ACT Past Papers with Answers

In the context of the passage, .which of the following Statements mo.st strongly toreshadows Jantzen's (lownfall? "Ida's father ran the bank" (line 6). "In the hard times of the Thirties people were still coming up with ideas" (lines 14-15). "He wasn't a fool, tliough maybe not as quick as he should have been to smell a rat" (lines 23-24). "Horace Jantzen may have had one him.qelt and had a fondness for them" (lines 27-28).

The passage suggests that in considering who con- vinced Jantzen to inve%t in manufacturing steam-thiven cars, most people in town; . could list everyone who was involved. were complete strangers. had fallen on hard time8. indulged in speculation, but didn't know for sure who it had been.

Which of the following is true ot people's behavior when the nanztor returned to town after his &pprentice8hip. I. Visitors who promoted steam cars had left town. II. People in town blamed the loss of money on Jantzeii having cheated. III. People in town who had favored the plan to bring back steam cars stopped speaking of the IV. People who had been against the plan to bring back %team cars spoke of the cars scornfully. Il, III. and IV only

As it is used in line 16, the word nursing most nearly rearing. educating,

The narrator speculates that whoever convinced Jantzen to invest in a steam-driven car must have been: well dressed. Jantzen would have been impressed by someone who looked affluent. wealthy; othenvise, Janizen wouldn't have risked loaning the money. elderly. Jantzen would have truslcd someone who could remember the original Steatn-driven cars. intelligent. it would have taken someone clever to convince Jantzen to invest.

Based on the passiige, it's most logical to conclude that the original steam-driven cars were: expensive and noisy. reliable and fast. unattractive and impractical.

According to the passage, the majority of the invest- ment inoney to manufacture a steam-driven car came from: som¢ of Jantzen's wcalthy friends.

