ACT - The Official ACT English Guide

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Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-1-119-67404-7 (paper)
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This guide will help you succeed on the ACT English test, which measures your understanding of what you've been taught in your core high school English courses. Reviewing all the grammar rules and writing skills you have learned during high school will take some time. This guide will help remind you of what you have learned and will likely teach you new skills and concepts as well. It covers the content of the ACT English and writing tests and the procedures you'll follow when you're actually taking the ACT English test. This guide also provides strategies for approaching the questions and content-specific test-taking tips.

The following chapters contain questions taken from actual ACT tests that are aimed at enhancing your understanding of the knowledge and skills you'll need to succeed on the test. Each question is followed by a detailed answer explanation. Chapters are organized by grammar and style concepts, which should help you see the patterns among the questions. Near the end of the guide, you will find a bank of real test questions and explanations as they appear on the test. This will give you practice switching gears between question types. A glossary is provided in the appendix to assist you in case you need reminders of common grammatical terminology.

If you already know your areas of strength and weakness when it comes to writing and grammar, you can look through the contents of this guide and focus on improving in those areas. If you are not yet aware of your weaknesses, take a diagnostic test. The Preparing for the ACT practice test is available for free online, and The Official ACT Prep Guide includes practice tests you can take. You should print the test if you plan to take it in hard copy so you can practice in the same manner in which you will take your actual test. Being able to cross out answer choices, underline, and star information can help you process the passages and questions.

We hope this guide helps you identify your strengths and improve areas of weakness so that you can show all that you know on your ACT English test.

Each ACT is different in its makeup and content. This chapter gives you an idea of what you can expect when you take the ACT English test and the ACT writing test.

The 45-minute ACT English test contains 75 questions in five passages. Each passage includes 15 questions, as follows:

• Passage I Questions 115
• Passage II Questions 1630
• Passage III Questions 3145
• Passage IV Questions 4660
• Passage V Questions 6175

If you divide your time evenly, you will spend 9 minutes per passage, and each question should take about 36 seconds to answer. The passages cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from texts about legendary athletes such as Roberto Clemente to scientific articles about exploring Mars.

At times, a concluding paragraph will be accompanied by questions about specific conventions and word choice, and then the final question will be a big-picture-meaning question, typically asking something like, Suppose the writer's goal had been to write a brief essay concerning his experience with Miami time. Would this essay successfully fulfill that goal? Since these types of questions are formatted differently from other questions, students may mistake them for directions and skip over them.

Remembering that each passage has 15 questions can help you realize that the last question related to a passage will end in a five or a zero. This should help you avoid accidentally skipping the last question.

In the following example, you will see how these questions will be formatted. Brackets are used to identify the number of a sentence within a paragraph and the paragraph numbers. Questions about an entire paragraph or passage will be identified by a box. Most question numbers appear below an underlined portion of a sentence. Be careful to replace