Official ACT questions are ACT's to distribute — it sells a Test Information Release service, US$36 when ordered before the test in the US — and any paper written before the 2025 changes reflects the earlier format, before Science became optional. What can be practised freely is each kind of question in the current sections. The twelve questions below are drawn from the Myndaq practice bank and are not reproductions of any official item. They cover English, Math, Reading and Science, grouped by ACT's reporting categories, each with a worked answer, alongside the Myndaq ACT course.
The pattern you are practising for
- English — 50 questions (40 scored), 35 minutes.
- Math — 45 questions (41 scored), 50 minutes; calculator allowed.
- Reading — 36 questions (27 scored), 40 minutes.
- Science (optional) — 40 questions (34 scored), 40 minutes.
- Writing (optional) — one essay, 40 minutes.
- Composite — 1–36, the average of English, Math and Reading. Science is reported separately.
- No penalty for incorrect answers — your score is the number you get right. Answer everything.
Some questions in every section are unscored and unmarked, so treat each one as if it counts.
English
Question 1 — Knowledge of Language (concision). A travel blog post reads: "Due to the fact that the trail was muddy, we decided to take a different route." Which revision of "Due to the fact that" best improves concision?
- A. In light of the fact that
- B. Because
- C. Owing to the fact that
- D. On account of the fact that
Answer: B. One word does the work of five. The other three are the same wordy construction in different clothes. On ACT English, when all the options say the same thing, the shortest grammatical one is usually right.
Question 2 — Conventions (pronoun case). Between you and ______, the new schedule will make our morning commute much easier.
- A. I
- B. mine
- C. me
- D. myself
Answer: C. Between is a preposition, and a pronoun after a preposition is in the object case. Test it by removing "you and": between me is natural, between I is not. Myself needs an earlier I in the same clause to refer back to.
Question 3 — Conventions (punctuation). The museum displayed three artifacts from the dig ___ a clay bowl, a copper bracelet, and a carved bone needle.
- A. ,
- B. :
- C. —and
- D. ;
Answer: B. A colon introduces a list after a complete independent clause, and "The museum displayed three artifacts from the dig" is complete. A semicolon must join two independent clauses, and the list is not one.
Question 4 — Production of Writing (relevance). A writer is revising a paragraph about how wetlands protect coastal towns from flooding. She is considering deleting this sentence: "By absorbing and slowly releasing storm surge, a healthy marsh can reduce the height and force of floodwaters before they reach inland homes." Should she delete it?
- A. Yes, because the sentence shifts the focus to marsh ecology rather than flooding.
- B. Yes, because the sentence repeats the paragraph's topic without adding detail.
- C. No, because the sentence explains the specific way wetlands protect towns from flooding, supporting the paragraph's purpose.
- D. No, because the sentence introduces a counterargument the paragraph needs.
Answer: C. The sentence gives the mechanism — absorbing and releasing surge — which is exactly what a paragraph about how wetlands protect towns needs. On add/delete questions, decide keep-or-cut first, then choose between the two reasons on that side.
Math
Question 5 — number properties. If p is a prime number greater than 3, which of the following must be a multiple of 6?
- A. p + 1
- B. p² + p
- C. p² − 1
- D. p + 3
Answer: C. Test p = 5 and p = 7. For 5: 6, 30, 24, 8. For 7: 8, 56, 48, 10. Only p² − 1 is a multiple of 6 both times. The reason: p² − 1 = (p − 1)(p + 1), two even numbers either side of p, and one of p − 1, p, p + 1 is a multiple of 3 — not p, since p is prime. Method: for "must be true", try two cases before trusting any option.
Question 6 — polynomials. When 2x³ − 5x² + ax − 6 is divided by (x − 2), the remainder is 4. What is a?
- A. 5
- B. 7
- C. 9
- D. 11
Answer: B, 7. By the remainder theorem, the remainder is the value at x = 2: 16 − 20 + 2a − 6 = 2a − 10. Set 2a − 10 = 4, so a = 7. No long division needed.
Question 7 — exponential models. A quantity grows according to Q(t) = Q₀·bᵗ and triples every 4 years. What is b, to the nearest thousandth?
- A. 0.760
- B. 1.245
- C. 1.316
- D. 1.732
Answer: C. Tripling in 4 years means b⁴ = 3, so b = 3^(1/4) ≈ 1.316. D is 3^(1/2), the rate for tripling every 2 years; A is less than 1, which would be decay. With a calculator allowed, the fastest check is 1.316⁴ ≈ 3.
Question 8 — absolute value. How many integer values of x satisfy |2x − 5| ≤ |x + 4|?
- A. 9
- B. 10
- C. 11
- D. 12
Answer: A, 9. Both sides are non-negative, so square them: 4x² − 20x + 25 ≤ x² + 8x + 16, which gives 3x² − 28x + 9 ≤ 0. The roots are 1/3 and 9, so the inequality holds for 1/3 ≤ x ≤ 9 — integers 1 to 9, which is nine values. Check the ends: x = 9 gives 13 ≤ 13, true; x = 0 gives 5 ≤ 4, false.
Reading
Passage.
When I first encountered the pottery of the Mata Ortiz village in northern Mexico, I assumed I was looking at ancient artifacts. The thin-walled vessels, painted with hairline geometric patterns in black and red, seemed to belong in a museum case beside relics from the pre-Columbian Casas Grandes culture. In fact, the pots in front of me had been made the previous week. They were the work of contemporary artisans who, beginning in the 1970s, revived a ceramic tradition that had been dormant for more than five hundred years.
