ACT practice tests

When my uncle sold his farm last spring, he told me I could keep anything I found in the barn. Most of what I found had rusted beyond saving, but behind a stack of old feed sacks I uncovered a bicycle with a steel frame and curved handlebars. Its' [1] frame was a deep green under the dust, and both tires had long since gone flat. I wheeled it home that afternoon, convinced I could make it ride again within a week.

The week turned into a whole summer. The chain was frozen with rust and had to soak overnight during the night [2] in a coffee can of oil before a single link would bend. The brake cables had snapped, the seat was cracked, and the gears would not shift at all. I had no idea what most of the parts were called, so I borrowed [3] a repair manual from the library and kept it open on the garage floor. Every evening I studied it carefully and attentively, [4] matching each drawing to the greasy piece in my hand.

The hardest job was the wheels. Truing a wheel means tightening and loosening its spokes until the rim spins without wobbling. [5] My first attempt left the rear wheel worse than before, and I had to loosen every spoke and start over. For example, [6] by the end of July the rim spun so evenly that it never touched the brake pads. My neighbor, a retired machinist, stopped by one evening and says [7] that he had never seen a beginner work so patiently.

On the first cool morning of September, I finally rode the bicycle to school. The new tires hummed on the pavement, and the gears clicked smooth [8] from one to the next. Bicycles were first sold in large numbers in the 1890s, when a craze for cycling swept the country. [9] Several classmates asked where I had bought such an unusual bike, and I enjoyed telling them that I had not bought it at all.

The bicycle still is not perfect. The bell is missing, and the seat squeaks whenever I hit a bump. Even so, every squeak reminds me of the summer I spent learning how a machine I had ridden all my life actually works. [10]

LITERARY NARRATIVE: Passage A is from a personal essay about a first job at a hardware store; Passage B is from a personal essay about a first job as a lifeguard.

Passage A: The Names of Things

The summer I turned sixteen, I took a job at Delaney's Hardware because it was the only place in town that would hire someone without a car. On my first morning, Mr. Pruitt, who had worked the counter for thirty-one years, handed me a canvas apron and a coffee can full of loose screws. "Sort those," he said, and went back to his crossword.

I thought it was a joke, or a test of my patience. It was neither. By lunch I had learned that a wood screw tapers to a point and a machine screw does not, that the spiral ridges are called threads and that some are coarse and some are fine, and that the heads come flat, round, and pan, which sounded like something you would order at a diner. Mr. Pruitt checked my piles at the end of the day and moved exactly four screws without a word.

For weeks, that was how it went. Customers came in holding broken things, a cracked faucet handle, a hinge with a missing pin, a brass part wrapped in a paper towel, and they looked at the shelves with the helpless expression I recognized from my own face on that first morning. Mr. Pruitt would take the part, turn it over once, and walk straight to the right drawer. I followed him like a duckling.

Somewhere in July I realized I was no longer following. A woman came in with a bent bracket from a kitchen cabinet, and before Mr. Pruitt looked up, I had walked to aisle six and found its twin. She thanked me as if I had performed surgery.

What I learned at Delaney's was not really about screws. It was that the world is full of objects that someone took the trouble to name, and that knowing their names is a way of paying attention to them. I still cannot walk past a loose hinge without wanting to fix it. The can of screws, I later found out, was a tradition: Mr. Pruitt had dumped the same can on the counter for every new hire since 1971, and he had sorted it himself on his own first day, for a man whose name he never forgot.

Passage B: The Chair

My first job was guarding the town pool, and for the first week I thought it was the easiest money anyone had ever made. I sat in a tall white chair under an umbrella, wore a whistle, and watched children splash. I brought a paperback in my bag for the slow hours.

On the second Monday, the head guard, a college student named Teresa, climbed the ladder of my chair and took the book out of my bag without asking. "You can have it back in August," she said. Then she told me to count the heads in my section. I counted fourteen. "Now do it again in thirty seconds," she said, "and again thirty seconds after that, for the rest of the day."

I resented her for about three days. Then I began to notice things I had never seen: that a child in trouble in the water does not shout or wave but goes quiet and upright, as if climbing an invisible ladder; that the deep end has its own weather, a darker blue where the sunlight stops; that a mother on the deck looks up every so often in the same rhythm I was learning. Watching, I discovered, was not the same as seeing. Seeing happened to you. Watching was work.

In the last week of July, a boy of about six slipped off the edge of the shallow end into water just over his head. He did not splash. He did not call out. He simply was not where he had been at the count before. I was in the water before I decided to be, and he was up on the deck, coughing and furious, before his father finished turning around.

Nobody gave me a medal. Teresa nodded once and said, "Fourteen," which was how many heads were in my section again. That was enough. I never did get the paperback back, and by then I did not want it. I had learned that the job was not to be there but to be present, and that the difference between the two can be a single count.

Algae are tiny living things that use sunlight to make food. Pond 1 is in an open field; Pond 2 is shaded by trees for most of the day. The two ponds have about the same depth and temperature.

On day 0, a biologist added the same number of algae cells to a sample tank from each pond. Every 2 days she counted the cells in 1 mL of each tank. Figure 1 shows the counts.