The College ACT Reading Section
What types of questions appear on the reading section of the ACT?
ACT reading section asks you to answer forty multiple choice questions based on four reading passages. Essentially you'll have to answer ten questions for each passage. There is always one ACT passage that is a pros passage, one passage that is a humanities passage, one passage that is based on social science and one passage that is a natural science passage.
What's the secret to getting a great score on the ACT reading section?
The top secret to getting a great score on the ACT reading section is to pace yourself. You have a lot of questions to answer in a very limited amount of time. In terms of an overall reading strategy, I would suggest reading the passage quickly, but answering the questions slowly. These passages are fairly long on the ACT, so you want to get through the passage on that initial read pretty quickly. Just get a sense of the main idea and where all the information is located. You'll want to spend most of your time dealing with the questions, and with each question, you want to read the question stem itself, and then go back in the passage and find the answer. Now what can be a little tricky about ACT passages is that many of the questions don't have line references. So there's a lot more hunting around for the right answer than you may be comfortable with.
How can I eliminate wrong answer choices on the ACT reading section?
If you can't find the correct answer in the reading passage, there are ways of getting rid of incorrect answer choices. You want to get rid of any answer choice that's not mentioned in the passage. You want to get rid of any answer choice that contradicts what's in the passage. Also you want to get rid of any answer choice that sounds too extreme or makes too broad a generalization like: "All students do 'this'" or "Every person is known as this'". Those answer choices tend not to be correct on an ACT reading passage.
What are the most common mistakes students make on the ACT reading section?
The most common mistake people make on the ACT Reading section is one of timing. They take way too long to read the passage and then rush through the questions. You actually want to do the opposite. Remember, you want to read the passage quickly but answer the questions slowly. Also, students tend to get stuck in one or two questions and therefore eat up a lot of valuable time. With any question, you want to read the question, find the answer in the passage, and then look for the answer choice that matches what's in the passage. If you don't find the answer choice that works, get rid of as many incorrect answer choices as possible, then guess and move on to the next question.
