ACT English Test Strategies

What’s on the test?  5 passages  15 questions per passage  75 total questions  45 minutes to complete

Reading the passages  Work the questions as you read through the passage  Do not read the passage first and then go back to answer the questions  Read until you get to an underlined selection, and then answer that question

Types of questions  Now  Later  Never

Identify Topic  Answers are the clues to figuring out what the question is testing  What is the only thing that changes in the answers?

POE  Figure out what’s wrong  Eliminate all answers that don’t fix the problem

Use context  Don’t skip from question to question  Read the text in between questions for clues for consistency

Trust your ear, but verify

Don’t fix what isn’t broken  No change is a legit answer sometimes  Work through the previous four steps first

Verbs  Ryan play soccer.  Mary and Allison practices every day.  Next week, the team traveled to play its bitter rival.  Shivani has became the star of the team.

Verbs  Singular verbs end with s  Plural verbs do not

Pronouns  The team nominated their goalie the most valuable player.  My friends and me took the train downtown.  Her and I worked on the group project together.  The crowd pushed Caesar and I onto the stage.

Pronouns  Agreement  Case

Modifiers  No one took her warnings serious.  Blizzard is a charmingly energetically puppy.  Farid is more busy than Wesley is.  Lara was the beautifullest girl at the prom.

Modifiers  Adjectives  Adverbs

Modifiers  Comparisons  -er, more  Superlatives  -est, most

Extras  A complete idea can stand on its own as a sentence  An incomplete idea cannot, so it must be appropriately linked to a complete idea  Always put a comma before the “and” at the end of a list of three of more items  Be biased toward choices that say “DELETE,” but do not assume they are right all or even half the time.