ACT Past Papers with Answers

Paper 1

ACT February 2025

Form Z14 · Reading Test · 40 questions

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Paper 1 · ACT February 2025 · Form Z14 · Reading Test

Which of the following statements best captures a main theme of the passage? person’s life. deeply know friends. subtleties of an ancestor’s life. records are not kept.

AIt’s difficult to know the complexities of anotherBIt’s easier to deeply know family than it is toCPhotographs give a clear and vivid view of theDFamily history seems like a riddle when good

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Paper 1 · ACT February 2025 · Form Z14 · Reading Test

The narrator states that in terms of Chao-hua Liu’s cul- tural identity, late in his life Chao-hua Liu had become: States. 31 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-Z14 3 3 Passage II SOCIAL SCIENCE: Passage A is adapted from the article “At Libraries, Quiet Makes a Comeback” by Jennifer Howard (©2012 by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc.). Pas- sage B is adapted from the book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs (©2011 by Alan Jacobs). Passage A by Jennifer Howard The buzzing of smartphones, the clacking of com- puter keys, the chatter of study groups: Academic libraries aren’t the quiet temples to scholarship they used to be. Personal portable technology takes some of the blame. So does the current pedagogical emphasis on group work. In response to students’ devices and habits, many college libraries have installed coffee shops and embraced the learning-commons model of design, cre- ating wired spaces where groups can gather and plug in. Library quiet is making a comeback, though, in part because students themselves are asking for it. “Stu- dents crave quiet as much as they crave conversation,” says Karen G. Schneider, director for library services at Holy Names University. “A lot of libraries are zoning their space into areas where there can be quiet conversa- tion, absolute silence, and even livelier conversations.” The way librarians, students, and researchers behave undermines what Ms. Schneider calls “the stereotype of the shushing librarian and absolute pin- drop silence.” She and other librarians point out that students are often the first to bring up noise problems in the library, to ask for more quiet spaces, and to police those spaces themselves. “We assume this is the multitasking generation. It’s how they’ve been labeled,” says Alison J. Head, co- director of the University of Washington’s Project Information Literacy, which looks at how young adults do research. But her own research has shown that “these students do seek solitude, they do seek the quaint hush of the library and a place they can dial down.” Eric A. Kidwell, director of the library at Hunting- don College, cites “this prevailing attitude among fac- ulty and administrators that all students want to be in a group situation all the time.” That’s not the case, in his experience. “Maybe there’s more of that, but there are plenty of students out there who enjoy being by them- selves, or can’t study with their earphones in and the TV on.” The solution, in Mr. Kidwell’s view, is “to be as creative as we can in our space design to provide as many different types of reading and study space as we can.” The most popular room at his library is not a fully wired collaborative space but a small room that’s designed to look like an old-fashioned study. “We bought a small table, a rocking chair, a wingback chair,” he says. “We wish we had the ability to make more rooms like that.” Passage B by Alan Jacobs The noisier the environment, the more readers are driven to be silent. The boy trying to study at the kitchen table while the clamor of family life goes on around him is a typical figure in the history of reading. No one could plausibly claim that we late moderns are uniquely challenged in this respect: surely a higher per- centage of human beings today have regular access to silence than at any time in human history. Most Ameri- cans and Western Europeans, and many people else- where—not all, mind you—live in environments with quiet rooms, or quiet corners. And many who lack quiet homes have had access to libraries, which have for cen- turies been dedicated, as it were, to silence. That may be changing, though. Here’s an example from the United Kingdom that has analogues in several other countries. In 2008, when Andy Burnham was Gordon Brown’s Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, he announced that libraries had to change: “Libraries should be a place for families and joy and chatter. The word chatter might strike fear into the heart of traditionalists but libraries should be social places that offer an antidote to the isolation of someone play- ing on the internet at home.” Libraries need to “look beyond the bookcase,” which means, among other things, allowing the use of cellphones and selling (or at least allowing people to bring in) food and drink. Even among educated folk, these proposals got some support, largely out of fear that without some such change libraries will become irrelevant and unused, and eventually will disappear altogether. But others fumed. Victoria Coren wrote, “My brain is strug- gling with the philosophical question: if there is noth- ing inside but people eating burgers and playing computer games, is it actually a library? Isn’t it just an internet cafe?” To the “they must look beyond the bookcase” line, Coren retorted, “Why? Why must they? They’re libraries. The bookcase is exactly where they should be looking. Someone should be. I can eat and make phone calls at home.”

