ACT Reading Practice test 1 — Free with Answer Explanations

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Practice test 1

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Question 1

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

The author's choice to end the passage with the phrase "a quiet promise that the city's day belongs to its night-shift workers, too" primarily serves to:

A.reframe a budget decision as a statement of civic valuesB.predict that the vote will pass by a wide marginC.ask night-shift workers to volunteer at the libraryD.criticize the city council for poor accounting

Question 2

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:

A.a young woman's grief at being forced to sell a property she had hoped to keep.B.a character's quiet, mixed reaction during a final visit to a meaningful place.C.a dispute between siblings over how to handle an inherited family home.D.the restoration of a neglected garden to its former condition.

Question 3

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?

A.The peach tree leans toward the south fence.B.The realtor handed Mira the keys with a sigh.C.Mira remembers her grandmother teaching her to whistle on the swing.D.Honeysuckle has swallowed the trellis in the garden.

Question 4

Refer to the passage about bumblebee flight in question 1.

The author's description of the bee's buzz as sounding "more like a complaint than a song" primarily serves to:

A.establish a casual, slightly humorous tone that prepares the reader for the "old joke"B.argue that bees are unhappy creatures that resent being studiedC.provide scientific evidence for the frequency of bee wingbeatsD.contrast the buzz of bumblebees with the songs of birds

Question 5

Based on the passages in question 7, the author of Passage A would most likely respond to Passage B's argument by

A.conceding that some hand axes had varied uses but maintaining that the basic design still represents a stable solution.B.rejecting microwear evidence as methodologically unreliable.C.agreeing fully and abandoning the claim that the hand axe was a single tool.D.arguing that Passage B's examples are too recent to bear on the deep prehistoric record.

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Question 6

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:

A.carves a hard material with sharp toolsB.actively shapes into a useful formC.imitates the appearance of a statueD.destroys piece by piece

Question 7

Based on the passages in question 1, the author of Passage B would most likely view Passage A's mention of Pontevedra and Times Square as

A.compelling evidence that pedestrianization works in any urban context.B.irrelevant comparisons, because dense European centers and Times Square differ from a mid-sized American main street.C.examples that should be dismissed because foreign cities have no lessons for American policy.D.support for Passage B's own argument about preserving independent merchants.

Question 8

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:

A.striking the screen with steady, forceful blowsB.making light, repeated contact with the screenC.drilling a hole through the screenD.calling out in a loud, sharp voice

Question 9

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

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

A.a flashback to Mira's mother's life, framed by Mira reading the letterB.a scene of present discovery that leads Mira toward a future decisionC.a debate between Mira and her grandmother about a hidden letterD.a list of recipes followed by a moral lesson

Question 10

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:

A.Tax cuts always fail as a strategy for economic recovery in small towns.B.Investing in public institutions can act as a credible signal that helps a community recover economically.C.Iron foundries were the principal engine of growth in late nineteenth-century Ohio.D.Skilled workers in the nineteenth century preferred libraries to higher wages.

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Question 11

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

A.argue that the long persistence of the hand axe reflects a good fit with stable conditions rather than intellectual limitation.B.demonstrate that early hominins were technologically more sophisticated than smartphones.C.catalog the regional variations in hand axe design across Africa, Europe, and Asia.D.criticize archaeologists who describe deep prehistory as stagnant.

Question 12

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

A.The Sherman Avenue pedestrianization has been good for the neighborhood's long-term character.B.Foot traffic on Sherman Avenue has risen substantially since the conversion.C.Cars should be permanently banned from the Sherman Avenue corridor.D.European pedestrianization models translate easily to American main streets.

Question 13

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

A.underestimates how dangerous prehistoric environments actually were.B.groups functionally different tools together based only on shared appearance.C.ignores the role of language in technological transmission.D.relies too heavily on microwear and refit experiments rather than direct observation.

Question 14

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?

A.Pedestrianizing urban streets typically produces commercial gains that opponents fail to predict.B.The Sherman Avenue project has been a failure that the city council should reverse.C.Drivers should be banned from all downtown areas in mid-sized American cities.D.European cities like Pontevedra have superior urban planning compared to American cities.

Question 15

Refer to the passage about bumblebee flight in question 1.

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

A.warn readers that bees may eventually become extinctB.suggest that mathematical models are only as reliable as their underlying assumptionsC.criticize physicists for refusing to study insectsD.convince readers to memorize the equations of insect flight

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Question 16

Based on the passage about the Ohio town, how does the neighboring town compare with the town described in the rest of the passage?

