ACT Reading — Practice Test 1

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Passage I — Prose Fiction

Read the passage. Then answer the questions that follow.

The Quiet Hour

From the novel The Quiet Hour by Eliana Marsh (2021).

My grandmother kept a kitchen the way other people keep a religion. 5The counters were wiped down between every cup of coffee, the salt was kept in a blue tin that had outlived two presidents, and the radio above the refrigerator was tuned, as if by federal mandate, to the same AM station my grandfather had liked before he died. I had been sent to stay with her for the summer because my mother and I had been “getting on each other's nerves,” 10which was the polite phrase my mother used in front of relatives. The truer phrase was that my mother had taken a job that required her to travel, and there was no longer anyone at home to argue with about the dishwasher. I was thirteen, which meant I had recently developed strong opinions about who else's house I ought to be living in.

The first morning, I came down the stairs barefoot, expecting the kind of 15welcome a guest gets in a movie. Instead my grandmother handed me a dish towel without looking up from the stove. “The blue mugs go on the second shelf,” she said, as if I had been there all along. “The white ones go on the third. If you put the blue ones on the third, I will know.”

I did not know, then, that this was how she said hello.

20For two weeks I was furious. I was furious about the radio, which played weather reports for counties I had never heard of. I was furious about the bread, which she made on Tuesdays and which I had to slice without complaining. I was furious about the porch, which she swept every evening at the same hour, the way other people prayed. Most of all I was furious that she did not seem 25to notice I was furious. She handed me towels. She pointed at shelves. She pulled a chair out at the kitchen table and put a plate in front of it, and the plate had food on it, and the food was always something I had not asked for but turned out to like.

It was on a Wednesday, in the third week, that something quietly broke open. I had come downstairs at five in the morning because I could not sleep, and 30I had expected the kitchen to be dark. It was not. My grandmother was at the table with her hands wrapped around a coffee mug, and the radio was off, and the only light was a small lamp she had brought down from the hallway. She did not look surprised to see me. She nodded at the chair across from her and pushed a second mug across the table. There was already coffee in it.

35I sat. I did not say anything. Neither did she. The coffee was too strong, and I drank it anyway, the way you drink something a stranger has handed you on a long bus ride. After a while, she said, without looking up, “Your grandfather used to come down at this hour. He liked the kitchen before anyone else got to it. He said the day was easier to start if you got a head start on it.”

40I had never heard her talk about my grandfather without being asked. I did not ask now. I sat. I drank my too-strong coffee. The lamp made a small yellow circle on the table, and outside the window I could see the porch, swept clean again, waiting for whatever the day was going to ask of it.

“You can come down at this hour, if you want,” she said, after a long minute. 45“I do not mind the company. But you have to be quiet about it.”

I did not know what to say. I nodded. I drank.

Years later, when I was teaching my own daughter how to fold a dish towel into thirds, I tried to explain what had happened to me that summer. I told her my grandmother had been hard on me, which was true. I told her my grandmother 50had not hugged me, which was also true. I tried to find a way to say that my grandmother had loved me by handing me towels and pulling out chairs and pushing mugs across the table, and that I had not realized any of it was love until I was much older, sitting in a kitchen of my own, swept clean at five in the morning, waiting for someone to come down the stairs.

I could not find 55the way to say it. So I handed my daughter the towel, and I pointed at the shelf, and I said, “The blue mugs go on the second one.”

1. The passage is BEST described as the narrator's reflection on —

2. According to the passage, the narrator was sent to stay with her grandmother because —

3. The narrator's attitude during the first two weeks at her grandmother's house is BEST characterized as —

4. The first sentence — “My grandmother kept a kitchen the way other people keep a religion” — functions in the passage MOST as —

5. In line 19, the sentence “I did not know, then, that this was how she said hello” is BEST understood to suggest that —

6. The scene that begins on a Wednesday at five in the morning (around line 28) is presented as —

7. In line 36, the simile “the way you drink something a stranger has handed you on a long bus ride” conveys MOST NEARLY —

8. As it is used in line 23, the word furious MOST nearly means —

9. The detail that the grandmother sweeps the porch every evening “the way other people prayed” (around lines 22-24) primarily serves to —

10. The closing paragraph (lines 47-56) most strongly suggests that the narrator —

Passage II — Social Science

Read the passage. Then answer the questions that follow.

The Architecture of a Crowd

Adapted from a sociology essay, “The Architecture of a Crowd,” by Devon Halloran (2022).

