Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about English: English 1 — rules, purpose and cutting words.
← ACT
Fifty questions in thirty-five minutes — forty-two seconds each, the fastest section on the test and the most learnable.
Passages with underlined portions, and for each one a choice of three alternatives plus NO CHANGE. Three reporting categories:
Of the fifty questions, forty are scored; the rest are being trialled for future forms and you cannot tell which. Treat all fifty as real.
Shorter is usually right. The ACT has a strong and consistent preference for concision. When two options say the same thing and one is shorter, the shorter one is nearly always the answer — and a great many wrong options exist only to add a redundant phrase. In my personal opinion, I think, at this point in time, the reason is because: all three are answers the test is waiting for you to reject.
NO CHANGE is a real answer. It is right about as often as any other choice. Students who have learned that a question implies a fault talk themselves out of it, and that is a systematic loss of marks — roughly one in four questions.
Two complete sentences may be joined only by a full stop, a semicolon, a comma with a coordinating conjunction, or a colon when the second explains the first. A comma alone is never one of them. Beyond that: subject–verb agreement across an interrupting phrase, pronoun agreement and ambiguity, the apostrophe, parallel form in a list, modifier placement, and the difference between a pair of commas around a non-essential phrase and no commas at all around an essential one.
That list is short and finite. A student who learns it properly can get essentially every Conventions question right, and Conventions is two fifths of the section.
The real section shows you four options differing only in punctuation. These cannot: the automatic checks that guard every bank here strip punctuation before comparing options, so four choices differing only in a comma read as the same answer four times over and the material is refused.
So punctuation questions here are set the other way round — a sentence with the fault in it, and the question of which change makes it conform, with the options written out in words. The judgement is identical and arguably harder, since you have to name the repair rather than recognise a shape. The layout is ours; the real paper will look different.