A.Both towns built libraries, but the neighboring town built them later.B.Both towns lost their foundries, but they responded differently — the Ohio town invested in civic institutions, while the neighboring town cut taxes.C.The neighboring town grew faster because of cheaper labor and land.D.The neighboring town's schools were stronger, which attracted manufacturers more quickly.

Question 17

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

A.The foundry closed, so the town council immediately lowered taxes to attract new business.B.Building civic institutions signaled stability, which in turn attracted skilled workers and new manufacturers.C.The opera house drew tourists, whose spending revived the local economy.D.Population decline forced the neighboring town to invest in schools.

Question 18

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:

A.a decorative ruffle on a piece of clothingB.an unnecessary luxuryC.a strict ruleD.a public ceremony

Question 19

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:

A.concedes the costs of expanded hours but believes the benefits outweigh themB.denies that expanded hours have any cost at allC.believes that libraries should be replaced entirely by home internet serviceD.thinks the city's night-shift workers should change careers

Question 20

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?

A.They trained in European studios when they could afford to.B.In the decades before the Civil War, the United States was rapidly clearing its forests, draining its wetlands, and laying down railroads.C.Later movements treated the school as a quaint anachronism.D.The painters borrowed from British and German romantics.

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Question 21

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:

A.list specific people whose schedules the current closing time excludesB.describe the typical workday of a librarianC.explain how the city's transit system is fundedD.argue that nurses and warehouse workers should be paid more

Question 22

Based on the passage about Mira, how do Mira's expected feelings about the visit compare with what she actually feels once she is on the swing?

A.She expected to feel only sadness, but she also experiences memory and quiet pleasure.B.She expected to feel relief, but she instead feels overwhelming grief.C.She expected to enjoy herself, but the wild garden ruined her mood.D.She expected to argue with her brother, but the visit unfolded peacefully.

Question 23

Based on the passages in question 7, the two passages together most strongly imply that progress in archaeology can depend on

A.the discovery of entirely new categories of artifact at undisturbed sites.B.improvements in dating technology that revise the chronology of human evolution.C.reinterpreting familiar artifacts in light of new methods such as microwear analysis.D.abandoning attempts to classify prehistoric tools altogether.

Question 24

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

The primary function of the second paragraph is to:

A.introduce the joke that bees cannot fly and explain why scientists first told itB.provide modern evidence that supports the explanation given in the first paragraphC.argue that the 1930s engineers were dishonest in their calculationsD.shift the topic from bees to the design of full-size airplanes

Question 25

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

A.Mira walked the grounds, then went to the lawyer's office to sign the deed, then sat on the swing.B.Mira signed the deed in the morning, met the realtor at the property, and then sat on the swing.C.Mira's brother sold the house, and Mira drove over later to confront the new owners.D.Mira's grandmother handed her the keys and asked her to visit the swing one last time.

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Question 26

Based on the passages in question 1, which of the following best describes how Passage B responds to Passage A's reference to the hardware store?

A.Passage B disputes that the hardware store ever opposed the project in the first place.B.Passage B accepts the hardware store's reported gain but argues that, after adjusting for inflation, the store lost ground.C.Passage B claims the hardware store has since closed and been replaced by a chain.D.Passage B agrees with Passage A that the hardware store demonstrates revival.

Question 27

Based on the passages in question 7, the 'table' analogy in Passage B is used primarily to

A.illustrate how grouping objects by shape can obscure functional diversity.B.argue that furniture has changed less over time than archaeologists assume.C.suggest that hand axes were used as furniture in some regions.D.show that modern observers are more easily fooled than ancient ones.

Question 28

Based on the passage about the Hudson River School, how does the view of the school in the late twentieth century compare with the view held by earlier post–Hudson River movements?

A.Earlier movements treated the school as an embarrassment, while late-twentieth-century historians began to read it as a record of pre-industrial America and an early statement that landscape has moral standing.B.Both eras dismissed the school as sentimental and unworthy of serious study.C.Earlier movements admired the school's environmentalism, while late-twentieth-century critics rejected it as old-fashioned.D.Both eras agreed that the school was the first truly American art movement.

Question 29

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

A.was fabricated by city officials to justify the pedestrianization.B.counts foot traffic rather than dollars spent, and so does not establish commercial revival.C.applies only to weekends, not to the full week of business activity.D.was inflated by tourists who do not live in the neighborhood.

Question 30

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

A.The critics praised the painters' moral seriousness, and the painters returned the compliment.B.The painters ignored the critics entirely and refused to respond.C.The critics called the work sentimental, and the painters argued in writing that their work was actually a moral argument.D.The painters and critics agreed that landscape painting was a lesser form of art.