ACT Past Papers with Answers

Which of the following actions affecting the farnily business does the naTrator NOT atlributc to Jack? J, Expanding the company into a publicly traded enterprise

As li is uged in line 44, the word out most nearly mcans..

According to the passage, there wa£ something snide about the narrator'.s daughter's suggestion Lhat: the company's history is a form of world history. D, the narrator ghould try a job in the travel profession,

As it is used in line 81. the phrase speak to most nearly means: outdated. out of fuej. talk to directly. contradict openly. scold gently. discuss knowledgeably. ACT-70Q 31 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. Passage 11 of 0.15-0.25 glcm. ). good resistanc¢ to compressio 55 and bending, good elastic'ity, great capacity to absort vibration, very high coefficient of friction, low coeffi- cicnt of swelling, very low heat conduction, inertness Ic chemical agents and to boiling in water (212'F), veiy good resistance to absorption, impermeability to mois- 60 ture, excellent durability and freedom from decay. nearly noninflammable, good coefficient of noise absorption. and handsome appearance, permitting iti use for decorative articles. SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the book Tr86 Bark.. A Color Guide by Huguès Vaucher, translatad and edited by James E. Eckenwalder {@2003 by Timber Press, Inc.) Bark m(akes up 6-22% as much of the bulk of tree trunk8 as the wood, In many lurnber mills, bark has often been di.%carded as wasie or burned in the open air. This poses a big problem in terms of groundwater con- 5 tamination and air pollution, The cxploitation of bark takes advantage of its three most important properties: its energy conTeni, which is dbout the same as that of wood: its low density. and the diverse cellular conients. These physical properties and the high conccntration of 10 chemical cell contents explain the diverse potential llses for bark. The induslrial and .8mall-scale applicdtions of cork 65 are aè> Yaried as they are numerous. Its most familial use is 414 Stoppers (corks) for bottles. However, the largest volume of cork Collsumed by industry actually goes into the tnanufacture of cork dggregate sound- proofing panels and cork tiles used as flooring in pri- 70 V<ite homes, public buildings, factorie,s, &*ports halls, etL. Significant quantities of cork are also used to make sheeLs of various thickness that are used in light carpen- try and tor interior decoratiOT]. Cork oak (Querc'u.¥ .YLiber) is virtually withoul par- allel among trees. It is the only one that is exploited industrially and exclusively for its bark: cork, a raw 15 material whose properties are nearly impossible to duplicate artiticially. This tree of the Mediterranean countries and ot the adjacent Atlantic coast.s is culti- vated principally in Portugal, which with 330-440 mil- lion pounds per yeaT piovides 50tYo Df world production. 20 Portugal has more than 1.8 million acres of cork oaks under cultivation. Next come Spain, Algcria, Morocco, France, Italy, and Tunisia. The li,8t ot products ibat are rnade wholly or partly 75 of cork is irnpressive, We can cite, in no particular order: floats for tishnets- life preservers. antivibration blocks for machinery; insulation for appliances, includ- ing refrigerators; parts for toys. linings for carrying cases; blocks for prinling on bags, fabric.s, or wall- 8Q Pdper" tabletops, trays, lind cork boards. model making by sculptors and architects" boxes and decorative objects sculpted from cork. in8ulating covers; polishing wheels for the glass industry; drtiLles for sports, educa- tion, and hdndicrafts; protective Piicking maierial for 85 fragile commodities. parts for footwe£ir, clogs, and orthopedic devices. etc. One could al80 mention the aerospace industry, which uses cork for its quulities of lightness coupled with good thermal insulation. standardized procedure is used for harvesting cork. When the cork oak reachcs the age of 20-25 years 25 and lis trunk measures about 12 inches in diarneter, it can be debarked (or stripped) for the first time. The virgin cork from thi.% harvest is of low quality and is generally only used for griinulated cork. After another 8-10 years, the cork will have regrown to a thiLkness 30 of l /-2 inches. The second harvest can then proceed. and thenceforth every 8-10 yeaTS to an age of 130-15() years if the tree holds up well and grows in favorable climatic conditions. Trees that are not subjected to this harvestAng regime can live 35 300-400 years ! The uniqueness of the cork oak lies in the great ease wirh which the outer bark (cork and rhytidome) can be separated from the inner bark (bast), preserving the living part that produccs thc cork. The art of strip- 40 ping, which is carried out from mid-June to mid-Augu8t (while the sap is rising), lies in making longitudinal and then hori20ntal cuts on the trunk in order to release ,5trips or sheets without damaging the inner bark. Thus the growth of cork can resume without initiating faults 45 in the new cork. The living bark, which is reddish yellow dftei debarking, gradually turns ochre ihereafter, then br()wThTrh red over the course of weeks, and finally blackish gray dtter about a year. Although cork is d dead bark, it should be con- sid¢Tcd a noble plant Material SEnce its intrinsic proper- tie4 are numerous and irreplaceable by any single synthelic rnaterial of the same cost. The qualities ot cork can be summarized as follows: lightness (density

In the first paragiaph, bark iq described as being a part ot the tree that is distinct from the tree's= wood.

According to the passage, the three most important qualities of bark are: capacity for noise abgorption. olor, thickness, and density. energy content. low density, and diverse cellulaI contents. sap confrnt, age, and durability.

According to the passage, determining when to first harvest cork is a tunction of the: age of a Iree and the diameter of its trunk. marketplace demand and the price of lumber. ACT.70G 33 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. Passage 111 55 prised, unmoved when they see the real thing., This is not a new problem, of course. it plagued the art world when the printing proce&iS allowed the mass reproduc- tion of great works of art, and its effects Lan still be seer] whenever one overhears il museum-goer express 60 disappointmeni that the Van Gogh he sees hanging on the wall is nowhere near d8 vibrani as the one on hig coffee mug. HUMANITIES: This passage is adapt8d from the article 'The lfflage Culture" by Chrlstine Rosen IQ2005 by Ethics and Public Policy Center}. The creator of one of the earliesi rechnologies of the irnagc named his invention, appropiiately enough, for himself. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. a French- man known for his elaborate and whimsical stage 5 design in the P(iris theater, began bL]ilding on the work of Joseph Nicéphore Niepce to try to produce a fixed irnage. Daguerre called the image he created in 1837 the "daguerreotype. He miide extravagant claims for his device. It is 'not merely an instrument which serves 10 to draw nature, he wrote in 1838, il 'gives her ihe power to reproduce herself., But Sontag's point is broader, and suggests that photography has forced us io consider that exposure to 65 images does not necessarily create understanding of the things themselves. Imagcb do not neccssarily lead to meaning. the infonnation they convey does not always lead to knowledge. This is due in part to the fact that photographic images must constantly be refreshed if 70 one's attention is to continue to be drawn to them. "Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel,, Sontag argues. "Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised-partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror., Images. Sontag conLlude.s, have 75 turned the world 'into a department store or museum- without-walls, a place where people "become cus- tDmers or tourists of reality. Despile its technological crudeness and often- spcctral images, the daguerreotype was eerily effective at capturing glimmers of personality in its fixed por- 15 trails. The extant daguerreotypes of well-known Amcri- cans in the nineteenth century include.. a young and serious Abrahatn Lincoln, sans beard; an affable Horace Greelcy in stovepipe hat; and a dour picture of the suffragi8t Lucy Stone. A daguerreotype of Edgar 20 Allan Poe, taken in 1848, depicts the writer with a baIe- ful expression and crossed arms, and was taken not long before Poe Wds found delirious and near deilth on the streets of Baltimore. Nevertheless, photographs still retain some of the magical allure that the earliest daguerreotypes inspired, 80 As W. l. T. Mitchell observes in What Do Pictures Want? 41When students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a pictur¢ and what it represents, ask thern to take a photograph ot their mother and blank out the eyes. Photographs remain powerful because they 85 arc reminders of the people and things we care about. They are surrogates carried into battlc by a soldier or by a traveler on holiday. They exist to rernind us of the absent, the beloved, and the dead, But the daguerreotype did more than capiure the 25 posture of a poised citizenry. It al%0 changed artists, perceptions ot human nature. Nathani¢l Hawthorne's 1851 Gothic romance, The House of the Seven Gables, has an ancient moral ("the wrong-doing of one genera- tion lives into the SUCLes5ive ones") but made use of a 30 modern technology. daguerreotyping, to unspool itg story about the unmasking of festering, latent evil. In the story, Holgrave, the strange lodger living in the gabled house, is a daguerreotypist (ds well as a poliiical radical) who says of his art: 'While we give it credit 35 only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings oui the secret character with a truth no painter would ever venture upon, even could he deteci it. Holgravc's silvery daguerrcotypes that eventually reveal the nefarious motives of Judge Pynchcon-and 40 in so doing sugge.gt that the camera could expose human character more acutely than the eye.

What does Ihe passage state is the art involved in removing bark frorn the tree? A, Cutting it in a way that makes what is removed from the tree particularly useful in art applications injury to the inner bark of the kind that would damage the next harvest layer of the inner bark to be extracted in one piece color for which there is the most demand in the industrial marketplace

The passage states that the largest volume of cork con- 5Utned by industry goes into the manufacture of: sloppers, known as corks, used in bottling. insulation for household 4tppliances. soundproofing panels and flooring tiles. energy content.

The passage's author most likely relates the plot of The House of the Seven Gables to: wise iechniccil passage. suggest some artistq, beliet" in the ability of daguerreotypes to expose truth. of new technology. encourdge the reader to siudy the cla.gsic novels of the 1800s.

According to the PdS8age, of the following, who was the earliest contributor to the technological develop- ment of fixed images? F, Hawthorne Niepce ACT.7 35 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. Passage IV 55 he put it, swallowed up or sucked in, But he didn't think his observations important, and they slipped into oblivion. NATURAL SCIENCE: Thls passage is 8dapt8d from Chance in the House of Fate.. A Natural History of Heredily by J8nnifer Ackerrnan {Icfd001 by Jennifer Ackerman). Twenty years later, scientists observing metamor- phosib in flies, ants, and beetles noied in the Changing 60 muscles and glands the wholesale death of cells. Laier studies of developillg bon¢,s, muscles, and other tissues in mammals suggested that the shaping of c(Ir, eye, nose, tongue, intesiinal Iract, and tiachea involves ,some removal of excess cells. By the turn of the century it 65 was clear: to have shapely toads. butterflies, babies, one must have cell death. I once chanced on a collection of brilliantly col- ored palntings ot" South American insects, somc of them nightmarish-a giant cockroach scaling a pineapple, for example-but most of them showing the metamorpho- 5 .¥is of moths and butterflies from egg to winged insect, the life stages presented as if they were happening dll at once. Thc paintings were the work of Maria Sybilla MeIian. a naturalist and artist who Icft her home in 10 Amsterdam in 1699 at the age of fifty-two and Siiiled to South Atnerica to paint the life cycles of insect8 in the junglcs of Suriname. The journey would have been remarkable in any century, but W¢lS especially so in the late 1600s, when savants were still poking for answers 15 to nature's riddles in the ruins of the classical world, quoting the authority of Pliny, the natural philosopher who had confidently proposed that butterflies were born from dew, and drawing their knowledge of ani- mgils from medieval bestiaries. Birds were categorized 20 according to notions of nobility, from most noble (eagles and hawks), to wise (owls), to big (05triches), and on down the line. Caterpillars, if they were con%id- ered at all, were classified apart from winged insects and lumped together wilh worms and .8erpents. Frorn the Suriname capital, Paramaribo, Merian sailed up Ihe Surinarne River, stopping along it,5 banks to collect caterpillars, then watching them closely for signs of metamorphosis ¢ind painling them ai the pivotal moment. Two years later, sick of heat and fever, she 30 returned home, loaded with .8pecimens and hundrcds of paintingg of iguanas and geckos, fighting snakes and frog-eating scoipions, and dozens of moths and buiier- flies in vaTiOUS life stages on their native cassava, guava, batata, and pawpaw plants. The idea that death would chaperone growth was not easy to accept. But at least the role of cell death in the miracle of development seemed of minor 70 importance. Then, in the early 1970s, a team of Scottish pathologists eAatnined different kinds of tissue and dis- covered that cells have two radically different ways of expiring. Those that die accidentally, by injury or poi- soning, swell up and pop like balloon8-a visually 75 obvious process the team called necrosis. But those that die naturally during dcvcloptnent do so by quiet, effi- cient, nearly invisible means. This way of dying (which the team called apoptosis from the Greek for fallillg") may be inconspicuou8, but it goes on all the 80 time in every kind of tAssue, in nearly every kind of animal. Cell deaih is the night-side of growth. Cells die en masse at incredible speed, not jusi to gculpt our body structures before wc arc born. but throughout oui life, 85 about ten billion each day, to adjust cell numbers, elim- inate the injured, and dispose of cells deemed obsolete. We don't ditninish in the face of such massive, inces- sant loss for the sirnpIe reason that new cells are born in trade for those that die. The body precisely balances 90 cell birth and cell death. 25 35 If we are to believe her journal, Merian knew Ihe details of mctamorphosis perhap.s rnore intimately than the savants. Her paintings and journal% address the step-by-step transfiguration not just of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) but al.so of amphibians. In 1686 40 she had precociously noted the dcvclopmental odyssey of frogs from black grains that "fed on the white slime that surrounded them," to tiny creatures that grew little tails so that they could %win], then eyes, then, eighi days later. two little feet 'from thc skin at the back dnd 45 after a further eight days two little leet at the front [like] small crocodiles, Thereafter the tail rotted away and they beLame proper frogs and jumped onio the land,

A journalist in 1839 had this to say about Ihe daguerreotype.. Talk no more of "holding the mirror up to nature" she will hold it up to herself. and present you with a copy of her countenance for a penny. Based on the passage, would Daguerre agree or dis- dgrcc with this statement? mostly be used to take pictures of the outdoors. Agree, because he believed daguerreotypes gave the power of reproduction to natUTe. technologically crude and ineffective. was inferior to paintings in providing realistic reproductions.

Based on the passage, why might The House of the Sevgn Gables have been considered a modern story for its tim¢? era. then becoming vital to the society ot that era. centr411 to the plot. Its plot changed the way writers thought about daguerreotyping and in so doing created a new genre.

Based on the passage, when Holmes called the photo- giaph a "tnirror with a memory" (Iine 43), he most likely meant that a photograph. is an effccti ve way to visualize and save a moment in time. of view. makes the world around us seem unirnportant to explore and remember. have to be Teminded of them.

Based on the passage, Mitchell suggests asking stu- dents to blank out the eyes of a photograph of their rnother in order to: show how physically fragile a picture can be. granied. through photography. have.

The passage can best be described a8 dn exploration of the.. natural processes observed by Merian and elabo- rated on by subsequent rcscarchers. female naturalist. artistic merit of Merian's paintings of animal metarnorphosis, Merian obseived grew their tailg.

The author's overall tonc when discus,sing Merian's work can best be described as: neutral. admiring. skeptical. Just whai was going on in this rotting away wasn't 50 discovered until 1842, not long after ihe discovery of animal cells. That year a German biologist, Carl Vogt, peered through a microscope at a developing midwife load, AIyie.v obstetricans. Vogt saw that the individual cells of the toad's notochord were being "resorbed,, as ACT-70G 36 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE.

The author rnakes clear that her enLounter with a col- lection of Merian's paintings was: unplanned. in a museum. in her youth.

The author characterizes the work of Pliny as an exam- ple of the kind of: impressivc authority that Merian COll.sulted when conceptualizing her paintings. outdated resource that many researchers in Merian's day were still relying on. ancient wisdom that fortunately had survived Ihe decline in knowledge during medieval times. were exposing io public scorn.

The Jnain point of the sixth paragraph (lines 58-66) is that: many animals experience metamorphosis at some point in their life cycle. cell death is critical to the proper development of inqects and animals. a wider ariay of aninials needs to be studied in order to understand cell death. animal Organs undergo a compliLated shaping process,

Source question 39. Refer to the source image.

According to the passage. the notion that "death would chaperone growth" (line 67) was initially rnet with.. relief. £lWe. curiosity. resistance. END OF TEST 3 STOP! DO NOT TURN THE PAGE UNTIL TOLD TO DO SO. DO NOT RETURN TO A PREVIOUS TEST. AGT.70G 37