The revival is usually credited to Juan Quezada, a self-taught potter who, as a teenager, gathered shards from the desert and tried to reconstruct the methods of the ancestors who had made them. Without access to formal training or even a potter's wheel, he experimented for years with local clays and mineral pigments. By the time American anthropologists 'discovered' his work in the late 1970s, Quezada had already taught his siblings and neighbors. Today, several hundred potters work in Mata Ortiz, and their pieces command prices that would have astonished the village's earlier generations of subsistence farmers.
What strikes me about this story is not simply its romance — the lone genius rediscovering a lost art — but the questions it raises about authenticity. Are these pots 'traditional'? They use ancient designs, but no living teacher passed those designs down; Quezada reverse-engineered them. They are made by hand in the village, but they are sold in galleries in Santa Fe and Tokyo. Some purists argue that true tradition requires unbroken transmission, and that what happens in Mata Ortiz is really a sophisticated form of revivalism, closer to historical reenactment than to inheritance.
I find this view unnecessarily severe. Traditions, after all, are not museum specimens; they are practices that living people choose to sustain, modify, or restart. If a community decides to pick up a thread its ancestors dropped, the resulting fabric is no less real for having a gap in the middle. The potters of Mata Ortiz are not pretending to be their ancestors. They are doing something their ancestors did, in their own way, for their own reasons.
Question 9 — Key Ideas and Details. According to the passage, the purists object to calling Mata Ortiz pottery "traditional" primarily because:
- A. no living teacher passed the techniques down in an unbroken line.
- B. the pots are sold in international galleries rather than used locally.
- C. the designs differ from those of the Casas Grandes culture.
- D. Juan Quezada lacked formal training as a potter.
Answer: A. "True tradition requires unbroken transmission", and "no living teacher passed those designs down". B is in the same paragraph, but it is the author's observation, not the purists' reason — the commonest trap in detail questions is a true statement attributed to the wrong person.
Question 10 — Key Ideas and Details (inference). It can reasonably be inferred from the second paragraph that the revival of Mata Ortiz pottery has:
- A. remained unknown outside the immediate region of northern Mexico.
- B. depended primarily on funding from American anthropologists.
- C. been resisted by Quezada's siblings and neighbors.
- D. significantly improved the economic standing of many village potters.
Answer: D. Prices "that would have astonished the village's earlier generations of subsistence farmers" imply a real economic change. A is contradicted by the galleries abroad; B and C have no support — the siblings and neighbours were taught, not resistant.
Science
Passage. A team tested how the surface material of a ramp affects the distance a toy car travels after rolling off. In Experiment 1, a 150 g toy car was released from the top of a ramp set at 20°, covered with smooth plastic, rubber or sandpaper; the car then rolled across a flat wooden floor until it stopped, and the average distance over 5 trials was recorded.
- Experiment 1 (20° ramp, wooden floor): smooth plastic 185 cm; rubber 140 cm; sandpaper 95 cm.
- Experiment 2 (35° ramp, wooden floor): smooth plastic 270 cm; rubber 210 cm; sandpaper 150 cm.
- Experiment 3 (20° ramp, carpet floor): smooth plastic 90 cm; rubber 65 cm; sandpaper 40 cm.
Question 11 — Interpretation of Data. In Experiment 1, the car traveled the greatest distance when the ramp was covered with which material?
- A. Smooth plastic
- B. Rubber
- C. Wood
- D. Sandpaper
Answer: A, at 185 cm. C is the trap: wood is the floor, not a ramp covering. Science questions often turn on reading which variable a value belongs to.
Passage. Students investigated how conditions affect how quickly a chemical hand warmer (iron powder, salt and activated carbon) heats up when exposed to air. Temperature inside the warmer was recorded after 10 minutes.
- Experiment 1 (air at 20 °C, 50% humidity; iron mass varied): 5 g → 32 °C; 10 g → 45 °C; 15 g → 54 °C.
- Experiment 2 (10 g iron, air at 20 °C; humidity varied): 20% → 38 °C; 50% → 45 °C; 80% → 52 °C.
- Experiment 3 (10 g iron, 50% humidity; air temperature varied): 10 °C → 36 °C; 20 °C → 45 °C; 30 °C → 55 °C.
Question 12 — Scientific Investigation. In Experiment 1, what was the independent variable?
- A. Time of exposure to air
- B. Surrounding air temperature
- C. Humidity of the surrounding air
- D. Mass of iron powder in the warmer
Answer: D. It is the one thing deliberately varied in Experiment 1; air temperature and humidity were held at 20 °C and 50%, and time was fixed at 10 minutes. Notice the control built into the design: the 10 g, 20 °C, 50% warmer reads 45 °C in all three experiments, which is how you know the experiments are comparable.
How to use practice like this
Practise by reporting category, then by clock. English and Math reward rules and methods you can drill; Reading and Science reward reading which statement belongs to whom, or which value to which variable. At the real pace — 42 seconds a question in English, a little over a minute in Math and Reading — a method has to be automatic. For the full structure and categories, see the ACT syllabus and sections; for a study plan, see the ACT preparation guide.
Quick answers
Are there ACT previous year papers?
ACT distributes its own through services such as Test Information Release. Papers from before the 2025 changes reflect the earlier format.
Is there negative marking on the ACT?
No. ACT says there is no penalty for incorrect answers.
Can I use a calculator on the ACT?
Yes, on the Math section, under ACT's calculator policy.
Is ACT Science about memorised facts?
ACT describes it as data interpretation and scientific reasoning across biology, chemistry, earth sciences and physics — built on experiments, tables and graphs.
Which sections count towards the ACT Composite?
English, Math and Reading.
