ACT Reading — does the evidence hold? Claims, evidence and the unsupported leap

Part of the ACT Reading section, in the Integration of Knowledge and Ideas category, asks you to judge an argument rather than simply follow it: what the writer claims, what evidence is offered, and whether that evidence actually supports the claim. These questions are hard to rush, because every wrong choice usually sounds reasonable. The skill is to separate what the writer shows from what the writer only asserts.

This material gives you five short original opinion pieces of the kinds the section draws on: a newspaper opinion piece urging a city to replace the grass on its medians with native plants, a student letter asking a school board for a later first bell, a letter to a town council about where to hold a farmers' market, a health column recommending a new bandage tested on mice, and an arts review that judges a novelist by her sales. Each piece has a real point and a real weakness, and two or three questions follow it.

You practice six moves. You state the main claim and tell it apart from the reasons given for it. You identify the evidence the writer actually cites, which is not the same as evidence that would be plausible. You find the part of the argument the evidence cannot carry, such as a promise of "millions of dollars" with no cost figures, or a full letter grade for every student. You name an unstated assumption: that eight Saturdays in one place and four in another differ only in location. You judge which new information would most weaken or strengthen the argument, looking for the choice that breaks or secures its central link. And you describe what a sentence does in the reasoning, such as a bridge the writer asserts between a study's result and a recommendation.

Explanations point to the exact words that settle each answer and explain why the other choices fail. The flashcards define claim, evidence, reasoning, assumption and leap, and list the patterns that recur: results in mice turned into advice for people, and popularity treated as proof of quality.

The material offers a quiz and a flashcard deck. All pieces are original and describe no real city, school, study or author. It is written for students preparing for the ACT and is not produced or endorsed by ACT.

  • State a writer's main claim and distinguish it from supporting reasons
  • Identify the evidence a writer actually cites
  • Recognize a conclusion that goes beyond the evidence
  • Name an unstated assumption an argument depends on
  • Judge which new information would most weaken or strengthen an argument

Practice material written by Zestly, based on ACT's published description of the ACT Reading section (reporting categories Key Ideas and Details, Craft and Structure, Integration of Knowledge and Ideas; act.org, retrieved September 2026). All passages are original.

Sample question

Read the following opinion piece from a city newspaper. The grass on Harmon Boulevard's medians is a luxury we can no longer afford. Two summers ago the parks department replaced the grass on four blocks of medians with native prairie plants as a trial. Its meter readings show that those blocks used about 60 percent less water than the grassy blocks beside them, and the crews that once mowed them every week now visit twice a season. Some residents worried that the plantings would look shabby; by the second summer the trial blocks were blooming with coneflowers and drew more compliments than complaints to the council office. The city should convert every median on the boulevard next year. Doing so would save the city millions of dollars and prove that a greener city can also be a thriftier one. Which choice best states the writer's main claim?

See the answer

The city should replace the grass on all of Harmon Boulevard's medians with native plants next year.

The writer's recommendation, "The city should convert every median on the boulevard next year," is what the rest of the piece argues for. The compliments, the reduced mowing and the answer to residents' worries are pieces of support for that claim, not the claim itself.

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