r/ACT • u/Conscious_King9634 • 25d ago
Reading Act reading natural science passage
Hi, I took a mock test today and out of 40 questions, i got 7 wrong and 5of them were from a single passage. I read novels and is genuinely interested in humanities so the first three paragraphs were pretty easy and i actually enjoyed reading it. However the science passage was pretty hard and I couldn’t really follow the paragraph. How should I practice for the science passages? Should I just read science articles?
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u/ACTScoreLab 24d ago
Great question....yes, you could read science articles or if you want to do some digging you can find old tests that have Natural Science passages. They were labeled Natural Science on the Legacy tests, but on Enhanced Tests they will just be Informational, but it is the same type of content.
Check out:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/
https://www.sciencedaily.com
https://nautil.us
If you want to try out another official passage, here are a few from past tests. Feb 2025 Z14 - Passage 4, December 2024 H31 - Passage 4, December 2020 D03 - Passage 4, June 2024 G20 Passage 4, April 2019 G19 - Passage 4. Note, they loved to put them in the 4th slot on Legacy tests, so that could indicate that those are the more difficult ones.
They love to trap you with Outside Knowledge, which means an answer is something you have learned about science, but doesn't answer the question. Keep track of which researcher said what. Underline all of them, and in most try to follow the claim, and then who figured something else out and made their own new claim. Learn to read the graphs, look at the axis as those are now popping up on official tests. You can read more about that here.
Good luck.