ACT Reading Unit 2: Craft and Structure

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:

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

The primary function of the second paragraph is to:

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:

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:

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 Mira and the letter in the previous question.

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

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:

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:

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:

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 question 5.

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

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

The narrator's description of the grandmother humming "the same four notes she always hummed when she was about to ask a question she did not want answered" primarily characterizes the grandmother as someone who is: