ACT Subject Tests

English

The ACT English Test assesses your ability to write clearly, organize your thoughts, and follow the rules ofgrammar and punctuation. The 45-minute test is made up of five prose passages, each followed by 15 multiple-choice questions for a total of 75 questions. The questions can be broken down into two categories:

Rhetorical skills

writing strategy (12 questions)
organization (11 questions)
style (12 questions)

Usage and mechanics

punctuation (10 questions)
grammar and usage (12 questions)
sentence structure (18 questions)

Common questions in the English test involve reordering passages to make the text more clear, substituting alternate passages, fixing basic punctuation like commas, apostrophes and semicolons, eliminatingredundancy, and improving the clarity or word choice in a passage.

Math

The 60-minute, 60-question ACT Math Test covers subjects taught in most high schools up to the start of 12thgrade:

Pre-algebra (14 questions)
Elementary algebra (10 questions)
Intermediate algebra (9 questions)
Coordinate geometry (9 questions)
Plane geometry (14 questions)
Trigonometry (4 questions)

Like the other sections of the ACT, the math test requires you to use reasoning skills. This is good newssince it generally means that you do not need to remember every formula you were ever taught in algebraclass. You will, however, need a strong foundation of all the subjects above in order to do well on the mathtest.

Reading

The 35-minute ACT Reading Test assesses your ability to read and understand what ACT considers collegefreshman-level material. The test presents four passages, each of which is followed by ten multiple-choicequestions. The four passages (each around 800 words) come directly from original sources in four subjectsor genres:

Prose fiction: either a short story or a novel
Social studies: anthropology, archaeology, business, economics, education, geography, history, politicaland sociology

Humanities: anthropology, archaeology, business, economics, education, geography, history, politicalscience, psychology, and sociology
Natural science: anatomy, astronomy, biology, botany, chemistry, ecology, geology, medicine, meteorology, microbiology, natural history, physiology, physics, technology, and zoology

The ACT includes different types of passages to test your ability to read and understand many styles ofwriting. Thankfully, this does not mean that you have to brush up on your meteorology or archaeology, oreven your vocabulary, for that matter, since all the information you need to answer the questions can begleaned from the passages themselves.

14 of the 40 questions ask for information that is taken wordfor word from the passages (ACT calls these “referring” questions).
26 of the 40 question answers must be “inferred” from the information you read in the passages. In order to answer these questions, you need to fully understand the passages as well as be able to infer meaning from them and draw some reasonable conclusions from the passagesthemselves.

Science Reasoning

The 35-minute ACT Science Reasoning Test aims to test your ability to think scientifically. You are given sevenpassages, which are followed by 40 multiple-choice questions that test your ability to interpret, analyze, andevaluate data.

The seven passages fall into three categories:

Data representation (15 questions on scientific data in the form of charts or graphs)
Research summaries (18 questions on the outcome of scientific experiments)
Conflicting viewpoints (seven questions based on scientists’ differing hypotheses on the same subject)

Like the math test, you will not need to memorize a lot of facts, but you will be asked to draw upon your

knowledge of biology, earth and space sciences, chemistry, and physics to answer the questions.

Source: ACT Exam Success