Aprimarily Chinese.Bprimarily American.Csomething other than Chinese.Dmore Chinese than when he came to the United

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Paper 1 · ACT February 2025 · Form Z14 · Reading Test

Which of the following quotations from Passage B most nearly echoes Kidwell’s comment about college students in lines 36–39 of Passage A? driven to be silent” (lines 49–50). and chatter” (lines 67–68). irrelevant and unused” (lines 76–78). looking” (lines 85–86). 33 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-Z14 3 3 Questions 14–17 ask about Passage B. Questions 18–20 ask about both passages. 34 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-Z14 3 3 Passage III HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the book Becom- ing Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon by Donald Sassoon (©2001 by Donald Sassoon). The popularity of the Mona Lisa is not just modern hype. This is an innovative and revolutionary painting. Taken one by one, few of the innovations deployed in the Mona Lisa were originally devised by Leonardo da Vinci. As in other fields (literature, philosophy, cinema) there is a difference between being the first to produce a novelty and being the first to understand fully its implications and be able to use them in a masterly fash- ion. The pose of the Mona Lisa was one such signifi- cant innovation. She sits presenting a three-quarter view, while the face looks in a different direction—the so-called contrapposto position. She looks directly at the viewer, another innovation. Leonardo had broken his own rules, for he had written that women should be painted in a demure position, ‘their heads lowered and inclined to one side.’ Titian and other Italian painters often painted women with downcast eyes, as if they avoided the insolence of the male gaze. Mona Lisa looks back, defiantly. The translucent veils add depth to the painting. The numerous ripples of the garments, the rivulets of drapery falling from her shoulders and the spiral folds of the mantle across the left breast highlight the close spatial relationship between the sitter and the landscape in a way that was very unusual. The barely perceptible columns at either side frame the portrait. The back- ground is asymmetrical, the right side being a little higher than the left. In traditional Renaissance portraiture, the main function of a landscape was to contribute additional elements for the identification of the sitter—for instance, the Tuscan countryside, or an urban setting. The landscape background of the Mona Lisa is not easily identifiable. Behind the balcony on which the woman is sitting are rocks, lakes, streams, but no trees or plants. The sole human structure is a bridge on the right-hand side. In portraits, such completely imaginary backgrounds are rare. The result of the complex system of asymmetric relations is to produce the idea of movement. The Mona Lisa constitutes a major development in the use of the contrapposto technique in paintings. The contrapposto was an attempt to solve a riddle that had baffled painters for a long time: how to represent on two dimensions (the flat surface) the three-dimensional conception of movement. By definition, a pose is static: the sitter remains still in order to enable the painter to draw. To represent the idea of movement, the static pose of the sitter must constitute a single moment in a sequence—like a photograph of an object in motion. By having the visage of the sitter facing a point different from that facing the torso, the entire body appears to be in motion. This structure had been used often in com- plex works with several figures, but seldom in one with a single sitter, as is the case with Mona Lisa. She is now a person in motion. In our age, the contrapposto position is regularly used by ordinary photographers, who tell their sitters to look away from the direction in which the body is facing so as to avoid the rigidity and stillness of body and face looking symmetrically towards the camera. The Mona Lisa was Leonardo’s solution to a series of technical experimentation he had been working on for decades, the culmination of a lengthy artistic itinerary. The technique used to give the impression of movement was impressive. But Leonardo used other innovations. He was an early convert to the use of oil paint in place of the quick-drying tempera—the tech- nique of using egg yolk to bind the paint pigments together. Oil paint, slower to dry, appealed to perfec- tionists. It enhanced the luminosity of the painting and permitted a more detailed and accurate representation. It was first used in northern Europe, and reached Venice and then the rest of Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century. The northern European connection, though very important, was not one-way. Albrecht Dürer sojourned in Venice repeatedly to learn the techniques of the Ital- ians, who in turn were dazzled by the inventiveness of his prints. Antonello da Messina was supposed to have studied in Bruges with the Van Eyck brothers and brought back to Venice the innovative use of oil paint. Indeed Vasari attributes to ‘Giovanni da Bruggia’ (John of Bruges, i.e. Jan Van Eyck) the invention of oil paint. This is unlikely, but the story illustrates the consider- able cultural interchange in fifteenth-century Europe. Antonello had preceded Leonardo in Milan by some ten years and had used both the contrapposto and the direct look.

