The Prepared Student

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ACT Reading Prep: What to Expect from the 4 Reading Passages

The reading section of the ACT can be infuriating for many students. Students are given just 35 minutes to work through 4 full stories, each with 10 questions accompanying it. For many students, this isn’t nearly enough time to thoroughly work through the questions and perform at their best. That’s precisely why having identified an effective strategy for the ACT reading section is so important. Part of having an effective strategy concerns understanding the different story types and other aspects of this section that never change. Here, we’ll walk you through what you can expect to remain the same throughout the reading section of the ACT, regardless of the specific topics that the test writers decide to throw at you.

The ACT reading section tests students on their ability to comprehend complicated texts related to literature, social science, humanities, and natural science. Students are examined on their ability to extract main ideas from full stories and individual paragraphs, determine the contextual meaning of specific vocabulary words, recall or locate exact information, make broad inferences, and more.

In truth, the stories that are presented in this section, as well as the questions that accompany them, are not all that much different from work that students complete in their literature and English/Language Arts classes in high school. For that reason, many students express that they would not find this section so difficult if they could simply take their time working through the stories and the questions.

However, students are tasked with moving very quickly through this section. Students have just 35 minutes to work through 4 full stories and answer 40 questions. That breaks down to 8.5 minutes per story, which does not give much time to be thorough with working through questions OR with reading the stories.

Students are not generally used to being examined on how quickly they can read and comprehend. For this reason, students who naturally read more slowly or comprehend more slowly, or those who simply prefer to take their time and review their answers carefully, are at a disadvantage when it comes to this section of the test.

This is why it is so important to prepare for the ACT. Students who go into the test without any preparation will oftentimes find that they run out of time on this section, sometimes having even full stories remaining when the time is up. While students already know how to read and understand texts, as this is what they’ve been doing in classes for years, students may not be used to working through stories quickly or working through the types of questions that the ACT will commonly ask.

A big part of ACT prep has to do with repetitive practice. This is important because it lets students become very familiar with the format of the exam, as well as the types of questions that will be asked. This is true across all sections of the ACT — the more you practice the English section, the more used to the question types you’ll become, and so on. That being said, make sure to take the adequate amount of time to prepare for the ACT exam.

As students practice the reading section of the ACT over and over, they will become used to a few different things. While we have no way of knowing exactly what topics the ACT writers will examine you on on test day, there are some things you can plan to see on the reading section of the ACT that never change.

Here are the things that NEVER change for the ACT reading section:

1. Story Categories

The stories that make up the ACT reading section will ALWAYS fall into the same categories. Students can use this knowledge during their practice to help to determine the best approach for them on test day.


Story 1: Literary Prose or Prose Fiction

Story 2: Social Science

Story 3: Humanities

Story 4: Natural Science


Story 1: This story will always be literature and will read like a storybook. You can expect to have a narrator and a handful of different characters that you have to keep track of in this story. This story may remind students of works of literature that they read in class and spend time discussing and analyzing. Knowing that, students should pay attention to the meaning of different parts of this story, as it does not always match the word-for-word text. Students should read between the lines and ponder what is meant by certain comparisons, examples, and dialogues. It can be helpful to pay attention to emotions and note the moods and opinions of the different characters in this story.

Story 2: The second story will read more like a history textbook, as it will be primarily fact-based. For this reason, students shouldn’t have to worry as much about reading between the lines on this story type. However, there can frequently be several characters or people mentioned and included throughout these stories, so it can be helpful to pay close attention to the different figures and their roles. Oftentimes questions will inquire about the roles and opinions of certain people, so paying attention to their roles as you read could save you time in having to figure that out later.

Story 3: This story will return to a format that is closer to Story 1. Oftentimes there will be dialogue, sometimes including characters. Subjects frequently include art, music, theater, and will include a first-person narrator who expresses a view on a specific topic.

Story 4: This story returns to the data-based textbook-type, this time reading like a science textbook. Topics range from astronomy to animal science, physics, and biology. Here, students are questioned on the facts and figures present in the story more than on its underlying meaning.

Knowledge of these different types of stories can help students identify strategies that work best for them. Many students find that they consistently perform better on either the literature-type stories 1 and 3 or the textbook-type stories 2 and 4. Students can pay attention to their performance over practice and look for patterns to help them pinpoint an effective ACT reading strategy.

Here’s a strategy tip: Keeping the intense time constraints in mind, we always recommend that students put parts of the ACT in order of easiest to hardest for them whenever possible. So if a student often scores better on stories 2 and 4, we would recommend that they start with those stories on test day and follow up with 1 and 3 at the end.

2. One Split Story

There will always be one story in the ACT reading section that actually consists of two mini stories. Students are tasked with answering a handful of questions about each story separately. Then they are quizzed on comparing and contrasting the two miniature stories. While this story type could show up as any of the 4 categories, it frequently shows up as story 1 or 3.

This is another thing that students can keep in mind when it comes to strategizing for the ACT reading section.

Here’s a strategy tip: Many students will elect to complete this miniature set of stories last, choosing to work through the other 3 stories more slowly. Then, while they are running out of time, they should have time to complete at least one short story with the time remaining, even if they won’t have time to complete one full length story. This minimizes the number of unconfident guesses that will be made due to running out of time.

3. Range of Question Types

Within each question set, there will always be some questions that are very specific, some questions that are very broad, and some questions that fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.

Specific question examples:

Specific questions include those that point you to a specific line or paragraph within a text.

The most specific type of question that shows up on the ACT reading section is VOCAB. There were likely be a question or two that corresponds with each reading story in which students are tasked with determining the meaning of a vocabulary word based on the context of a certain part of the story. Generally, these will be words that high school students will be familiar with, but you can pretty much bet that they won’t mean what they’re expected to mean because of the context in which they’re used. Therefore, these questions can be tricky — we’re not saying they’re super easy. We’re saying that, since you’re directed to a certain, small part of the story, your probability of answering these questions correctly does not necessarily go up or down as you learn more about the story. For that reason, it can be smart to begin by answering these questions first and getting them out of the way.

Other specific questions may direct students to a series of lines or a full paragraph. They might ask about the main idea of a portion of the text or certain information covered in a certain spot. While these questions can be much broader than the vocabulary questions mentioned above, there is still a higher probability that students can answer these questions correctly earlier on, simply because they are being pointed to the correct environment where they need to look for the answer. Not only does that increase their likelihood of answering the questions correctly, but it also means that students can usually work more quickly and get the faster questions out of the way early on.

Remember our strategy tip from earlier: Always put parts of the ACT in order of easy to hard whenever possible.

Broad question examples:

In contrast to the specific questions, broad questions are those that students should wait and answer last. These questions can ask about the story as a whole, ask students to make inferences based on the information they’ve been given, inquire about the mood of the narrator, and more.

Saving these types of questions and answering them last makes quite a lot of sense when you think about it. As students work through the other questions that are more specific and that direct them to specific portions of the story, they will continue to learn about the story as a whole. This is why it will be easier to answer broad questions last. Saving any

Questions that fall somewhere in between:

Basically, these are all the questions that are left over after you’ve identified the specific questions and the broad questions. These will be questions where you aren’t necessarily directed to a particular part of the story. For the textbook-type stories, these questions can be riddled with facts and figures, and you have to search the story and your memory to determine what data was presented. For the literature-type stories, these questions may ask about the role of a character or an event.

We recommend that students answer these AFTER they’ve worked through the specific questions but BEFORE they work through the broad questions.

Here’s a strategy tip: It can be helpful to change around the order of how questions are answered. The ACT will often ask you broader questions toward the beginning of a question set. While you may have just finished reading the story, it will always be easier for you to answer the broader questions later after you’ve answered the other, more specific questions. This is true because as you work through the more specific questions, you’ll continue to learn about and deepen your understanding of the story and its overall meaning. Save broad questions for answering last.

As with any exam, preparation is key. Preparation for the ACT includes not only familiarity with the content but familiarity with the FORMAT. Hopefully we’ve helped to shed some light on what can be expected of the format of the ACT reading section on test day. Students should practice this section and keep these consistencies in mind as they work to pinpoint an effective ACT reading strategy.