ACT: Reading

Four passages, 40 questions, 35 minutes

The ACT Reading test is a 35-minute race across four passages — Literary Narrative, Social Science, Humanities, and Natural Science — with 40 questions total and no reward for the ones you leave blank. This journey teaches the test as a system: how each passage type reads, what every question type is really asking (main idea, detail, inference, vocabulary-in-context, function, and paired-passage synthesis), and the pacing and mapping habits that let a prepared reader finish all four passages with points to spare. Learn the format, then learn the moves.