A“The noisier the environment, the more readers areB“Libraries should be a place for families and joyC“Without some such change libraries will becomeD“The bookcase is exactly where they should be

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Paper 1 · ACT February 2025 · Form Z14 · Reading Test

It can most reasonably be inferred from the passage that oil paint appealed to artists who were perfection- ists because oil paint: and therefore images that were more realistic. tions through the use of fine detail. experiment without inviting criticism. painters in northern Europe. 35 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-Z14 3 3 Passage IV NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article “Dinosaurs’ Living Descendants” by Richard Stone (©2010 by Smithsonian Institution). A Chinese farmer, Li Yingfang, made one of the greatest fossil finds of all time, in August 1996 in Sihetun village. “I was digging holes for planting trees,” recalls Li. From a hole he unearthed a two-foot- long shale slab. An experienced fossil hunter, Li split the slab and beheld a creature unlike any he had seen. The skeleton had a bird-like skull, a long tail and impressions of what appeared to be feather-like structures. Because of the feathers, Ji Qiang, then the director of the National Geological Museum, which bought one of Li’s slabs, assumed it was a new species of primitive bird. But other Chinese paleontologists were convinced it was a dinosaur. On a visit to Beijing that October, Philip Currie, a paleontologist now at the University of Alberta, saw the specimen and realized it would turn paleontology on its head. The next month, Currie showed a photograph of it to colleagues at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. The picture stole the show. Despite the feathers, the skeleton left no doubt that the new species, named Sinosauropteryx, meaning “Chinese lizard wing,” was a dinosaur. Its integumen- tary filaments—long, thin structures protruding from its scaly skin—convinced most paleontologists that the animal was the first feathered dinosaur ever unearthed. A dozen dinosaurs with filaments or feathers have since been discovered at that site. The abundance of feathered fossils has allowed paleontologists to examine a fundamental question: Why did feathers evolve? Today, it’s clear that feathers perform many functions: they help birds retain body heat, repel water and attract a mate. And of course they aid flight—but not always, as ostriches and penguins, which have feathers but do not fly, demonstrate. Many feathered dinosaurs did not have wings or were too heavy, relative to the length of their feathered limbs, to fly. Deciphering how feathers morphed over the ages from spindly fibers to delicate instruments of flight would shed light on the transition of dinosaurs to birds, and how natural selection forged this complex trait. Few scientists know ancient feathers more intimately than Xu Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontol- ogy and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing. He has discovered 40 dinosaur species—more than any other living scientist—from all over China. Xu envisions feather evolution as an incremental process. Feathers in their most primitive form were single filaments, resembling quills, that jutted from rep- tilian skin. These simple structures go way back; even pterodactyls had filaments of sorts. Originally, single filaments may well have been for display, the dinosaur equivalent of a peacock’s iridescent plumage. Vivid evidence for that theory appeared when scientists unveiled the true colors of 125-million-year-old feathers. Bird feathers and reptile scales contain melanosomes—tiny sacs holding vari- eties of the pigment melanin. Many paleontologists suspected that dinosaur feathers also contained melanosomes. In Mike Benton’s laboratory at the Uni- versity of Bristol, IVPP’s Zhang Fucheng spent more than a year searching for melanosomes in photographs of bird and dinosaur fossils taken with an electron microscope. Zhang’s diligence paid off in 2009 when he pinpointed melanosomes in the primitive bird species Confuciusornis that contained eumelanin, which gives feathers a gray or black tinge, and pheo- melanin, which gives them a chestnut to reddish-brown color. The animal’s feathers had patches of white, black and orange-brown coloring. Sinosauropteryx was even more stunning. Zhang found that the filaments running down its back and tail must have made the dinosaur look like an orange-and- white-striped barber pole. Such a vibrant pattern sug- gests that “feathers first arose as agents for color display,” Benton says. Feathers did, of course, eventually become an instrument of flight. Some paleontologists envision a scenario in which dinosaurs used feathers to help them occupy trees for the first time. “Because dinosaurs had hinged ankles, they could not rotate their feet and they couldn’t climb well. Maybe feathers helped them scramble up tree trunks,” says paleontologist Michael Carrano. Baby birds of primarily ground-dwelling species like turkeys use their wings in this way. Feath- ers may have become increasingly aerodynamic over millions of years, eventually allowing dinosaurs to glide from tree to tree. Individuals able to perform such a feat might have been able to reach new food sources or better escape predators—and pass the trait on to sub- sequent generations.

Adried slowly, leading to a less luminous surfaceBenabled them to produce more accurate representa-Cwas rare, giving painters who used it license toDhad the reputation of being used by only the finest

Form Z14 · Reading Test · 40 questions

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