digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: On ACT Reading, spend about 2 to 3 minutes "passage glancing" (a targeted skim) to get the gist of each paragraph and where the main ideas sit, then answer questions by returning to the passage for specifics. The speaker's framing is that reading time earns no points, so the goal is to minimize reading and maximize question answering.
Key Points
- The speaker says the reading section has four passages, 40 questions, and 35 minutes, leaving very little time per passage.
- Passage glancing is a fast skim focused on the basic gist and location of main ideas, not every detail, because not all details will be asked about.
- Track three things in every passage: relationships, emotions, and events.
- Humanities and prose fiction passages emphasize personal relationships and emotions, while social science and natural science passages emphasize events, cause and effect, and chronological order.
- The four common question types are main idea, details, vocabulary (answered from context), and author's intent.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Spend about 2 minutes reading each passage, going up to 3 minutes if needed, then move to questions.
- While skimming, note what each paragraph is about and where the main ideas are, so you know where to look back for details.
- For prose fiction and humanities passages, track how people feel about each other and about things, and how relationships change over time (the speaker's example shifts from very positive to very negative).
- For social science and natural science passages, track the events, their order, and any cause-and-effect links, and note relationships between figures, which may be people, animals, plants, objects, or historical events.
- For main idea questions, confirm the author's overall purpose or intent.
- For details questions, return to the passage for specific facts such as how someone felt or which event happened first.
- For vocabulary questions, choose the option that fits how the word is used in the passage, which requires going back to the text almost 100% of the time.
- For author's intent questions, ask why the author includes a specific statement, what it explains, and what emotion or effect it creates.
- The speaker estimates that skimming in about 2 to 2.5 minutes leaves about 6 minutes for roughly 10 questions per passage, or about 1.5 questions per minute.
- The speaker says the four passage types are prose fiction, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and says the "literary narrative" is the prose fiction type on newer exams.
- The speaker says the strategy helped raise their ACT reading score by 15 points.
Bottom Line
Skim each passage quickly for structure and key relationships, emotions, or events, then rely on targeted returns to the text to answer questions, since question-answering is what earns points.