The narrator state8 that people assumed it was pIide that drove Jant7,en to: invest in steam-driven cars. agree to manage the Hawksburg bank. ereate a makeqhift office out of varnished boards. ACT-AIO 31 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. Passage 11 Sidney Gross, who joined Modern Plastics in 1952 and 50 became editor in 1968, recalled that he had 'agitated a lot" over the years to get SPI, the trade association for the plastics induslry. to quit trying to convince people 'that plastic is not bad." It was a waste of money because plastic's image-good or bad-did not really 55 matter. The key to plastic's success, as h¢ saw it, was always 'selling the manufacturer." Once plastic prod- ucts filled the stores, people had no choice but to con- sume what they were offered. Most of the time, Gross rnaintsined, after the industry had solved postwar qual- 60 ity problems, plastic objects did work better. Things made of plastic were better designed and lasted longer. People intuitively recognized that fact even if they retained an intellectual notion that plastic was bad or shoddy. In short, nothing succeeded like success. SOCIAL SCIENCE: Passage A is adapted from Plastlc.. A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel I (4 2011 by Susan Freinkel). Passage B is adapted from American Plastlc.. A Cul- tur81 History by Jeffrey L. Meikle ( 1995 by Jeffrey L. Meiklel. Passage A by Susan Freinkel Designers were enthralled by the universe of pos- sibility from plastics, earliest days. They Joved the design freedom that synthetics offered and the spirit of modernity the materials embodied. To furniture 5 designer Paul T. Frankl, a material like Bakelite, the world's first synthetic plastic, spoke "in the vernacular of thc tw¢nti¢th century the language of invenlion, of synthesis,, aiid he urged his fellow designers to use their fulj imaginative powers to explor¢ the new materi- 10 als, frank artificiality. As interpreted by Frankl and other designers working with Bakelite in the '30s and '40s, that was the language of streamlining, a lingo of curves and dashes and teatdrop shapes that created a fceling of speed aud motion in ¢veryday objects. 15 Streamline a fountain pen and even that stolid item declared: we're hurtling toward the future here I Often plastic did offer a 8ignificant improvement on whatever it replaced. A sleepy householder had to watch only once in disbelief as a polyethylene jllice pitcher bounced off the kitchen floor to begin accepting plastic in a practical way no mattsr how strong the con- 70 ceptual disdain for it. Even plastic toys, despite the brit- tle polystyrene items that broke on Christmas morning, proved superior in many ways. A toy soldier of molded polyethylene could not scratch the furniture as readily as an old-fashioned lead soldier. Most people who 75 expressed negative attitudes about plastic used it anyway without thinking about it, either because a par- ticular use had proven itsclf or bccaus¢ an inexpensive trouble-free alternative no longer cxisted. As House Beautiful observed in 1955, "The news is not that plas- 80 tics exist, biit [that] they have already been so assimi- lated into our lives. The average person was "conditioned to plastics., They had penetrated so far into the material fabric of everyday life that theiT pres- ence could not be denied no matter how many people 85 considered them second-rate substitutes or a sad com- mentary on modern times. There W<iS another reason designers embraced plastiLs. From the mid-twentieth century on, modern design has been guided by an egalitarian gospel, a. 20 belief that good design needn't cost a Jot of money, that even the most mundane items could be things of beauty. "Get the most of the best to the most for the least" was the way Ray and Charles Eames put it in theiT famous tonguc-twisting ciedo, Plastics were the ideal medium 25 for that mission: malleabI¢, relatively inexpensive, and made for mass manufacture. Yet, as in any new relation,ship, there were risks. It Wds all too easy to exploit plastics, powers of mimicry to produce the kinds of imitations-pseudo-wood.C¢ibi- 30 nets and faux-leather recliners-that contributed to the growÉng reputation of plastic as an inferior material. Plastics. adaptability and glibness undermined their capacity to achieve 'dignity" as legitimate materials worthy.of being taken seriously, one critic wrote. This impression was exacerbated by people's unfortunate experiences with plastics in the immediate postwar years. Theie were plastiL plates that melted in hot water, plastic toys that cracked on Christmas morn- ing, plastic raincoats that grew clammy and f¢Jl apart in 40 the rain. Polymer technology improved during the 1950s as manutacturers figured out how to make better plastics and. even more irnportant, how to match the right polymer with the right.appliciltion. But the damage to plastic's reputation had been done". Passage B by Jeff rey L. Meikle Worrying about the image of plastic made sense in 1945 when unfamiliar new materials confronted wary consumers. By the mid-1950s, however, no one was ignorant of plastic because it surrounded everyone. Queslions 11-14 ask about Passage A.

Jantzen's cntirc life savings. entrepreneurs from Toronto,, Windsor, OT Kitchener.

According to Passage A, one reason for designers, early interest in plastics was that: aged inventiveness. consumers, demand for attractively designed items was high. a person creating everyday items out of pldstics was seen as a bold risk taker. older materials like Bakelite were difficult to work witb. Questions 18-20 ask about both passages.

It can reasonably be inferred from Passage A that before the 1950s, plastics manutacturers had not yet figured out: streamlining. whether consumers would buy cvcryday items made of plasti¢li, whether designers would embrace working with plastics.

