Free ACT Practice Test

Read the passage excerpt below: Archaeologist Dr. Miriam Vance, who led the subterranean excavation at the ancient Mayan ceremonial site ______ uncovered an intact stucco frieze depicting celestial deities. Which choice best completes the sentence according to standard conventions of English punctuation?

Read the passage excerpt below: Neither the lead curator nor the museum conservators ______ prepared for the sudden surge in international tourism that accompanied the traveling artifact exhibition. Which choice correctly completes the sentence according to standard subject-verb agreement rules?

Read the passage excerpt below: Urban planners originally believed that expanding suburban highway lanes would permanently relieve commuter congestion. ______, empirical traffic studies over the subsequent decade proved that increased highway capacity rapidly induces additional vehicle demand, leaving gridlock unchanged. Which transition best establishes the logical relationship between the two sentences?

A high school drama club sells student tickets for $6 each and adult tickets for $11 each. For opening night, the club sold a total of 180 tickets and collected $1,430 in revenue. How many adult tickets were sold?

In the standard (x, y) coordinate plane, a circle is defined by the equation (x - 3)² + (y + 4)² = 25. What are the coordinates of the center of the circle and the length of its diameter?

In right triangle △ABC, the right angle is at vertex C. If cos(A) = 5/13, what is the value of tan(A)?

Read the passage excerpt below: For decades, landscape painter Arthur Bowen worked exclusively in gouache and oil on canvas. When he turned seventy, however, he abandoned his studio easel entirely, taking long walks through the salt marshes of coastal Maine carrying only a pocket sketchbook and walnut-ink wash. The resulting drawings exhibited a raw, economical vitality that his earlier, laboriously layered studio canvases had rarely achieved. Critics noted that by relinquishing the perfectionism of layered oils, Bowen had finally captured the fleeting luminescence of coastal fog. The passage most strongly suggests which of the following regarding Bowen's artistic transition?

Read the passage excerpt below: Cognitive psychologists distinguish between "declarative memory"—the conscious recall of factual data—and "procedural memory," which governs the automatic execution of motor and cognitive habits. Brain imaging reveals that when learners initially acquire a complex skill such as playing the cello, the prefrontal cortex exhibits intense metabolic activation. As the skill becomes automated through deliberate repetition, neural control shifts to the basal ganglia and cerebellum, allowing fluent execution without conscious deliberation. According to the passage, the transition of a motor skill into procedural memory is neurobiologically characterized by which change?

Read the passage excerpt below: Trekking across the windswept tundra for over three weeks, the polar bear's distinctive footprints were finally spotted by the wildlife biologists. Which choice best corrects the underlined portion of the sentence?

Read the passage excerpt below: The autonomous exploration rover periodically re-calibrates ______ navigation gyroscopes, allowing the vehicle to detect subtle changes in slope before adjusting its wheel velocity across steep martian sand dunes. Which choice correctly completes the sentence according to standard punctuation and grammar rules?

Read the passage excerpt below: The restoration crew removed centuries of accumulated soot from the Renaissance fresco's surface, ______ the vivid ultramarine and vermilion pigments beneath astonished the museum conservators. Which choice best completes the sentence according to standard conventions of English punctuation?

Read the passage excerpt below: The regional transportation agency issued an updated environmental impact statement that was ______ concerning the proposed commuter rail extension. Which choice provides the most concise phrasing without introducing redundant information?

Read the paragraph below: [1] In 1911, physicist Ernest Rutherford directed his research team to conduct the landmark gold foil experiment. [2] Alpha particles were fired at an ultrathin sheet of gold leaf surrounded by a zinc sulfide detection screen. [3] Most alpha particles passed directly through the foil with negligible angular deflection. [4] A tiny fraction, however, rebounded at extreme angles, prompting Rutherford to observe that it was as if an artillery shell had bounced off tissue paper. [5] This unexpected recoil proved that atomic mass is concentrated in a dense, positively charged nucleus. The writer wishes to add the following explanatory sentence: 'According to J.J. Thomson's prevailing plum pudding atomic model of the era, positive charge was thought to be diffuse throughout the atom, leading scientists to expect all particles to pass through unimpeded.' Where in the paragraph should this sentence be placed to establish the most logical sequence?

Read the passage excerpt below: The architect's master plan for the coastal municipal library was heavily influenced ______ traditional Scandinavian post-and-beam construction, utilizing local maritime cedar timbers to resist salt-air corrosion. Which choice completes the sentence with the most idiomatically appropriate preposition?

