ACT Exam Prep FREE Sample Exam — Fixed Set

For the science fair, each participant built a display explaining a question, a method, and a set of results in plain language. Judges moved slowly from table to table, asking about variables, measurements, and sources of error. One display tested how quickly different fabrics dry after being soaked in identical amounts of water. The students project explained the results with a clear chart and photographs. Visitors lingered there longer than at most tables, partly because the conclusion was honest about what the small sample could and could not prove about everyday laundry. A retired teacher volunteering at the next table said clear displays matter because judges can only reward what they can quickly understand. The fair ended with certificates, photographs, and several invitations to present at schools.

Question: Select the correctly punctuated version of the sentence that starts “The students project explained”.

Graders for the scholarship essays work in pairs, reading each application twice and comparing scores before the committee meets to choose the finalists from a pool of several hundred. Disagreements are settled by a third reader. Neither of the two final answers are supported by the essay’s evidence, one grader wrote. The other grader concurred, noting that both conclusions contradicted the prompt. Their shared rubric rewards claims tied to specific passages. Essays that merely summarize, however gracefully, earn the rubric’s lowest band for analysis. Graders calibrate their scoring each morning on two sample essays, discussing any differences before the day’s applications are distributed among the pairs.

Question: Which option corrects ‘Neither of the two final answers are supported by the essay’s evidence.’?

Along the river trail, volunteers gathered on a cool Saturday to remove litter left behind after the summer festival crowds had gone home for the season. They filled bags with bottles, food wrappers, and broken signs, sorting recyclable items into separate bins near the parking area. In spite of the fact that the trail looked clean from a distance, the crew found trash hidden under benches and bushes. Organizers weighed each bag so the town could track how much waste the cleanup had removed in a single morning. By noon, the path looked welcoming again for walkers, runners, and families pushing strollers.

Question: Select the revision of the sentence beginning ‘In spite of the fact that the trail’ that removes redundancy while preserving the contrast.

Soap making combines lye and oils in a reaction that demands respect, because lye can burn skin and eyes if handled carelessly at the workbench. The maker begins by weighing the oils precisely, melting the solid ones gently, and setting them aside to cool to the temperature the recipe specifies for that batch. Separately, lye is stirred into water outdoors, since the mixture heats rapidly and releases fumes that must not be breathed in a closed kitchen space. When both mixtures reach the same temperature, they are combined and stirred until the blend thickens to the light pudding consistency soap makers call trace. Poured into molds, the soap hardens for two days and then cures for a month, growing milder and longer-lasting with every week of patient waiting.

Question: How does the sentence beginning ‘Separately, lye is stirred into water’ relate to the sentence that precedes it?

Glassblowers shape molten glass by gathering a glowing blob on the end of a long pipe. Visitors watch from a raised platform behind a low rail, close enough to feel the furnace’s heat on their faces whenever the blower swings the glowing pipe toward the workbench to begin shaping. Turning the pipe steadily keeps the soft glass from sagging while the blower puffs a short breath to start a bubble. Tools wetted in water help smooth the surface, and colored glass bits pressed into the surface melt into patterns. Because the material cools quickly, an assistant often reheats the piece in a second furnace between steps. A finished vase still must cool slowly overnight in a kiln, since rapid cooling would crack the glass from within.

Question: The writer’s stated goal is to convey how much glassblowing depends on controlling temperature. Which existing sentence most directly serves that goal and should definitely be kept?

A photography studio charges a session fee of $51 and then $11 per hour of work. A customer pays for 4 hours. What is the total charge, in dollars?

A cyclist travels 84 miles in 6 hours at a constant speed. What is the cyclist’s speed, in miles per hour?

A glacier does not only flow downhill; it also, in flowing, sorts the landscape it crosses. Rocks plucked from the valley floor are carried within and beneath the ice, grinding against bedrock in a process that produces a fine silt called rock flour, which colors meltwater streams a milky turquoise. Larger debris rides passively and is deposited, when the ice melts, in ridges that mark the glacier’s former edges with surveyor’s precision. Geologists read these deposits the way historians read archives, and with similar cautions. A ridge records a position the ice once held, but not how long it held it. A polished, grooved bedrock surface records direction of flow unmistakably and speed barely at all. The archive is eloquent about some questions and silent about others, and competence in reading it consists largely of knowing which is which. This is why two geologists can stand on the same ridge, agree on every observable fact, and still argue productively about the glacier’s past. They are not disputing the archive. They are disputing how much of the story a given kind of trace can be asked to tell, and that dispute, conducted honestly, is itself a form of knowledge. Field courses bring students to the same ridges each summer to practice separating observation from inference under supervision.

The comparison of glacial deposits to an archive that is ‘eloquent about some questions and silent about others’ conveys that the deposits:

The composer died in 1911 in a provincial capital, leaving behind forty-one works and a reputation that fit inside a single paragraph of the reference books. Elena Varga had encountered that paragraph as a student and thought no more about it until, cataloguing the estate of a retired schoolteacher, she found a trunk of hand-copied orchestral parts in the attic — parts copied by musicians, which meant the music had been performed, though no program or review survived. Over the next six years, in the gaps of her teaching job, Varga reconstructed the composer’s third symphony from those parts, a process she describes as ‘proofreading a letter written by forty people at once, each with different handwriting and some with pages missing.’ Two orchestras declined to perform the reconstruction, calling the composer a footnote. A third agreed, largely, Varga admits, because its director had also once been a schoolteacher with an attic’s worth of unanswered questions. The premiere, in the same provincial capital where the composer died, sold out — not, the reviews agreed, because the symphony was a lost masterpiece, but because it was genuinely good in a way the reference books had no room to record: patient, funny in the woodwinds, and entirely uninterested in impressing anyone.

Varga’s description of the reconstruction as ‘proofreading a letter written by forty people at once’ most likely refers to:

Trees planted along a highway have been dying at increasing rates, while trees of the same species a short distance from the road remain healthy. Two scientists explain the pattern differently.

Scientist 1: Salt spread on the road in winter washes into the soil, making the soil too salty. Tree roots in salty soil cannot take up enough water, so the trees slowly dehydrate and die from the roots upward.

Scientist 2: Salt spray thrown up by passing traffic coats the trees’ buds and twigs. The salt directly damages this exposed tissue, killing buds before they open in spring, so the trees decline from the crown downward.

The two scientists agree that:

A safety researcher recorded how a car’s speed changed after the brakes were applied.

Seconds after braking begins | Speed (km/h)
0 | 50
1 | 40
2 | 30
3 | 20
4 | 10

The speed at a second of 4 is how many times the speed at a second of 3, to the nearest hundredth?

A student tested four brands of battery in identical flashlights. Each flashlight received a fresh battery of one brand, and all flashlights were switched on at the same time in the same room. The student recorded how long each flashlight stayed lit before going out, and repeated the test three times for each brand.

For one condition, three repeated trials gave measurements of 29, 27, and 34 (growth in millimeters). What is the mean of these three trials?