In the context of Passage B, the statement "They had penetrated so far into the material fabric of everyday life" (lines 82-83) most nearly refers to the way that plastics came to be: considercd a symbol of increased consumerism. materials. D, pervasive to the extent that they were integral to pcoplc's routines. ACT-A10 33 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. Passage 111 HUMANITIES: This passage is adapl8d from the article The Myth of Gabriel Garcla Marquez.. How th8 Colombian Writer Really Changed Lllerature" by Mlcha81 Wood (@2009 by WB8h- ington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC)- have been quite different. One of his finest sentences, written in an article in 1983, concerns a dream of the life he niight have led if he had stayed in his isolated 55 birth'pla¢e of Aracataca, Colombia. "I would not per- haps be the same person I am now but maybe I would have been something better: just a character in one of the novels I would J)ever have written." Many years later, and many times over, the writer Gabriel Garcla Marquez was tv remember the day he discovered how to set about writing his great novel. He was driving from Mexico City to Acapulco when the 5 iIlumination bit him, He turned the car around, went home, and lock¢d himself away for 18 months. When he reappeared, he had the manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude in his hands. The term "mythomania" certainly covers Garc£a 60 Marquez's stories about his life and plenty of his jour- nalism. But his fiction is different. It takes pieces of already thoroughly mythified reality-there is scarcely an extravagant incident in his novels and stori¢s that doesn't have some sort of basis in specific, local fact or 65 legend-and finds the perfect, unforgettable literary home for them. But Garcia Marquez neither copies nor further mythifi6s these facts and legends. He honors them, to borrow a well-placed word from Martin: When Gerald Martin, around the middle of his rich 10 and resourceful biography of Garcia Marquez, starts to tell this story, the reader may be a little surprised, even disappointed. "He had not been driving long that day when Garcfa Marquez, as if in a trance, turned the Opel around, and drove back in the direction of Mexico 15 City. And then Up to this point, Marlin has not been challenging what he calls his subject's "mythoma- nia" how could he. since it's the basis of the writer's art and fame-but he has not been retelling the Tnyths, either. He has been grounding them, laying out the 20 pieces of what became the puzzles. And that's what he's doing here, too. [O]ver the dark story of conquest and violence, tragedy and failure, he laid the other side of the continent, the carnival spirit, the music and the art of the Latin American people, the ability to honor life even in its darkest corners. 70 To honor life, I take Martin as saying, is to cele- 75 brate dignity, courage, and style wherever they are found and in whatever fornis they take. It is not to deny darkness or even to believe li has its compensations, After "and thcn,, Martin writes in mock apology, 'It seems a pity to intervene in the story at this point but the biographer feels constrained to point out that 25 there have been many versions of this'story . and that the one just related cannot be true., The trutii was no doubt less "miraculous," to use Martin's word. The writer probably continued to Acapulco. He didn't live in total seclusion for 18 months. And Garcia Marquez 30 wasn't starting a new book; he was revAving an old one. Martin's biography is itself rather a dark affair- appropriately, since he is telling the life of a man whose 80 autobiography is an elaborate historical myth. In Garcia Marquez's own accounts, his life is both hard and magi- cal. But it's never sad, and Martin evokes the Sorrow that must lurk in such a life. There is p¢rhaps a slight imbalance in Martin's insistence on the writer's sad- 85 ness, an excess of melancholy. but it's a good correc- tive to Garcia Marquez's own joking cheerfulness and elaborate ironies, and we can return to the master if we get too depressed. What Garcia Marquez found was a way of telling it. He would combine, as he frequently said, the narra- tiv¢ tone of his grandmother with that of the author Franz Kafka. She told fanLqstic stories as if they were 35 true, because for hcr, they were true. Katka told them that way because he was Kafka. After his moment of illumination Garcia Marquez came more and more to look for (and often to find) the truth in the fantastic, to pursue whatever truth was lurking in the nonliteral 40 reading of literally presented events. Just because the miracle didn't happett as the story says it did doesn't mean there wasn't a miracle. One Hundred Years of so.litude changed Garcfa Marquez's life entirely, and it changed literature. When he got into 45 the car to set out for Acapulco, he was a gifted and hardworking writer, certainly. When he got out of the car, he was on his way to the Nobel Prize, which he won in 1982.

Source question 16. Refer to the source image.

Passage B most nearly suggests that compared to toys made of traditional materials, toys made of plastic were often: more flexible and more detailed. more popular with kids but less popular with parents.

To support their claims about the public's perception of plastiLs during the time peiiods discussed in the passages, both passage authors.. analyze publications that promoted plastics.

Both pa8sages suggest that one bias the public held in the postwaT years was that items made of plastic were: unattractive in design. unnervingly artificial. expensive novelties. inferior substitutes. Questions 15-17 ask about Passag6 B.

The primary function of the f￿st paragraph is to: correct misconceptions about how long it took Garcfa Marquez to wrile One Hundred Years of Solitude. novels. relate a story about Garcfa Marquez that Martin discusses in his biography. Marquez's childhood, Garcia Marquez made many jokes about his fame 50 over the years. These jokes are witty and complicated acts of gratitude for a destiny the writer was sure could ACT-A10 34 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE.