A municipal park fountain propels an arc of water whose height above the ground is modeled by the quadratic function h(x) = -x² + 8x + 2, where h(x) is the vertical height in feet and x is the horizontal distance in feet from the fountain's base. What is the maximum height, in feet, reached by the water arc?

In the figure below, triangle △PQR is similar to triangle △XYZ. The length of side PQ is 6 centimeters, and the length of corresponding side XY is 18 centimeters. If the area of triangle △PQR is 24 square centimeters, what is the area, in square centimeters, of triangle △XYZ?

For all real values of θ such that cos(θ) ≠ 0 and sin(θ) ≠ 0, the expression (sin²(θ) + cos²(θ)) / cos²(θ) is equivalent to which of the following?

A biological laboratory cultures a strain of beneficial probiotic bacteria. The culture begins with an initial count of 500 bacteria and doubles in population every 3 hours. Which of the following equations models the total bacterial population P(t) after t hours?

A solid right circular cylinder has a base radius of 4 inches and a height of 10 inches. A right circular cone has the same base radius of 4 inches and the same height of 10 inches. What is the difference, in cubic inches, between the volume of the cylinder and the volume of the cone?

In the standard (x, y) coordinate plane, line segment AB has endpoints A(-3, 5) and B(5, -1). What is the length of segment AB, and what are the coordinates of its midpoint M?

Read the passage excerpt below: During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, philosopher and cultural theorist Alain Locke championed the concept of the 'New Negro,' urging African American artists to look to ancestral African aesthetic traditions for visual and spiritual inspiration rather than conforming to European academic conventions. Locke argued that authentic cultural self-expression was not a defensive reaction against discrimination, but a profound, positive reclamation of artistic heritage. By synthesizing traditional African motifs with contemporary urban life, writers and painters forged an unprecedented modern American identity. The passage most strongly suggests that Alain Locke viewed the cultural movement of the Harlem Renaissance primarily as:

Read the passage excerpt below: In benthic ocean ecosystems, hydrothermal vents discharge mineral-laden superheated water into total pitch-black darkness. Deprived of solar radiation, deep-sea tubeworms and giant clams rely on chemosynthetic sulfur-oxidizing bacteria harbored within specialized internal trophosome tissues to convert hydrogen sulfide into organic carbohydrates. This obligate symbiosis forms the bedrock of an oasis that thrives miles beneath the reach of the ocean's photic zone. As used in the passage, the phrase 'obligate symbiosis' most nearly refers to a biological relationship in which:

Read the passage excerpt below: Eleanor stood motionless before the family heirloom secretary desk, its walnut veneer worn dull by three generations of restless elbows. She drew open the shallow bottom drawer, inhaling the faint scent of dried cedar shavings and brittle parchment. Unlike her siblings, who had spent the morning calculating appraisal estimates for the weekend estate auction, Eleanor ran her fingertips over the ink-stained dovetailed joints, feeling an acute reluctance to reduce a lifetime of quiet domestic habit into a ledger of monetary valuations. The primary contrast established in the passage between Eleanor and her siblings is that Eleanor:

Read the passage excerpt below: Behavioral economists studying the 'endowment effect' observed that individuals routinely demand significantly higher prices to part with an object they own than they would be willing to pay to acquire the exact same item. In a classic experiment, participants randomly gifted a ceramic coffee mug demanded an average of $7.12 to sell it, whereas non-owners were only willing to pay an average of $2.87 to buy it. Researchers attribute this substantial disparity to loss aversion: the psychological discomfort of forfeiting an owned possession is felt roughly twice as intensely as the pleasure of acquiring an identical asset. Based on the passage, the discrepancy between the mug owners' selling price and the non-owners' purchase price illustrates that:

Read the passage excerpt below: Glaciologists monitoring ice-shelf instability in West Antarctica deploy both satellite radar altimetry and autonomous oceanographic buoyancy floats. While satellite sensors provide comprehensive, continental-scale tracking of surface crevasses, radar cannot penetrate hundreds of meters of dense ice. Autonomous buoyancy floats drifting beneath the ice shelf, conversely, measure turbulent fluxes of warm Circumpolar Deep Water that melt the ice from below, thinning the shelf's vulnerable grounding line long before surface fractures become visible from orbit. According to the passage, the primary advantage of deploying autonomous buoyancy floats alongside satellites is that the floats: