Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Mathematics: Mathematics 1 — breadth, trigonometry and no formula sheet.
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Forty-five questions in fifty minutes, pre-algebra through trigonometry — and now four answer choices instead of five.
Two reporting categories, and the split is lopsided:
Forty-one of the forty-five questions are scored, and you cannot tell which four are not.
The ACT has always had five answers in Math and no penalty for a wrong answer. It now has four, which means a blind guess is worth a quarter rather than a fifth, and eliminating one option makes it a third.
Two things follow. Never leave anything blank — that is not a tip, it is expected-value arithmetic. And with a minute six seconds per question on average, a question you cannot start within about fifteen seconds should be guessed and marked, not fought.
It goes further. Trigonometry is on this test in a way it is not on the SAT: the ratios, the unit circle, the graphs of sine and cosine and what amplitude and period mean on them, the law of sines and the law of cosines. So are matrices, logarithms, complex numbers, sequences and some vector work.
It is broader and shallower. There are more topics and less depth in each, and the questions are less often wrapped in long paragraphs than the SAT's are.
There is no formula sheet. The SAT gives you one; the ACT does not. Area and volume formulas, the quadratic formula, the trigonometric identities, the distance and midpoint formulas — bring them with you. That is what the flashcards here are for.
A calculator is permitted throughout, subject to ACT's approved-models list, but the test is built to be done without one and reaching for it is usually slower than thinking.
