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The Four Passage Types

6 dot points across 6 inquiry questions. Click any dot point for a focused answer with worked past exam questions where available.

How do you read an ACT humanities passage, often a reflective essay on art, music, literature, or ideas, and catch the author's stance?

Humanities passages: reading reflective, often first-person essays on art, music, theater, literature, philosophy, and culture, tracking the author's stance and the development of an idea, and reading tone and nuance as carefully as fact.
How to read an ACT humanities passage: follow reflective, often first-person essays on art, music, literature, and ideas, track the author's stance and the development of an idea, and read tone and nuance as carefully as fact.
10 min answer →

How do you read an ACT literary narrative (prose fiction) passage, and what kinds of questions does it ask?

Literary narrative (prose fiction) passages: reading an excerpt from a story, novel, or memoir for character, relationships, motivation, mood, and meaning, and answering questions that reward inference about people and feelings rather than locating a single stated fact.
How to read an ACT literary narrative (prose fiction) passage: read for character, relationships, motivation, mood, and meaning, and answer questions that reward inference about people and feelings rather than locating a stated fact.
11 min answer →

How do you read an ACT natural science passage, dense with terms and processes, without needing outside science knowledge?

Natural science passages: reading term-dense texts on biology, chemistry, physics, and earth or space science, following processes and cause-and-effect chains, locating the right detail, and answering from the passage rather than from prior science knowledge.
How to read an ACT natural science passage: follow processes and cause-and-effect chains in term-dense texts on biology, chemistry, physics and earth science, locate the right detail, and answer from the passage rather than prior science knowledge.
11 min answer →

What reading approach works across all three informational passage types on the ACT (social science, humanities, and natural science)?

Reading informational passages: the shared approach to the three nonfiction passage types (social science, humanities, natural science), reading for main idea and structure, mapping where information lives, following arguments and processes, and answering every detail from the text.
The shared approach to ACT informational passages (social science, humanities, natural science): read for main idea and structure, map where information lives, follow arguments and processes, and answer every detail from the text.
10 min answer →

How is reading a literary passage on the ACT different from reading an informational one, and what habits carry you through prose fiction?

Reading literary passages: the distinct approach to prose fiction, reading for character, relationships, mood, and meaning beneath the events, inferring rather than locating facts, and reading dialogue and detail for what they imply about people.
The distinct approach to ACT literary (prose fiction) passages: read for character, relationships, mood, and meaning beneath the events, infer rather than locate facts, and read dialogue and detail for what they imply about people.
10 min answer →

How do you read an ACT social science passage, with its dense facts and arguments about history, economics, psychology, and society?

Social science passages: reading fact-dense, argument-driven texts on history, economics, psychology, sociology, and politics, tracking the main claim and its support, holding many details in order, and locating the right fact to answer detail questions.
How to read an ACT social science passage: track the main claim and support in fact-dense, argument-driven texts on history, economics, psychology and society, hold many details in order, and locate the right fact for detail questions.
10 min answer →