car driving over, but the sadness would not stay still. It kept slipping sideways into something else — into the memory of her grandmother teaching her to whistle on this very swing, into the smell of cut grass and creek mud, into the simple animal pleasure of being alone outside on a warm afternoon.

She had told her brother she would only stay an hour. She had told herself the same. But the swing kept moving, gently, of its own slight momentum, and Mira found she did not yet know how to stand up.

The passage is primarily concerned with:

When a bumblebee lifts off from a clover blossom, its flight looks almost reckless. The body is plump, the wings are short, and the buzzing sounds more like a complaint than a song. For decades, an old joke insisted that, according to physics, bumblebees should not be able to fly at all. The joke is funny, but the science behind it is wrong. Engineers who first analyzed insect flight in the 1930s applied equations meant for rigid airplane wings, which slice through air in smooth, predictable strokes. A bee, however, beats its wings nearly two hundred times per second and rotates them at the end of each stroke. That rotation creates tiny whirlpools of air, called leading-edge vortices, that cling to the top of the wing and pull the bee upward. In other words, the bumblebee does not fight the air the way an airplane does; it sculpts the air into temporary stairs and climbs them.

Recent high-speed cameras have confirmed what the early engineers missed. Each wing twists at the shoulder joint so that, on the upstroke, the leading edge tilts down and slices the air at a new angle. The vortex briefly stalls, sheds, and reforms on the next downstroke. Because the cycle repeats so quickly, the bee never falls between beats. Researchers studying these patterns have begun to design tiny drones with flexible, twisting wings, hoping to copy the bee's trick on a circuit-board scale.

The story of the "impossible" bumblebee is therefore not really about bees at all. It is a reminder that the math is only as honest as the assumptions stuffed inside it. When the assumptions fit airplanes but the subject is an insect, the equations will dutifully prove a falsehood. The bee, indifferent to our equations, simply keeps flying.

As it is used in the passage, the word "sculpts" (paragraph 1) most nearly means:

Passage A

The hand axe, that almond-shaped stone tool flaked on two sides, dominated the human archaeological record for more than a million years. From roughly 1.7 million years ago to perhaps 200,000 years ago, hominins across Africa, Europe, and western Asia produced essentially the same artifact, with only modest variation in size and refinement. To a modern observer accustomed to technologies that change within a single human lifetime, this stasis is staggering. What it tells us, I think, is that the hand axe was not a "tool" in the way a smartphone is a tool. It was a stable, near-perfect solution to a stable set of problems: butchering carcasses, processing plants, occasionally throwing at small game. Once a design reaches that kind of fit with its environment, it has no reason to change. We sometimes describe deep prehistory as a period of intellectual stagnation, as though our ancestors were too dim to innovate. The more honest reading is the opposite. The hand axe persisted because it worked, and because nothing in the world its makers inhabited demanded that it work differently.

Passage B

The traditional account of the hand axe — a million-year design frozen in place because it was "good enough" — has always struck me as too generous to the artifact and too stingy with the makers. Recent microwear studies and refit experiments suggest that what we have been calling "the hand axe" is, on closer inspection, a family of tools used for quite different purposes in different regions and periods. A hand axe from Olduvai shows wear consistent with heavy butchering; one from the Sussex coast shows polish consistent with reed cutting; some appear never to have been used at all and may have served as cores from which sharp flakes were struck. To call all of these the same tool because they share a silhouette is rather like calling every object with four legs and a flat top a "table" and then marveling at the stasis of furniture design. The makers were not locked in a million-year rut. We have simply been looking at the silhouette and ignoring the work.

The primary purpose of Passage A is to

Mira had not meant to keep the letter. When she found it tucked inside her grandmother's recipe box, between a card for plum dumplings and another for braised cabbage, she meant to read a few lines and put it back. But the handwriting was her own mother's, looping and impatient, and the date at the top was the summer before Mira was born.

She carried the letter to the porch, where the afternoon light came in long yellow bars. The first paragraph was about the weather and the price of flour. The second was about a job at a fabric mill that her mother had taken and then quit within a week because the air made her cough. None of it was secret. None of it explained why her grandmother had hidden the page between dessert and side dish.

Then Mira reached the third paragraph. "If you ever meet her," her mother had written, "do not tell her about the mill. Tell her I sewed curtains for a theater. Tell her the curtains were blue." Mira read the sentence twice. The "her" had no name, and the verb "meet" sat strangely beside "ever," as if meeting were something her mother both hoped for and dreaded.

The porch boards were warm under Mira's bare feet. A wasp tapped at the screen, gave up, and drifted away. Somewhere inside the house her grandmother was humming the same four notes she always hummed when she was about to ask a question she did not want answered. Mira folded the letter along its old creases. She would put it back, she decided, between the dumplings and the cabbage. But she would remember the blue curtains, and she would wait, and when her grandmother finally hummed her way out to the porch, Mira would be the one to speak first.

As it is used in the final paragraph, the word "tapped" most nearly suggests that the wasp was:

Based on the passage about the Hudson River School, which detail most directly supports the claim that the painters were responding to changes in the country around them?

Based on the passage about Mira and the porch swing, which detail most directly supports the idea that Mira's grandmother had a personal influence on her?

Passage A

When the city council voted last spring to convert four blocks of Sherman Avenue into a pedestrian-only promenade, the merchants on that stretch reacted as if a hurricane had been forecast. Storefront owners predicted ruined businesses, empty cafés, and a steady migration of customers to suburban malls. Six months later, the data tell a different story. Foot traffic on Sherman is up forty-one percent compared to the same period last year. Three new restaurants have signed leases. Even the hardware store, which sent the loudest delegation to the council meetings, reports a modest gain in weekend sales. The pattern is not unique to our city. From Pontevedra in Spain to Times Square in New York, the conversion of car-clogged streets into walkable space has, again and again, produced exactly the commercial revival that opponents insisted was impossible. The lesson is not that drivers do not matter — they do — but that the imagined customer who arrives only by car is often a fiction. Most shoppers, on most days, arrive on foot, by bicycle, or by transit. Designing streets as if the opposite were true does not serve them; it merely punishes everyone for the convenience of a few.

Passage B

The boosters of the Sherman Avenue pedestrianization love to cite the forty-one percent figure, but they are careful not to mention what it measures. Foot traffic counts everyone who walks past a sensor on the sidewalk — tourists, dog-walkers, teenagers killing time after school. It does not count dollars spent. The hardware store's "modest gain" was three percent in nominal terms, well below the seven percent inflation rate for the same period; in real dollars, the store lost ground. Two of the four storefronts that closed in the past quarter were small family operations that had served the neighborhood for decades; the new tenants are a chain coffee shop and a boutique selling fifty-dollar candles. This is not commercial revival. It is the substitution of one kind of business — affordable, neighborhood-serving — for another aimed at visitors with disposable income. Pedestrianization in dense European city centers is one thing; imposing it on a mid-sized American main street, where many older customers genuinely cannot make the trip without a car, is something else. The council should reopen Sherman to limited vehicle traffic before the damage to our remaining independent merchants becomes irreversible.

The central claim of Passage A is best summarized as which of the following?