One of the trickiest parts of the ACT Reading section is that the questions often don’t have line references. Plus, the questions don’t go in order of where the answers appear in the passage. This jumble makes it hard for students to know where to look back in a passage for a question’s answer. But looking back is key: on the ACT if you can just find where the passage mentions the question, the answer will be easy to spot.
So how do you find the answer? The passages are long. There’s a lot in each passage. And you probably rushed through the reading to make the time limit.
The key is to annotate as you read the passage the first time. Two things to annotate:
1) Circle nouns: Each question will mention a noun from the passage, perhaps a city, a scientist’s name, or a sociological term. The answer will be wherever that noun was mentioned in the passage. To save you time, circle the major nouns as you read so you can easily spot them when you get to the questions.
2) Label paragraphs: Every paragraph in the passage has a topic. Maybe the first paragraph explains the invention of a machine, the second discusses the inventor’s life, the third the invention’s components, and so on. Take a few seconds after you read a paragraph to write down the paragraph’s topic in a word or two. That way when you get to a question about that topic, you know where to look.
Annotating as you read only takes a few extra seconds but can save you valuable minutes when you get to the questions. Keep marking up those passages!