Based on the passage, which of the following best describes the passage author's opinion of Garcia Marquez's writing. Marquez's novels. heavily from local facts and legends. He believes that Garcia Marquez's writing con- tains excessive melancholy.

The "illumination" mentioned in lines 5 and 37 most nearly refers to: approach he should take in writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. his writing after Franz Katla's. Marquez based his stories on local facts and legends. the awareness by Garcfa Marquez of how miracu- lous it was. thai he completed One Hundred Years of Solilude.

The passage most strongly suggests that a reader might "be a little surprised, even disappointed" (lines 11-12) while reading Martin's book because Martin: 18 critical of Garcia Marquez's preference for writ- ing in seclusion. rather than discussing his development as a writer. interrupts a familiar story about Garcia Marquez to claim that it's not true. drove back to Mexico City.

As it is used in line 24, the word constrained inost nearly means: restrained. compelled. coerced.

According to Garcia Marquez, his grandmother told fantastic stories as if they were trne because she: was imitating Kafka.

The passage indicales that the comments Garcia Marquez makes about his fame demonstrate his: concern that his accomplishments are distorted by others. the complexity of his writing.

According to Garcia Marquez, he might have become 'something better" (line 57) if he had: written One Hundred Years of Solitude sooner. .completed his journey to Acapulco. stayed in Aracataca, Colombia.

The passage author indicates that Martin's biography helps balance Garcia Marquez's: refusal to write about life's tragedies.

As it is used in line 87, the word master refers to: the passage author. ACT-A10 35 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. Pa88age IV from two different observation points on Earth. The two points were Paris and Cayenne, French Guiana. Using the distance to Mars, astronorners were also able to compute the distance from Earth to the sun, approxi- mately 100 million miles. NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage Is adapted Irom the essay "Our Plac8 in the Universe" by Alan Lightman I 2012 by Harper's Magazlne Foundatlonl. One measure of the progress of human civilization is the increasing scale of our maps. A clay tablet dating from about the twenty-fifth century B.c. found near what is now the Iraqi city of Kirkuk depicts a river 5 valley with a plot of land labeled as being 354 iku (about thirty acres) in size. In the earliest recorded cos- mologies, such as the Babylonian Enuma Elish, from around 1500 B.C., the oceans, the continents, and the heavens were considered finite, but there were no scien- 10 tific estimates of their dimensions. The early Greeks, including Homer, viewed Earth as a circular plane with the ocean enveloping it and Greece at the center, but there was no understanding of scale. In the early sixth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Anaximander, 15 whom historians consider the first mapmaker, and his student Anaximenes proposed that the stars were attached to a giant crystalline sphere. But again there was no estimate of its size. A few years later, Isaac Newton managed to esti- ate the distance to the Dearest stars. (Only someone as accomplished as Newton could have been the first to 65 perform such a calculation and have it go almL)St unno- ticed among his other achievements.) If one assumes that the stars are similar objects to our sun, equal in intrinsic luminosity, Newton asked, how far away would our sun have to be in order to appear as faint as 70 nearby stars? Writing his computations in a spidery script, with a quill dipped in the ink of oak galls, Newton correLtly concluded that the nearest stars are about 100,000 times the distance from Earth to the sun, about 10 trillion miles away. Newton's calculation is 75 contained in a short section of his Principia tktled simply "On the distance of the stars." Newton's estimate of the distance to nearby stars was laTger than any distance imagined before in human history. Even today, nothing in our experience allows us 80 to relate to it. The fastest most of us have traveled is about 500 miles per hour, the criii8ing speed of a jet. If we set out tor the nearest qtar beyond our solar system at that speed, it would take us about 5 mlllion years to reach our destination. If we traveled in the fastest 85 rocket ship ever manufactured on Earth, the trip would last 100.000 years, at least a thousand human Ikfe span8. The first large object ever accurately measured 20 was Earth, accomplished in the third century B.c. by Eratosthenes, a geographer who ran the Library of Alexandria. From travelers, Eratosthenes had heard the intriguing report that at noon on the summer solgtice, in the town of Syene, due south of Alexandria, the 8un 25 casts no shadow at the bottom of a deep well. Evidently the 8un is directly overhead at that time and place. (Before the invention of the clock, noon could be defined at each place as the tnoment when the sun was highest in the sky, whether that was exactly vertical or 30 not.) Eratosthenes knew that the sun was not overhead at noon in Alexandria. In fact, it was tipped 7.2 degrees from the vertical, or about one fittieth of a circle- fact he could determine by measuring the length of the shadow cast by a stick plallted in the ground. That the 35 sun could be directly overhead in one place and not another was due to the curvature of Earth. Eratosthenes reasoned that if he knew the distance from Alexandria to Syene, the full circumference of the planet must be about fifty times that distance. Trader8 passing through 40 Alexandria told him that camels could make the trip to Syene in about fifty days, and it wa8 known that a C￿e1 could cover one hundred stadia (almost eleven and a hair miles) in a day. So the ancient geographer estftmated that Syene and Alexandria were about 45 570 miles apart. Consequently, the complete circumfer- ence of Earth he flgured to be about 50 x 570 miles, or 28,500 miles. This number was within 15 percent of the modern measurement, amazingly accurate considering the Jtnprecision of using camels as odometers.

The overall organization of the passage is bcst described as a.. chronological account of scientists, attempts to determine the distance of the stars from Earth. series of historical examples explaining how increasingly large distances were measured. step-by-step explanation of the calculations used lo measure Earth's circumference. collection of anecdotes describing how maps of the universe have changed over timc.

The main function of the first paragraph is lo: known when Eratosthene.s made his calculations. explain what led early geographers to conclud¢ that Earth was curved, ings has expanded over lime. summarize contiibutions the ancicnt Greeks made to astronomy. 50 As ingenious as they were, the ancient Greeks were not able to calculate the size of our solar system. That discovery had to wait for the invention of the tel¢- scope. nearEy two thousand years later. In 1672, the French astronomer Jean Richcr determined the distance 55 from Earth to Mars by measuring how much the posi- tion of the latter shifted against the background of stars ACT-AIO 36 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE.

Based on the passage. one similarity among the ancient models of the univeise described in lines 6-18 is that: verse wa8 infinite. they provided no scientific estiinates of the size or scale of the objects they identified. prASAngly accurate according to modern maps. homelands as the center of the universe.

The main idea of the last paragraph is that: nothing in our experience allows us to relate to the distance from Earth to the nearest stars. recent advancements in space travel make the dis- tance from Earth to the nearest stars seem smalI. Earth to the nearest stars has been calculated only r¢cently. the nearest stars are more distant from Earth than Newton predicted.

According to the passage. the early Greeks imagined Earth as a: circular plane with the ocean enveloping it and Greece at the center. attached.

Based on the passage, to calculate the distance between Syene and Alexandria, EratO8theneg required inforrnation about the: curvature of Earth and the angle of the sun in each city. number of miles in one hundred stadia and the complete ciicumlerence of Earth. length of Shadows cast on the ground. time it took camels to travel between the cities and the distance camels could cover in one day.

The passage indicates that astrononiers could not cal- culale the distance from Earth to other points in the solar system until: they had identifjed proper observation points. they applied ancient Greek calculations.

The passage suggests that compared to his other work, Newton's calculation of the distance to the nearest stars was: more important. more speculative.

It call Eeasollably be inferred from the passage that the author includGs the description of Newton's handwrit- ing and writing tools (lines 70-74) primarily to: by contrasting it with Newton's old-fashioned writing method. suggest one reason Newton's calculation took so long to decipher. Principia in which Newton's calculation appears. illustrate the number of mistakes Newton made before arriving at the correct calculation.

As it is used in line 82, the phra8e set oul most nearly stated a purpose. started a journey. created an arrangement. END OF TEST 3 STOPI DO NOT TURN THE PAGE UNTIL TOLD TO DO SO. DO NOT RETURN TO A PREVIOUS TEST. ACT-AIO 37