Help on ACT reading section. Highest score is 16.

connercoan
Wed, 22 Jan 2014 23:37:15 +0000

The strategy I use is to read a passage in exactly 4 minutes and then to answer the 10 questions that follow in 4:45 which gives me 8:45 per passage. Normally I finish the science passages faster than 8:45 and the humanities/prose fiction might take me up to 9 minutes per passage, so I do stray away from my timing rules, but it’s within reason. The biggest tip to give is to actively read. As you read think about big picture ideas. During the science passages, you should know what the passage is about after reading the first 2 sentences. Think about what each paragraph is getting at and what it means as a whole. Essentially don’t just read words on a page, read and think about what is going on. If you do this, it will make the questions far easier as you’ll already have thought about bigger implications. Also, always try to disprove any answer choices, it is often easiest to disprove an answer choice than prove it. Cross off eliminated answer choices and guess if you just can’t figure it out, but if you have time come back to it. If you favor different types of passages, do those first and get all the points you can get before moving on. Practice makes perfect so just keep taking practice reading tests and try to make yourself do the passages faster. Time is crucial on the reading test so don’t get distracted and don’t get bogged down by a question. You should attempt each question on a passage before moving on. Just keep practicing in the red book or from online PDFs and try to figure out why you may have gotten a certain answer wrong.