What is ACT about?

• The ACT Test is a standardized test that measures a high school student’s academic skills and readiness for college by testing an individual knowledge.


• ACT tests your English, math, science, and writing skills. It was created using extensive research into expected high school abilities and necessary college expectations. It is all about setting you up for success in college.


• ACT is a test offered by a nonprofit organization, with the same name, ACT (American College Testing). This test is seen as one of the two major standard tests used in the United States for admission into colleges.


• The ACT test is also often taken by students in the US to determine whether they are "ready for college". Sometimes, regardless of whether they are going to college or not, states and individual school districts require all high school students to take the ACT, using it to assess the students' learning and/or the performance of schools. It is used a standard of determining the academic performance and/or excellence of individual students, or schools at large.

What is ACT Reading Test? The reading test is a 40-question, 35-minute test that measures your ability to read closely, reason logically about texts using evidence, and integrate information from multiple sources.
The test questions focus on the mutually supportive skills that readers must bring to bear in studying written materials across a range of subject areas. Specifically, questions will ask you to determine main ideas; locate and interpret significant details; understand sequences of events; make comparisons; comprehend cause-effect relationships; determine the meaning of context-dependent words, phrases, and statements; draw generalizations; analyze the author’s or narrator’s voice and method; analyze claims and evidence in arguments; and integrate information from multiple texts.

The test comprises four sections, three of which contain one long prose passage and one that contains two shorter prose passages. The passages represent the levels and kinds of text commonly encountered in first-year college curricula.
Each passage is preceded by a heading that identifies what type of passage it is (e.g., “Natural Science”), names the author and source, and may include important background information to help you understand the passage. Each section contains a set of multiple-choice test questions. These questions do not test the rote recall of facts from outside the passage or rules of formal logic, nor do they contain isolated vocabulary questions.
In sections that contain two shorter passages, some of the questions involve both of those passages. Five scores are reported for the reading test: a total test score based on all 40 questions; three reporting category scores based on specific knowledge and skills; and an Understanding Complex Texts indicator. The approximate percentage of the test devoted to each reporting category is:

ACT Reading Practice Test