ACT Past Papers with Answers

The, narrator mentions a piece of lint and a flake of dandruff 'primarily to: imply that the narrator's grandfather didn't value [amily traditions. filling out the birth certificate. H, emphasize the importance of naming the baby afteT.the. baby's grandfalher. illustrate the casual way in which the narrator's fatheJ ignoTed a tradition.

Based on the passage. Mama's reaction to learning the name Baba gave the baby can best be described as: A,. disapproval followed by resignation. annoyance followed,by amusemen4. embartasÈment followed by outrage. shock followed by'resentment,

The sequence of actions described in the seventh para- graph (lines 54-68) can best be characterizcd as: office of the City of Boston clerk. a scenario the narrator imagines could have happened. point of view. a memory that the narrstor shares to reveal more about ber.personality.

The narrator concludes that. Mama didn't go to the office of the City of Boston clerk based on the fact that: A, Baba believed it would be unlucky to change a baby's name at that point. in a severe winter storm.

In line 78, the phras¢ these slories most nearly refers to.. name. the narrator's accounts of her family's time in Boston.

According to the passage. which of the following emo- tions do Baba and Mama share regarding their profes- sional lives?

Which of the following statements about automobiles in San Francisco in 1903 is best supported by Passage A? unpopular nevertheless. They were used more by tOUri8ts for sightseeing purposes than by citizens for practical purposes. spite of huge public relations efforts. a small segment of the Population.

The purpose of the quotation marks around the word accessories in line 29 is most likely to: suggest that the features were actually essentials. indicate that the word avpeared in legal documents. emphasize that the word was widely misunderstood. clarify that inexpensive automobiles had some luxury features.

The statement in lines 43-45 is typical of Passage B in the way it: contrasts data about the Edsel with data about otheT cars of the 1950s. conveys the obligation that Ford executives felt to involve consumers in the design of the Edsel. combines an industry perspective on the Edsel with that of the typical consumer. suggests the entire Edsel enterprise was marked by extremes. GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. The ONLY Off Icial Prep Guide Irom the Makers of the ACT 75 OVIACT loviact The Official ACT Prep Guide Passage 111 55 property at Prouts Neck-which included a large, Tam- bling hotel building-was. purchased by his brother Charles for the whole extended Homer family. The artist also built a studio with an ocean view just yards away from the family house so throughout the summers 60 he could enjoy the company of his father, his brothers and their wives, as well as the year-round guests of the many local people whose friendship he valued. Homer continued to travel frequently, spending parts of the winter in the Caribbean. But the artist'alsyays lived 65 alone, and when he was working. which was the laTge part of most of his days, he could ;be extremely short- tempered when intemipted. HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article "Winslow Homer-. His Melancholy Truth" by John A. Parks {02006 by VNU Businass Medlal. The images in the paintings of Winslow Homer epilomize a peculiarly American 19th-century world. Through Homer's eyes, it is a world in which people live in close contact with nature and natural forces, a 5 world where landscape and ocean are viewed not as a paradise but as powers and'presences that can be enjoyed and whose threats can sometimes be overcome. And, particularly in his later paintings, it is a world imbued with a stark and melancholy atmosphere. The sea outside l]is window now inspired the arlist to create what came to'be known as his greatest paint- 70 ings. The Maine coast is e4tremely rocky and prone to monstsous gales tbat-at their inost powerful-can whip up the waves to 40 OT 50 feet. Screaming winds can rip across the breAkeis, creating long horizontal trails of spray. Homer rendered this sea Wlth all the 75 understanding of a painter who knows to simplify and synthesize. In paintings such as Eastèrn Point and Cannon Rock the construction of the water has been reorganized into clear graphic shapes and strong direc- tional lines that ¢cho the Japanese printmaking that had 80 such a lastiing effect on his work. The rocks in the paintings are massed into powerful, almpst.flat, designs and the bxushing has become energetic, as though feed- l-].e physical "str¢ngth.of the ocean. These ing from "t -paintingLtakLo]LaL&bslraoLgrandeur that has justly 85 made them famous. They remain. however, haunting evocations of the eternal power of the ocean. 10 In 1867, two of Homer's canvases were chosen to hang at the Great Exposition in Paris. The artist spent 10 months in the city, wl]ich later proved to have a pro- found effect on his art, A large display of Japanese prints was exhibited in the same building as his own .15 paintings, and the pro¢¢ss of simplification that it revealed and the wealth of pictorial invention it pro- vided made a deep itnpression on the artist. The intlu- ence of Japanese art on Hower's painting was immediately apparent upon his return to the United 20 States. The weakness of earlier compositions is replaced by a'boldness and'lucidity in which simple shapes are massed into powerful designs. h Homer's work of the 18708 gained strength, the artist continued to paint his genre subjects: 25 tO￿18t scenes, schoolchildren, and farni life. It wasn't unti1 1881, howeiieT, that he found the Subject matter that would in8pire him most. In that year, for reasons unknown, Homer went to England, where he elected to spend the summer at the town of Tynemou,th on the 30 .coast of the North Sea. It is possible that he was search- ing for a town filled with the type of tourists and bathers that made his paintings of tbe Jersey shore suc- cessful back hotne. But Tynemouth was also a commu- nity of fishermen who wrested their livelihood from the 35 dangerous and unpredictable waters of thé North Sea. Moreover, the light and weather in that part of the world, so much farther north than Atlantic City, is much gloomier and more dramatic than that of the Jersey coast. It was theTe that Homer became enthralled 40 by the dramas of.the people who ll￿k￿ their-li¥ing-from the ocean: the"fishermen's wive8 Staring.. out to sea as they wait for their men, the launch of th¢ lifeboat to rescue sailors from. a £oundeiing ship,, the agonizingly fragile fishing boats being tossed on angry waves. Here 45 at last was a subject matter that matched, th'e artist's deepest feelings. The dynamic and daDg¢rous relation- ship between human activjty and natural forces exposed in this setting would occupy Homer for many years to come. On his return to America he elected to leave New 50 York and relocate to the rural town of Prouts Neck, Maine.

