Your Comprehensive Guide to the ACT
Reading
Typical face when reading an ACT Reading passage
The reading section, for the most part straightforward but very long and very boring. The length of the passages, the sheer amount of knowledge you learn when reading the passages, makes this section especially challenging. Furthermore, the way they compose questions, and especially extremely tempting wrong answers, add to the difficulty of this section. However, if you learn how the section is composed and follow an innovative strategy designed to overcome these challenges, you can make this section simple.
Types of Questions
There are basically two major types of questions, those that ask about specific details in the passage and those that ask about the passage overall. Each passage has 10 questions, 7 to 8 of them will be specific questions and only 2 to 3 will ask about the passage overall. Think about what they want to you to and why. They want you to read the passage and then go to the questions. They want you to do this because 1. you'll spend a lot of time reading the passage, much of which is not even asked about and 2. once you get to the questions you'll have to go back and reread the passage, wasting even more time. Furthermore, many of the wrong answers you see come directly from the passage, but from irrelevant parts. This makes the test very challenging and confusing. However, if you can learn to do answer the questions without reading the passage, you can save precious time and avoid the pitfalls of many of the wrong answers.
Types of Wrong Answers
There are three major types of wrong answers. If you know them, and if you use my reading strategy, you can get to answers much easier by using the process of elimination. Some answers are completely irrelevant (but appear in the passage), some are half right but half wrong, and some are completely wrong (but sound completely right!). Fortunately, these are all pretty easy to learn. Using my reading strategy, knowledge of wrong answer types, and the process of elimination can get anyone significant increases on their results.