ACT Past Papers with Answers

Paper 7

ACT June 2023

Form F12 · Reading Test · 40 questions

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Paper 7 · ACT June 2023 · Form F12 · Reading Test

The point of view from which the passage is told is best described as that of a: relates events as they happen. relates events that happened in the past. relates the thoughts and feelings of many characters. who relates the thoughts and feelings of primarily one character.

Afirst person narrator, present in the action, whoBfirst person narrator, not present in the action, whoCthird person narrator, present in the action, whoDthird person narrator, not present in the action,

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Paper 7 · ACT June 2023 · Form F12 · Reading Test

Which of the following statements provides the best summary of the events portrayed in the sentences in lines 77–81? to Andrea that she thinks the bowl is enchanting. tion of Andrea’s deliberate and perfect placement of the bowl. bowl had been perfectly placed, even though Andrea had moved a pitcher. had not noticed the bowl on the chest. 31 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-F12 3 3 Passage II SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is from the book The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan. Originally cultivated in the Ottoman Empire, tulips were intro- duced to Europe at the end of the sixteenth century and became wildly popular in the seventeenth century. One crucial element of the beauty of the tulip that intoxicated the Dutch, the Turks, the French, and the English has been lost to us. To them the tulip was a magic flower because it was prone to spontaneous and brilliant eruptions of color. In a planting of a hundred tulips, one of them might be so possessed, opening to reveal the white or yellow ground of its petals painted, as if by the finest brush and steadiest hand, with intri- cate feathers or flames of a vividly contrasting hue. When this happened, the tulip was said to have “broken,” and if a tulip broke in a particularly striking manner—if the flames of the applied color reached clear to the petal’s lip, say, and its pigment was brilliant and pure and its pattern symmetrical—the owner of that bulb had won the lottery. For the offsets of that bulb would inherit its pattern and hues and command a fan- tastic price. The fact that broken tulips for some unknown reason produced fewer and smaller offsets than ordinary tulips drove their prices still higher. Semper Augustus was the most famous such break. The closest we have to a broken tulip today is the group known as the Rembrandts—so named because Rembrandt painted some of the most admired breaks of his time. But these latter-day tulips, with their heavy patterning of one or more contrasting colors, look clumsy by comparison, as if painted in haste with a thick brush. To judge from the paintings we have of the originals, the petals of broken tulips could be as fine and intricate as marbleized papers, the extravagant swirls of color somehow managing to seem both bold and delicate at once. In the most striking examples— such as the fiery carmine that Semper Augustus splashed on its pure white ground—the outbreak of color juxtaposed with the orderly, linear form of the tulip could be breathtaking, with the leaping, wayward patterns just barely contained by the petal’s edge. Anna Pavord recounts the extraordinary lengths to which Dutch growers would go to make their tulips break, sometimes borrowing their techniques from alchemists, who faced what must have seemed a com- parable challenge. Over the earth above a bed planted with white tulips, gardeners would liberally sprinkle paint powders of the desired hue, on the theory that rainwater would wash the color down to the roots, where it would be taken up by the bulb. Charlatans sold recipes believed to produce the magic color breaks; pigeon droppings were thought to be an effective agent, as was plaster dust taken from the walls of old houses. Unlike the alchemists, whose attempts to change base metals into gold reliably failed, now and then the would-be tulip changers would be rewarded with a good break, inspiring everybody to redouble their efforts. What the Dutch could not have known was that a virus was responsible for the magic of the broken tulip, a fact that, as soon as it was discovered, doomed the beauty it had made possible. The color of a tulip actu- ally consists of two pigments working in concert—a base color that is always yellow or white and a second, laid-on color called an anthocyanin; the mix of these two hues determines the unitary color we see. The virus works by partially and irregularly suppressing the anthocyanin, thereby allowing a portion of the under- lying color to show through. It wasn’t until the 1920s, after the invention of the electron microscope, that sci- entists discovered the virus was being spread from tulip to tulip by Myzus persicae, the peach potato aphid. Peach trees were a common feature of seventeenth- century gardens. By the 1920s the Dutch regarded their tulips as commodities to trade rather than jewels to display, and since the virus weakened the bulbs it infected (the reason the offsets of broken tulips were so small and few in number), Dutch growers set about ridding their fields of the infection. Color breaks, when they did occur, were promptly destroyed, and a certain peculiar manifestation of natural beauty abruptly lost its claim on human affection. I can’t help thinking that the virus was supplying something the tulip needed, just the touch of abandon the flower’s chilly formality called for. Maybe that’s why the broken tulip became such a treasure in seventeenth-century Holland: the wayward color loosed on a tulip by a good break perfected the flower, even as the virus responsible set about destroying it. On its face the story of the virus and the tulip would seem to throw a wrench into any evolutionary understanding of beauty. Excerpt from THE BOTANY OF DESIRE: A PLANT’S-EYE VIEW OF THE WORLD by Michael Pollan, copyright © 2001 by Michael Pollan. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Pen- guin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

AThe homeowner, first noticing the bowl, explainsBAndrea imagines the homeowner’s sudden realiza-CThe homeowner tells Andrea that she thinks theDAndrea determines the reason that the homeowner

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Paper 7 · ACT June 2023 · Form F12 · Reading Test

As it is used in line 79, the word abandon most nearly means: 33 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-F12 3 3 Passage III HUMANITIES: Passage A is from the book Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York by Joseph G. Schloss. Passage B is from the book The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture That Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy by Steve Stoute. Passage A by Joseph G. Schloss The term b-boying refers to break dancing. In the first sense of the term, hip-hop refers collec- tively to a group of related art forms in different media (visual, sound, movement) that were practiced in Afro- Caribbean, African American, and Latino neighbor- hoods in New York City in the 1970s. The term, when used in this sense, also refers to the events at which these forms were practiced, the people who practiced them, their shared aesthetic sensibility, and contempo- rary activities that maintain those traditions. Perhaps the most important aspect of this variety of hip-hop is that it is unmediated, in the sense that most of the practices associated with it are both taught and performed in the context of face-to-face interac- tions between human beings. To some degree, this con- stitutes an intentional rejection of the mass media by its practitioners, but to a great extent it is just the natural result of the practices themselves. Activities like b-boying and graffiti writing are simply not well suited to the mass media. Although in both cases, brief attempts were made to bring these forms of expression into mainstream contexts (b-boying in a series of low- budget “breaksploition” movies in the early 1980s and graffiti as part of a short-lived gallery trend around the same time), neither developed substantially in those environments. This, it has been suggested, was not so much because the forms lacked appeal, but because— on an economic level—b-boying was an advertisement with no product. This reality is reflected in the phrase that is often used to refer to this branch of hip-hop: “hip-hop culture,” which suggests something that is lived rather than bought and sold. The second sense of the term hip-hop refers to a form of popular music that developed, or was devel- oped, out of hip-hop culture. This hip-hop, also known as “rap music,” resulted from the interaction between hip-hop culture and the preexisting music industry. As we would expect, this hip-hop features elements of both sensibilities. My students are often surprised when I point out that, even when hip-hop lyrics seem to reject every aspect of mainstream culture and morality, the one thing they almost never reject is a strict 16-bar verse structure derived from Tin Pan Alley pop music. But this should not be surprising. This hip-hop, in con- trast to hip-hop culture, is deeply intertwined with the mass media and its needs, largely because it does have a product: records, CDs, MP3s, and ringtones. Passage B by Steve Stoute It wasn’t until I was nine years old, late in 1979, that I even heard the words “hip” and “hop” strung together or was able to grasp the notion of what being a rapper actually meant. That was when, fatefully, I heard a record that changed my life (and pop culture) forever. Like it’s yesterday, I can still remember that moment over at my aunt’s home in Brooklyn—where it seemed there was always a party under way with rela- tives and neighbors hanging out, a great spread of food, and new, hot music on the record player. Most stereo systems in those days could be adapted for the single two-sided records that were smaller and had the big hole in the middle (45 RPM) as well as the bigger records with the small holes (331 ⁄3 RPM)—which were the full albums that had several songs on each side. But as the intro plays to what I recognize as “Good Times” by the group Chic and I’m drawn into the living room because it’s a familiar hit song from the previous summer, I encounter a record on the turntable that defies categorization. Instead of the sweet female lead vocals of that disco smash, I hear something totally dif- ferent and spot a baby-blue label on the black vinyl record I’ve never seen before. Even though it’s a twelve-inch disc, the size of an album, as I listen to the rhyming words being spoken—“Singin’on ’n’’n’on ’n’ on / The beat don’t stop until the break of dawn / Singin’ on ’n’ ’n’ on ’n’ on on ’n’ on / Like a hot buttered a pop da pop da pop dibbie dibbie pop da pop pop / Ya don’t dare stop”—it hits me that this entire side is one long song. Almost fifteen minutes long as it turns out. Or, to be exact, fourteen minutes and thirty-six seconds of pure fun laid over the thumping bass beat from the break of “Good Times” with sing-along words easy to remember and repeat. The record, I discover, is by an unknown group, the Sugarhill Gang, and is called “Rapper’s Delight.” From then on, nobody ever has to tell me what rap is. It’s whatever words are spoken, chanted, or talk- sung, or whatever philosophies, stories, or ideas are espoused, by the house party Master of Ceremonies. Passage A: FOUNDATION: B-BOYS, B-GIRLS, AND HIP-HOP CUL- TURE IN NEW YORK by Schloss (2009) 397w from pp.4-5. By permis- sion of Oxford University Press, USA. Passage B: “Chapter 1: Walk This Way”, copyright © 2011 by Steve Stoute, from THE TANNING OF AMERICA by Steve Stoute, with Mim Eichler Rivas. Used by permission of Gotham Books, an imprint of Pen- guin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. 34 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-F12 3 3 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85

Auninhibitedness.Brelinquishment.Cretreat.Ddenial.

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Paper 7 · ACT June 2023 · Form F12 · Reading Test

The authors of both passages would most likely agree with the idea that early rap music: and its practices. popular culture. 35 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-F12 3 3 Questions 21–24 ask about Passage A. Questions 28–30 ask about both passages. Questions 25–27 ask about Passage B. Passage IV NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is from the article “The Rise and Fall of the Living Fossil” by Ferris Jabr. The term “living fossil” refers to creatures that had emerged long ago and seemed to have stopped evolving. Like all living fossils, crocodiles were thought to have emerged in the distant past and then stayed largely unchanged. The standard theory held that the crocodil- ian species we know today originated in Africa during the Cretaceous (145 to 66 million years ago), when the seven continents were much closer together. As the continents drifted apart, the crocodilians went with them, explaining how they ended up in a band of tropics encircling the globe. If that were true, then modern crocodilian species should be very different from one another at the level of genes and molecules, because there would have been more than enough time for sub- stantial mutations to accumulate. By the 1990s, how- ever, molecular analysis revealed that immune system molecules conserved across living crocodilian species were remarkably similar in structure and behavior. Intrigued by this puzzle, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Washington named Jamie Oaks began collecting DNA samples from all 23 living crocodilian species, comparing sections of the genome where mutations were most likely to have appeared. Although the fossil record had confirmed that ancient crocodilians were more diverse than previously real- ized, it also demonstrated that, on the whole, crocodil- ians were not particularly swift evolvers compared to mammals and other vertebrates. Even accounting for this slower-than-average evolution, Oaks did not find nearly as many differences between the modern croco- dilian genomes as one would expect had those species diverged all the way back in the Cretaceous. He con- cluded that modern crocodilian species split from their last common ancestor between 8 and 13 million years ago, not long before ancient hominins split from their last common ancestor with chimpanzees. The living fossil theory of crocodiles had overestimated their evo- lutionary age by about a factor of 10. Oaks also noticed something odd about the DNA samples he had acquired from the iconic Nile croco- diles (Crocodylus niloticus): they did not match up with each other. In fact, the variation between them was great enough to suggest that he was looking at two dis- tinct species. If so, then not only were modern croco- diles much too young to be living fossils, but they had also continued to speciate after diverging from their basal ancestor—something living fossils are not sup- posed to do. On its own, Oaks’ study was intriguing, but not enough to convince the larger scientific commu- nity to cleave the Nile crocodile into two species. Unbeknownst to him, however, a separate team of scientists was preparing to corroborate his results. In the early 2000s, on an excursion to Chad, the wildlife conservationist Michael Klemens encountered some odd little crocodiles in a desert oasis. They were so docile that he and his companions could swim beside them without concern. He took a tissue sample from one that had recently perished and sent it to the Ameri- can Museum of Natural History in New York City, where Evon Hekkala, an assistant professor at Fordham University studying crocodilian diversity, sequenced its genome. When she compared the docile croc’s DNA to other Nile crocodiles, she noticed some rather striking differences. She found similar reports of tame croco- diles in Mauritania, and she remembered once reading a description by the Greek historian Herodotus of ancient Egyptians using mellow crocodiles in temple rituals. Could these tame crocs be an entirely distinct species? DNA analysis of 123 African crocodiles—as well as 57 separate samples from museum specimens, including crocodiles mummified in ancient Egypt— confirmed her suspicion. In a few sections of their respective genomes, all the mild-mannered crocs would have one DNA sequence, and all the typical Nile crocs another. They even had different numbers of chromo- somes. “That made us very confident that there were actually two different populations and they were not mixing their DNA,” Hekkala says. The two different species had diverged between 3 and 6 million years ago: Crocodylus niloticus in the East and the smaller, less aggressive Crocodylus suchus in the West. The vast majority of mummified crocodiles were C. suchus, sug- gesting that ancient Egyptians had recognized the difference. Together, Hekkala, Oaks, and other scientists helped redraw the map of how crocodilians evolved in space and time, and conclusively removed them from the category of living fossils. Ferris Jabr, science writer. Originally published in Nautilus.

Arepresented artists’ rejection of the music industryBrepresented a significant development in AmericanCwas more popular than today’s rap music.Dwas slow to find an audience.

Form F12 · Reading Test · 40 questions

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