It is tempting to imagine a crowd as a single thing — a body of people 5moving in unison, obeying a shared mood. The metaphor goes back at least to the nineteenth century, when early observers of mass political gatherings described the crowd as a creature of its own, capable of reason or panic but rarely both. The metaphor has been useful, and it has also been misleading. A century of careful field studies, beginning in the 1960s and continuing through more 10recent work using overhead video at concerts, train stations, and stadiums, suggests that what looks like a single creature is in fact something more like a building — an architecture of small groups, each obeying its own internal rules, fitted together into a shape that only an outside observer can perceive as one.

The first finding, established repeatedly by researchers studying crowd 15movement at large events, is that most people in a crowd are not alone. Roughly seventy percent of the individuals in a typical festival crowd, for example, arrive in groups of two to four — couples, families, small clusters of friends. These small groups remain remarkably stable even when the surrounding crowd is dense and moving. Members of a small group adjust their pace to one another, hold hands or 20tug at sleeves, and reorganize themselves around obstacles together. The crowd, in other words, is not a sea of strangers; it is a sea of small islands.

The second finding concerns the way these small groups respond to changes in density. As a crowd grows tighter, the small group does not dissolve. Instead, it compresses. Members move closer to one another, often into a configuration 25researchers have called a “turtle”: a tight cluster, sometimes facing outward, that protects its members from being separated by the press of strangers. Crowds that look chaotic from above are often, on closer inspection, a careful tessellation of these tight clusters, each one steering itself.

A third finding has surprised many researchers. When a crowd faces an 30unexpected obstacle — a sudden bottleneck, a fallen barricade, a turn that becomes impassable — it does not, in most cases, behave the way movies have led us to expect. The dominant response is not panic but conferral. Members of small groups stop, look at one another, exchange a few words, and decide together whether to push forward, turn back, or wait. Field researchers have found that these 35small conferrals propagate outward, and that within a minute or two of an obstacle's appearance, dozens of small groups can be observed making roughly similar decisions. The crowd reorganizes not because it has a single mind but because each small group has consulted its own.

What this work suggests is not that crowds never panic — they do, especially 40when sightlines are bad, exits are unclear, or the density passes a critical threshold. It suggests instead that the language we have inherited for talking about crowds is too coarse to describe what is actually happening. The image of the crowd as a single creature, easily inflamed, has shaped a century of crowd-control planning. It has encouraged designers to assume that any crowd is one impulsive decision away 45from disaster, and that the right response is to channel and constrain.

A more accurate image — the crowd as architecture, as a fitted-together set of small groups — points toward a different kind of design. If most of the decision-making in a crowd is happening at the level of pairs and trios, then crowd safety is largely a matter of giving those pairs and trios the information and the room 50they need to confer. Wider sightlines, clearer signage, redundant exit routes, and even simple visual cues that help small groups stay together at bottlenecks turn out to matter more than louder loudspeakers or more aggressive corralling. The crowd, in this view, is a design partner rather than an unruly mass to be subdued.

None of this, of course, eliminates the need for vigilance. Critics rightly note 55that the “turtle” behavior that protects a small group from being separated can, under extreme density, contribute to local pile-ups when groups try too hard to stay together. The story is not that crowds are always rational; it is that they are not the panic-prone monolith of nineteenth-century imagination. They are, instead, an architecture — and like any architecture, they are governed by the small, patient 60decisions of the people inside.

11. The main idea of the passage is BEST stated as —

12. According to the passage, approximately what percentage of individuals in a typical festival crowd arrive in small groups of two to four?

13. The author uses the term “turtle” (line 25) to refer to —

14. The third finding (lines 29-38) suggests that, when a crowd encounters an unexpected obstacle, the dominant response is —

15. The author organizes paragraphs 2-4 (lines 14-38) MOST clearly using which structure?

16. In line 13, the word perceive MOST nearly means —

17. The author's purpose in lines 39-45 is BEST described as —

18. Which of the following design choices does the author argue would BEST follow from the “crowd as architecture” view?

19. The metaphor in lines 11-13 — “something more like a building — an architecture of small groups” — functions in the passage MOST as —

20. A reader who finishes the passage would BEST conclude that the author would most likely AGREE with which of the following statements?

Passage III — Humanities

Read the passage. Then answer the questions that follow.

On Listening to a Cello

Adapted from an essay, “On Listening to a Cello,” by Marisol Vance (2020).

The first time I heard a cello played alone, I was sixteen and sitting in 5the wrong row of a small chamber-music hall. I had come to the concert because a friend had a ticket she could not use, and I had taken it the way teenagers take any free thing, without inquiring closely. The program said the second piece would be a suite for solo cello. I did not know what a suite was. I did not know what a cello sounded like alone. I did not know that for the next twenty minutes I was going 10to be quietly disassembled by a single wooden instrument and the woman holding it.

It is difficult to describe, to someone who has not heard it, what a cello does to a room. The piano fills a room the way a cathedral fills a hill. The violin pierces it. But the cello — the cello sits down in the middle of the room and says, calmly and without apology, that it intends to talk to you for a while, and that you may want 15to sit closer. It is the instrument closest, in pitch and timbre, to the human voice in its lower register, and the resemblance is uncanny. When a cellist plays without accompaniment, the air in the room becomes, briefly, a conversation between two people, only one of whom is speaking out loud.

The suite that night was four movements long. The first was a stately opening 20that I now know is called a prelude, although at the time I had no name for any of it. The cellist did not look at the audience. She looked at the floor, at the ceiling, occasionally at the bridge of her instrument, the way a person looks at someone she loves while she is choosing what to say to them. She seemed to be in a private conversation that we were allowed to overhear. I had never been in a room of 25strangers that listened so completely. We had become, briefly, a single body, leaning forward in our seats so as not to miss what came next.

What I think now, having played the recording of that suite many hundreds of times, is that what makes a great solo performance is not the skill alone — though the skill is enormous — but a particular willingness to be heard thinking. A bad 30recital sounds finished, polished, complete. A great one sounds like a person working out, in real time, what the music has been waiting to say. The cellist that night played certain phrases as if she were trying them out, asking the room a small question and waiting, in the next bar, for it to answer. She did not perform the music; she lived inside it for twenty minutes and let us live inside it with her.

35Critics sometimes call this quality “intimacy,” which is a fair word and also, I think, an incomplete one. Intimacy suggests something hushed, something private. What I heard that night was not hushed. It was open. It was the cellist's willingness to let us see her at work, including the small risks she was taking — a longer pause than expected, a phrase pulled slightly back from the tempo, a note 40held a moment past where another player might have released it. None of this is reckless. All of it is brave. The bravery of solo performance is not in the difficulty of the notes; it is in the willingness to be wrong, in front of strangers, in the service of saying something true.

I have wondered, since, why the cello in particular seems to invite this kind 45of listening. The instrument's range overlaps with the human speaking voice; that is part of it. Its size — held between the player's knees, leaning into the body — makes the instrument visibly part of the player; that is another part. But what I keep returning to is the simple fact of solo cello: nothing else is sounding. There is no piano holding up the harmony, no second violin rounding out the chord. The 50cellist plays a line, and the room must supply, in its own listening, the harmonies that another arrangement would have made explicit. The audience completes the music. We are not, at a great solo recital, passive consumers; we are necessary collaborators. We are filling in, with the work of our own attention, what the score has deliberately left unsaid.

55This is, in the end, the gift of the form. A solo cello tells you, plainly, that you are needed. A symphony can carry on quite well without your full attention; a great solo recital cannot. And after twenty minutes of being needed by music — twenty minutes of leaning forward in your seat, supplying the inner harmony with the work of your own listening — you walk out of the hall changed in a small way. 60I walked out, that night, into a parking lot full of strangers and felt, for the first time in my life, that I had been part of making something beautiful, simply by paying attention to it.

21. The passage is BEST described as —

22. The narrator attended the concert primarily because —

23. According to the narrator, what makes a great solo recital different from a merely competent one is —

24. Which feature of the cello does the narrator say MOST contributes to its conversational quality?

25. In lines 12-15, the comparison “The piano fills a room the way a cathedral fills a hill. The violin pierces it. But the cello…sits down in the middle of the room” functions in the passage MOST as —

26. In line 30, the phrase “working out, in real time, what the music has been waiting to say” suggests that the narrator values —

27. As it is used in line 35, the word intimacy is presented by the narrator as —

28. The narrator's claim in lines 47-54 is BEST paraphrased as —

29. The narrator's tone toward the cellist's small risks (lines 36-43) is BEST described as —

30. The structure of the passage moves MOST clearly from —

Passage IV — Natural Science

Read the passage. Then answer the questions that follow.

How Trees Talk Underground

Adapted from a science feature, “How Trees Talk Underground,” by Daniel Okafor (2023).

For most of the twentieth century, the popular picture of a forest was a 5collection of solitary trees standing in well-mannered competition for sunlight, water, and soil. Each tree, the picture suggested, was on its own. The metaphor was tidy. It was also wrong, or at least very incomplete. Beneath the floor of a healthy forest is a network of fungal threads, called hyphae, that connect the roots of many trees to one another. Through this network, individual trees exchange water, 10carbon, and chemical signals. The forest, in short, is wired.

The discovery is not new. As early as the 1990s, ecologists working in temperate forests demonstrated that radioactively labeled carbon, fed to one tree, would appear within days in the tissues of nearby trees of different species. The carbon had moved underground, through the fungi. Subsequent studies, using more 15refined tracers and DNA sequencing of the soil, have confirmed and extended the early findings. A single fungal individual can connect dozens of trees over many meters. A single tree can be connected to several different fungal individuals at once. The architecture of the forest, viewed from below, is closer to a circuit board than to a collection of separate plants.

20What does the network do? Researchers have observed at least three classes of effect. The first is straightforward resource sharing. Trees in shaded patches of forest, where their own photosynthesis is limited, can receive small amounts of carbon from neighboring trees in sunnier patches. The amounts are not enormous; they are not enough to keep a tree alive that has no leaves at all. But they are enough 25to make a measurable difference in the survival of seedlings struggling under the canopy of older trees.

The second class of effect is signaling. When a tree's leaves are attacked by certain insects, the tree releases chemical compounds — a kind of alarm. Some of these compounds travel through the air, but some travel through the fungal network 30to the roots of nearby trees, which then begin to produce defensive compounds in their own leaves before the insects arrive. The neighboring trees are, in effect, warned ahead of time. From the insect's point of view, attacking one tree quietly raises the resistance of an entire patch.

The third class of effect is the most controversial and the most interesting. 35Several research teams have reported that older, larger trees — sometimes informally called “hub trees” — appear to direct disproportionate amounts of carbon and nitrogen toward their own seedlings, recognizable, the researchers suspect, through chemical signatures in the network. If these findings hold up under further scrutiny, the implication is striking: the network is not merely a passive plumbing 40system but a medium through which trees can preferentially support their own kin. Critics correctly note that the evidence here is still young, that “recognition” is a strong word for what may be simpler chemical sorting, and that the metaphor of trees “recognizing” their offspring should not be pushed past what the data actually show.

45What is not in dispute is the basic architecture. Cut a healthy forest open, and you find that the supposedly separate trees share a common underground infrastructure. The implications for forest management are significant. A clear-cut, in this view, is not just the removal of standing trunks; it is also the dismantling of an underground network that took decades to build. Replanting saplings into a clear-cut 50does not, by itself, restore that network. The replanted saplings must, in effect, rewire the soil from scratch — a process that can take many years and that may, in some forests, never fully recover the older configuration.

This view also reframes the long-running debate about competition versus cooperation in nature. The image of trees as competitors is not exactly wrong; trees 55do compete for light, and the forest canopy is, in part, a record of that competition. But the underground story complicates the picture. The same trees that are competing above ground are exchanging resources, in modest amounts, beneath it. Competition and cooperation are not, it turns out, opposite arrangements. They are layered, occupying different elevations of the same forest at the same time.

60Researchers continue to argue, productively, about how strong each effect is and how widely it generalizes across forest types. What seems unlikely to be reversed is the basic shift: the forest is no longer best understood as a stand of separate trees. It is a system, with a measurable circuitry, much of it hidden under our feet.

31. The main idea of the passage is BEST stated as —

32. According to the passage, the underground network is composed of —

33. The passage organizes the section beginning at line 20 (“What does the network do?”) using which structure?

34. In line 36, the term “hub trees” refers to —

35. As it is used in line 18, the word architecture MOST nearly means —

36. The author's tone toward the “hub trees” finding (lines 34-44) is BEST described as —

37. Which of the following claims would be MOST consistent with the passage's overall argument?

38. The passage suggests that “competition” and “cooperation” in a forest are BEST understood as —

39. Which kind of EVIDENCE does the passage rely on MOST heavily?

40. A reader who finishes the passage would BEST conclude that the author would most likely AGREE with which of the following statements?

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