ACT Reading Medium practice

Based on the passages in question 1, Passage B's objection to the 'forty-one percent' figure is that the figure

Based on the passage about Mira, which of the following best describes the sequence of events on the day described?

Based on the passage about the Ohio town, which detail does the author offer as the most direct evidence that the town's investments attracted new business?

Based on the passages in question 7, Passage B's central objection to the traditional account of the hand axe is that the account

In the late nineteenth century, a small town in central Ohio quietly transformed itself in a way that nearby cities did not. The town, which had relied for decades on a single iron foundry, faced collapse when the foundry closed in 1887. Rather than wait for a replacement industry, the town council voted to use municipal funds to build a public library, a brick schoolhouse, and an opera house — all within five years.

Historians studying the region have argued that this decision, which seemed extravagant at the time, was the reason the town survived the difficult decade that followed. The reasoning is straightforward. Skilled workers and their families, the historians note, did not move only for jobs. They moved for the prospect of stability and culture, and a town with a library and a school sent a signal that it intended to last. Within a decade, two new manufacturers — a furniture maker and a small ceramics firm — had relocated to the town, citing the quality of the local schools as a deciding factor.

The case is sometimes contrasted with that of a neighboring town only fifteen miles away, which had relied on the same foundry's contracts and which chose instead to lower local taxes to attract new business. That town offered cheaper land and cheaper labor but had no civic institutions to speak of. By 1900 its population had declined by nearly a third, while the Ohio town that had built the library had grown.

The lesson, if there is one, is not that culture by itself rescues a local economy. The lesson is that investment in public goods can serve as a signal — to workers, to investors, to nearby towns — that a community believes in its own future. Tax cuts alone, the historians suggest, send a quieter and more ambiguous message.

The author's central claim in the passage is best stated as:

Based on the passages in question 1, on which of the following points would the authors of Passages A and B most likely AGREE?

Based on the passage about the Ohio town, the cause-and-effect relationship the author emphasizes is best described as:

Refer to the passage about bumblebee flight in question 1.

The author's main purpose in the final paragraph is to:

Refer to the passage about Mira and the letter in the previous question.

The phrase "between dessert and side dish" in the second paragraph most nearly emphasizes that:

Based on the passage about the Hudson River School, the relationship between the painters and their contemporary critics is best described as:

Refer to the passage about Mira and the letter in question 5.

The overall organization of the passage can best be described as:

Refer to the persuasive passage about library hours in the previous question.

The primary function of the third paragraph ("Consider the night-shift nurse…") is to:

Refer to the passage about bumblebee flight in the previous question.

The primary function of the second paragraph is to:

The Hudson River School, a loose group of American landscape painters active from roughly the 1820s to the 1870s, has often been described as the first distinctively American art movement. The label is somewhat misleading. The painters trained in European studios when they could afford to, and their compositions borrowed liberally from the formulas of the British and German romantics. What set them apart was not technique but conviction. They believed that the American landscape — the unfarmed valleys of the Catskills, the storm-bent peaks of the White Mountains, the vast, gray-green light of the Adirondacks — was itself a moral subject, worthy of the same serious attention a European painter might give to a cathedral or a ruin.

This conviction was inseparable from the historical moment. In the decades before the Civil War, the United States was rapidly clearing its forests, draining its wetlands, and laying down railroads. The Hudson River painters were among the earliest American voices to argue, in oil paint rather than in pamphlets, that the country was losing something it had not yet learned to name. Critics at the time sometimes dismissed their canvases as merely sentimental. The painters answered, in private letters and in published essays, that what looked like sentiment was in fact an argument: that wilderness had a worth not reducible to lumber or farmland.

Later movements would treat the Hudson River School as an embarrassment, a quaint anachronism whose huge skies and dramatic light belonged to an unsophisticated age. The judgment has softened. By the late twentieth century, environmental historians had begun to read these paintings as a record of what the country looked like before extensive industrialization, and as one of the earliest American articulations of an idea — that landscape itself has moral standing — that would later anchor conservation politics.

The author's main point about the Hudson River School is that:

Refer to the persuasive passage about library hours in question 9.

The author's point of view can best be described as that of someone who: