ACT Past Papers with Answers

Paper 82

ACT January 2003

Form 59F · Reading Test · 40 questions

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Paper 82 · ACT January 2003 · Form 59F · Reading Test

The passage is written from the point of view of: over time between a boy and his grandfather. shared trait through joint activities. he received as a child from older relatives. dents that illustrate a family trait.

Aan unidentified narrator observing the relationshipBtwo members of the same family discovering theirCa grown man agonizing over the mixed messagesDa boy and the man he becomes considering inci-

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Paper 82 · ACT January 2003 · Form 59F · Reading Test

In the last paragraph, a comparison is made between “diminished excellence” and “flawed competence.” From the narrator’s point of view, the conditions are different because the one is: pride. self. inherent in the individual. while the other is a sign that the individual can’t. 3 3 85 36 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-59F-PRACTICE 3 3 3 3 Passage II SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from Dava Sobel’s book Longitude (©1995 by Dava Sobel). To learn one’s longitude at sea, one needs to know what time it is aboard ship and also the time at the home port or another place of known longitude—at that very same moment. The two clock times enable the navigator to convert the hour difference into a geo- graphical separation. Since the Earth takes twenty-four hours to complete one full revolution of three hundred sixty degrees, one hour marks one twenty-fourth of a spin, or fifteen degrees. And so each hour’s time differ- ence between the ship and the starting point marks a progress of fifteen degrees of longitude to the east or west. Every day at sea, when the navigator resets the ship’s clock to local noon when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, and then consults the home- port clock, every hour’s discrepancy between them translates into another fifteen degrees of longitude. Those same fifteen degrees of longitude also cor- respond to a distance traveled. At the Equator, where the girth of the Earth is greatest, fifteen degrees stretch fully one thousand miles. North or south of that line, however, the mileage value of each degree decreases. One degree of longitude equals four minutes of time the world over, but in terms of distance, one degree shrinks from sixty-eight miles at the Equator to virtu- ally nothing at the poles. Precise knowledge of the hour in two different places at once—a longitude prerequisite so easily accessible today from any pair of cheap wristwatches— was utterly unattainable up to and including the era of pendulum clocks. On the deck of a rolling ship, such clocks would slow down, or speed up, or stop running altogether. Normal changes in temperature encountered en route from a cold country of origin to a tropical trade zone thinned or thickened a clock’s lubricating oil and made its metal parts expand or contract with equally disastrous results. A rise or fall in barometric pressure, or the subtle variations in the Earth’s gravity from one latitude to another, could also cause a clock to gain or lose time. For lack of a practical method of determining lon- gitude, every great captain in the Age of Exploration became lost at sea despite the best available charts and compasses. Untold numbers of sailors died when their destinations suddenly loomed out of the sea and took them by surprise. In a single such accident on October 22, 1707, at the Scilly Isles near the southwestern tip of England, nearly two thousand men lost their lives. The quest for a solution to the problem of longi- tude persisted over four centuries and across the whole continent of Europe. The British Parliament, in its famed Longitude Act of 1714, set the highest bounty of all, naming a prize equal to several million dollars in today’s currency for a “Practicable and Useful” means of determining longitude. English clockmaker John Harrison, a mechanical genius who pioneered the science of portable precision timekeeping, devoted his life to this quest. He accom- plished what Newton had feared impossible: He invented a clock that would carry the true time from the home port, like an eternal flame, to any remote corner of the world. With no formal education or apprenticeship to any watchmaker, Harrison nevertheless constructed a series of virtually friction-free clocks that required no lubrica- tion and no cleaning, that were made from materials impervious to rust, and that kept their moving parts per- fectly balanced in relation to one another, regardless of how the world pitched or tossed about them. He did away with the pendulum, and he combined different metals inside his works in such a way that when one component expanded or contracted with changes in temperature, the other counteracted the change and kept the clock’s rate constant. His every success, however, was parried by mem- bers of the scientific elite, who distrusted Harrison’s magic box. The commissioners charged with awarding the longitude prize changed the contest rules whenever they saw fit, so as to favor the chances of astronomers over the likes of Harrison and his fellow “mechanics.” But the utility and accuracy of Harrison’s approach tri- umphed in the end. In 1773 he claimed his rightful reward. His followers shepherded Harrison’s intricate, exquisite invention through the design modifications that enabled it to be mass produced and enjoy wide use. To retrace this story in an age when a network of satellites can nail down a ship’s position within a few feet in just a moment or two—is to see the globe anew.

Aa source of sorrow while the other is a source ofBbased in the family while the other is based in theCinherent in the environment while the other isDa sign that the individual can improve the world

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Paper 82 · ACT January 2003 · Form 59F · Reading Test

The passage indicates that instruments for determining longitude now include: 3 3 38 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-59F-PRACTICE 3 3 3 3 Passage III HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the essay “Albany, 1958” by Lydia Minatoya. It appeared in her book Talking to High Monks in the Snow (©1992 by Lydia Minatoya). This story takes place in Albany, New York. The meter of my childhood was the rising and plunging of a sewing machine needle: rapid and smooth, like an endless distant drum roll. My mother hummed as she sewed. She guided the fabric this way and that. In 1938, she had graduated from a school of costume design, and before World War II, she had her own boutique in Los Angeles. It was a time when the dream of America never seemed finer. The Albany of my childhood was a festive place, closer in spirit to the nineteenth century than to the twenty-first. Italian pushcart grocers crowded southern city blocks, crafting tiered architectural wonders from fresh produce and pungent sausage. Heavy-legged workhorses clopped along cobblestones, delivering bread from German bakeries and milk from Dutch dairies. A cable car ran along streets named for trees. Each year in early April, an annual dinner-dance was sponsored by the pharmaceutical institute where my father worked as a researcher. A ballroom was rented in a downtown hotel. Musicians were hired to play big-band music. The dinner-dance was the only time when my mother would sew for herself. It was the one time when my parents went out, alone, together. I was a romantic child, dreamy and diffuse. For me, the dinner-dance was an annual event: looked forward to in long anticipation and back upon with nostalgia. Each year, on a snowy weekday evening, Father would take us window shopping. The deserted down- town streets would be a magical glaze of snow-softened lights and shadowy shop displays. My mother would linger in front of the mannequins clad in evening apparel. I would follow along, drunk with wonder. Each year before the tape had desiccated on the backs of the New Year’s cards and they had fallen to the floor, my mother would have decided on the design for her dinner-dance dress. Then there would be a trip to the fabric store. I would run my hands along gradu- ated rainbows of thread spools. I would watch their changing hues as they shimmered in the light. As the dress took form, my parents would practice dancing. “Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow,” Father would mutter with determination as he trod unmincingly on Okaa-chan’s feet and guided her into the walls. “Next lady?” he gallantly would inquire. My sister Misa and I would take turns, balancing on the tops of his shoes, as Father swept us around the room. I always thought that Dinner-Dance Eve had some of the magic of Christmas. Every year, I would perch on the bathtub’s edge. I would watch my father fix his tie. “See the nice dimple below the knot?” Father would turn from the mirror and bend to show me. “The dimple is very important.” I solemnly would nod—the honored recipient of this arcane cultural wisdom. Back in the bedroom, Okaa-chan would slide into her new dress. She would glance at her reflection with modest pleasure. When she moved, I could catch the sweet scent of face powder. When I was seven or eight, the window shopping and the dinner-dances stopped. The granite façades of the downtown stores were grimy with graffiti. Display windows were boarded with plywood. The elegant hotels had fallen into disrepair. No one danced to big- band music anymore. As I grew older, my mother began to sew for wealthy women. The women lived in country homes where sunlight, reflected from swimming pools just beyond French doors, played across fine wood floors. Once after a luncheon in the city, a woman came to our house for a fitting. Standing erect in the door- way, then bowing slightly, my mother met her formally. “Won’t you please come in? May I please take your coat?” “Here you go. Try to put it somewhere clean.” Like an eagle, her words slipped regally down a great distance and struck with awful ease. After the fitting, my father was ashamed and angry. “Actually, I do not like this work,” he stormed. “You do not have to do this; we do not need this kind of money.” He waved his arms dismissively at Okaa- chan’s sewing machine. “They come and look at our home with contempt. You kneel at their hems like a ser- vant! Mo dame desu yo! It is no good, I tell you!” Okaa-chan was intractable. Eloquent in anger, she blazed over the pronunciation of words that ordinarily would have left pondering pauses in her speech. “I do not care what they think of me, of our home. They cannot affect our value.” My mother stepped in front of her sewing machine, as if to shield it from scorn. “My work gives me happiness.” She squarely faced my father. “I do not care if you speak as Husband,” she said. “I am a Designer!”

Amodified pendulum clocks.Bsatellites.Ca network of ships.Dbarometers.

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Paper 82 · ACT January 2003 · Form 59F · Reading Test

Which of the following words best describes the nar- rator’s father’s dancing as he practices for the dinner- dance with Okaa-chan? 3 3 40 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-59F-PRACTICE 3 3 3 3 Passage IV NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the Preface to neurologist Oliver Sacks’s collection of essays An Anthropologist on Mars (©1995 by Oliver Sacks). Nature’s imagination, as Freeman Dyson likes to say, is richer than ours, and he speaks, marvellingly, of this richness in the physical and biological worlds, the endless diversity of physical forms and forms of life. For me, as a physician, nature’s richness is to be studied in the phenomena of health and disease, in the endless forms of individual adaptation by which human organisms, people, adapt and reconstruct themselves. Defects, disorders, diseases, in this sense, can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. It is the paradox of disease, in this sense, its “creative” potential, that forms the central theme of this book. Thus while one may be horrified by the ravages of developmental disorder or disease, one may sometimes see them as creative too—for if they destroy particular paths, particular ways of doing things, they may force the nervous system into making other paths and ways, force on it an unexpected growth and evolution. This other side of development or disease is something I see, potentially, in almost every patient; and it is this which I am especially concerned to describe. Similar considerations were brought up by A. R. Luria, who studied the long-term survival of patients who had cerebral tumors or had suffered brain injuries or strokes—and the ways, the adaptations, they used to survive. He also studied deaf and blind children as a very young man (with his mentor L. S. Vygotsky). Vygotsky stressed the intactness rather than the deficits of such children: A handicapped child represents a qualitatively dif- ferent, unique type of development. . . . If a blind child or a deaf child achieves the same level of development as a normal child, then the child with a defect achieves this in another way, by another course, by other means; and, for the pedagogue, it is particularly important to know the uniqueness of the course along which he must lead the child. This uniqueness transforms the minus of a hand- icap into the plus of compensation. That such radical adaptations could occur demanded, Luria thought, a new view of the brain, a sense of it not as programmed and static, but rather as dynamic and active, a supremely efficient adaptive system geared for evolution and change, ceaselessly adapting to the needs of the organism—its need, above all, to construct a coherent self and world, whatever defects or disorders of brain function befell it. That the brain is minutely differentiated is clear: there are hundreds of tiny areas crucial for every aspect of perception and behavior. The miracle is how they all cooperate, are integrated together, in the creation of a self. This sense of the brain’s remarkable capacity for the most striking adaptations, not least in the special (and often desperate) circumstances of neural or sen- sory mishap, has come to dominate my perception of my patients and their lives. So much so, indeed, that I am sometimes moved to wonder whether it may not be necessary to redefine the very concepts of “health” and “disease,” to see these in terms of the ability of the organism to create a new organization and order, one that fits its special, altered disposition and needs, rather than in the terms of a rigidly defined “norm.” Sickness implies a contraction of life, but such contractions do not have to occur. Nearly all of my patients, so it seems to me, whatever their problems, reach out to life—and not only despite their conditions, but often because of them, and even with their aid. The study of disease, for the physician, demands the study of identity, the inner worlds that patients, under the spur of illness, create. But the realities of patients, the ways in which they and their brains con- struct their own worlds, cannot be comprehended wholly from the observation of behavior, from the out- side. With this in mind, I have taken off my white coat, deserted, by and large, the hospitals where I have spent the last twenty-five years, to explore my subjects’ lives as they live in the real world, feeling in part like a natu- ralist, examining rare forms of life; in part like an anthropologist, a neuroanthropologist, in the field—but most of all like a physician, called here and there to make house calls, house calls at the far borders of human experience.

ASkillfulBGracefulCClumsyDIndifferent

Form 59F · Reading Test · 40 questions

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