Which of the following events referred to in Passage B occurred first chronologically. Edsel sales dropped below 45,000. Questions 11-13 ask about Passage A.

As it is used in the passage, the term premium cars (line 86) serves primarily as a.. reference to what Ed8els have become now that they are valued antiques. name for a ty.pe of car that was ushered in by the makers of the Edsel. Edsel intended it to belong to. who were disappointed in their purchase.

A similarity between the two passages is that they both: examine their topics from a significant distance of time. reveal the author's professional background as a way of lending credibility to the text. assert that automobiles have contributed little that is worthwhile to society. incorporate information about traffic and.road con- ditions into a discussion of au¢omobile design. Questions 14-17 ask about Passage B.

If publicity experts had been assigned to build enthusi- asm for the car8 mentioned in Passage A using the methods described in Passage B, the experts would most likely have first released photos to the press that showed: caTS going up Nineteenth Avenue in San Francisco. a single detail such as a gleaming headlight or a poIAshed door handle. to ensure the quality of the new car. an attractive young couple smiling as they enjoy a car ride past horses grazing in pastures.

The n￿1n purpose of the.passage is to.. experience that inspiTed it. explore the Telationship between the:natural world and the fine arts. important infiuerices On that artist's Work. peculiarly American nineteenth-¢entury world.

Based on the passage, the way Homer depicted shapes in his early work and the way he depicted them in his later wor,k is best described as shifting from: sharp to rnunded. uplifting to melancholy.

According to the passage, Homer felt fascination for the subjects that inspired him at Tynemouth for a: short time. Homer soon abandoned them for the genre subjects he'd been painting previously, short time. Homer found little commercial success painting those subjects. to paint. he saw there for yeaTS.

According to the passage, the paintings that Tynemouth inspired Homer to create mainly featured: scenes of tourists and sunbathers enjoying the beach. ermen and their families. powerful forces of nature. and its rocky shoreline.

The passage most 8trong,ly suggests that the nlain turn- ing point in the development of Homer as an artist was his.. inspired him. sense of accomplishment at having paintings dis- played at the Great Exposition. he was inspired by the sea. rejection of the belief that the world was stark and melancholy.

The author characterizes the immediate effect of expe- riences in Paris upon Homer's work as.. and poweTful designs but used more color." cl¢arei. imperceptible. Homer's work didn't change until several yeaTS later. been painting before his time in Paris.

The main idea of the last paragraph is that: culmination of his artistic skills. the human spirit in the natural world. ing is to use graphic shapes and directional lines. viewing two of Homer's famous paintings of the sea had a lasting effect on the author.

The author speculates that Homer may have chosen to go to Tynemouth because he.. wantsd to return to the place that had originally inspired him to be a painter. expected to be able to work better without the dis- tractions,he struggled with in Paris.. needed a break from the overcrowded Jeisey coast. in some of his earlier popular paintings.

The passage states that in Prouts Neck, Homer could bc irritable when: storms prevented him from painting outdoors. GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. The ONLY Official Prep Guide from the Makers of the ACT 77 OVIACT loviact The Official ACT Prep Gulde Passage IV 55 astronomers may, have to monitor stars patiently to capture just a few transits. The French COROT satel- lite, now in the third and final year of its, pnme mission, has discovered seven transiting exoplanets, one of which is only 70 percent larger than Earth. NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted Irom the article 'Worlds Apart- Seeking New Earths" by Timothy Ferrls (Q2009 by Naiional Geographlc'soclely). It took humans thousands of years to explore our own planet and centuries to comprehend our neighbor- ing planets, but nowadays new worlds are being discov- ered every week. To,date, astropomers have Identified 5 more than 370 "exoplancts," iQorlds orbiting stars other than the Sun. Many are strange. There's an Icarns-like "hot Saturn" 260 light-years from Earth, whirling around its parent star so rapidly that a year there lasts less tban thrFe days. CiTcling apotber star 150 light- 10 years out is a scorched "bot Jupiter," whose upper atmo.sphere Is being blasted off to form a gigantic, comet-like, tail. Three benighted planets have been found orbiting. a pulsar_the Temaills of a once mighty star shrunk into a spinuing 4lomic nucleus the size of a 15 Clty-whil¢.untold numbcTS of worlds have evidently fallen into theiT suTAs or been flung out of theiT Systems to become "floaters" that wander in cteTn&l darkness. 60 The United States, ,Kepler satellite is COROT'S more ambitious successor. Launched from Cape Canaveral in March 2008, Kepler is ¢ssenti211y just a big digital camera with a .95-meter aperture and a 95-megapixel detector. It makes wide-field pictures 65 every 30 minutes, capturing thè light of more than 100,OOO' stars in a single patch of sky between the bright star8 Deneb and Vega. Computers on Earth moni- tor the brightness of all those stars over time. alerting ' humans when they detect thè slight dinuning that could 70 signal the transit of a planet. Because that dirnming can be rnimicked by other phenomena, such as the pulsations of a variable star or a large sunspot moving across a star's surface, the Kepler scientl8ts won't announce thE presence of a 75 planet until they bave seen it transit at least three times a wait that may be only a few days or.weeks for a planet rapidLy circling close to its star but years for a terrestrial twin. By cornbining Kepler results with , Doppler observations, astronowers expect to deterniine 80 the diameters and masses of transiting planets. If they manage to discover a rocky planet ro.ughly the size of Earth orbiting in th-e habitable.zone-not so close to the aLth¢-*t￿laLeLI￿￿n baked away, nor so far out that it ,has frozen into ice-they will have found 85 ,what biologists believe could be a promising abode for lrfe. Amid such exotica, 8Ci¢Iltists are eager for a htnt of the familiaT: planets resembling Earth, orbitin£ théir 20 Stars at just the right diStancL￿ne1thcr too hot nor too cold to suppoIt life as we know it. No planets quite like our own have yet been found, prèsumably because they're inconspi£uous- _To-_see."& planet as". sm.all and dim as ours amid the lare of its star is Ilke tying to see a 25 firefly in a firewor,ks display. to detect its gravitationa] influence on the 8tar is like listening for a cricket in a tornado. Yet by pushing technology to the limits, astronomers are rapidly approaching the day when they can find another Earth and interrogate it for signs of 30 life. Only I l exoplanets, all of them big and bright and conveniently far away from their stars, have as yet had their plctures taken., Most'of the others have been detected by using the spcctrostopic Doppler tecl]nique, 35 in which starlight is analyzed for evAdence that the star is being tugged ever so slightly back and forth by the gravitational pull of its planets. In recent years astronomers have refined the Doppler technique so exquisitely that they can now tell when a star is pulled 40 from its appointed rounds by only one meter a second-about human walking speed. That's sufficient to detect a giant planet in a big orbit, or a small one if it's very close to its star, but not an Earth at anything like our Earth's 93-millioD-mile distance frnm its star. 45 The EaTth tugs the sun around at only one-tenth walk- ing speed, or about the rat¢ that an infant can crawl: astronomers cannot yet prize out 80 tiny a signal from the light of a distant star.

The passage makes use of both technical terms and: rhetorical questions. excerpt8 from the writings of astronauts. excerpts from the writings of ancient a8tronomers. GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. 78 The ONLY Official Prep Guide from the Makers ol the ACT .OVIACT loviact Taking and Scoring Your First ACT Practlce Test

As it is uscd in line 18, the tenn such exotica refers to.. ously unidentified planets. planets Jupiter and Saturn. overblown claims about planets far from Earth. its solar system.

The passage's description of the spectroscopic Doppler techniqlle indicates that it is a method used to identify intensity of light reaching Earth from a planet out- side Earth's solar system. effect of a planet's gravitational pull ou the sun the planet is orbiting. speed at which a planet rotates on its axis.

According to the passage, in order to confirni a possi- ble planet using the Kepler method, scientists look for: evidence of water both as a solid and a liquid on the supposed planet. an uninterrupted light originating froni the sup- posed planet. identical results in images of the same, location taken 24 hours apart. strongly indicates a planet's presence.

According to the passage. at the tin]e the passage was written, bow many exoplanets had had their picture taken? 11

In the passage. Deneb and Vega identified as: staTS at the edges of the area examined by the Kepler. scientists pioneering in the field of planet searching.