ACT Preparation / Unit 23 ACT 2215 review, 2 to 3 minutes
An English Passage, Worked
The idea
English questions come in two kinds. Underlined questions ask for the best version of a part, with No Change as a real option; passage questions ask about the writer's purpose, a sentence's relevance, or the order of ideas. Conventions items turn on sentence structure, punctuation and usage; knowledge-of-language items on precision and concision; production items on purpose, focus and organization.
In practice
Worked passage, invented for the course: "Every spring, volunteers in Millbrook clean the river, the town has done this for twenty years. The cleanup began when a teacher, frustrated by plastic on the banks, organized her students. Their first effort collected forty bags of trash. Since then, the event has grew into a weekend festival. In addition, the river now hosts a fish count each fall." Question one: the first sentence joins two complete sentences with a comma alone, a splice; "clean the river, and the town has done this for twenty years" repairs it. Question two: "has grew" needs the past participle, "has grown." Question three: "Their first effort collected forty bags of trash" is correct as written, so No Change. Question four: "In addition" adds a point, and the fish count is a further activity, so the transition fits: No Change. Question five: should the writer add a sentence on the river's length? No, because the paragraph is about the cleanup's growth, not the river's geography.
Where people slip
Three habits carry forward from the English units. Read the full sentence before judging an underline. Treat No Change as a real answer when the original is already best. And judge an added sentence by the paragraph's focus. On test day, pace about forty seconds a question in this section.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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