Free printable ACT practice test for Grade 11

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is from a story about a teenager who visits his father, who lives far away, and goes ice fishing with him.

My father's fishing shanty sits a quarter mile out on Lake Tamsin, a plywood box painted a faded green, with a stovepipe that leans to the east because of a storm three winters ago that he has never gotten around to fixing. I had not seen the shanty in two years. I had not seen him in nearly one, except on a laptop screen, where he always seemed to be sitting too close to the camera.

We drove out onto the ice in his truck, which I had not known you could do. "Eighteen inches," he said, when he saw my face. "You could park a school bus out here." I held the door handle anyway.

Inside, the shanty was dark and smelled of kerosene and wet wool. He lit the little stove, and then he knelt and used a long hand auger to reopen the two holes in the floor, grinding through the skin of new ice until black water welled up into each one. He handed me a short rod no longer than my arm. "Perch," he said. "They're near the bottom this time of year. Drop it down until it touches, then reel up two turns."

I did that. Then we sat on two overturned buckets and waited, and nothing happened, and kept on happening.

I had prepared things to say on the drive up. I had a whole list, actually, in the notes on my phone: school, the swim team, the fact that Mom had started taking pottery classes and now gave everyone lopsided bowls. I had thought these would fill the silence. But in the shanty the silence was not something that needed filling. It was more like a third person sitting with us, patient and not unfriendly, and every time I opened my mouth it seemed rude to interrupt.

My father watched the tip of his rod the way some people watch television. Once, his line twitched, and he lifted the rod an inch, and then let it settle again. "Looking," he said quietly. "Not biting. Just looking."

After an hour I caught a perch. It came up out of the hole all at once, yellow and barred with dark green, flipping on the plywood, and I yelped like a much younger kid. My father laughed, a real laugh, the first one I had heard from him in person since I was thirteen. He showed me how to hold the fish so the spines on its back folded down instead of stabbing my palm, and then he said, "Keeper," and dropped it into the bucket of lake water by the stove.

That was when I asked him. I hadn't planned to; it wasn't on the list. "Why'd you move all the way up here?"

He didn't answer right away. He opened the stove door and looked at the fire, and closed it again. "I was no good in the city," he said finally. "I was angry all the time, and I didn't know why, and I didn't want you to see that. Up here I can hear myself think." He paused. "That's not a good enough reason. I know it isn't."

I wanted to tell him it was fine, but it wasn't, exactly, and he would have known I was lying. So I said, "The stovepipe's crooked," which was a stupid thing to say.

He looked up at it as if he had never noticed. "Huh," he said. "So it is."

We caught eleven perch between us by the time the light in the little window went from white to blue. On the walk back to the truck the ice boomed somewhere far off, a deep sound like a door slamming in a huge house, and I grabbed his arm without thinking. "Just the lake settling," he said. "It's talking to itself. It does that when it gets cold." He didn't pull his arm away, and I didn't let go until we reached the truck.

That night he fried the fish in a cast-iron pan, and we ate them standing at the counter with our fingers. I never did get to the list on my phone. In the morning, before he drove me to the bus, I went out with him and held the ladder while he straightened the stovepipe, and neither of us mentioned why.

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is from an article about the history of ZIP codes in the United States.

Before 1963, a letter mailed across the United States depended heavily on the memory of the people who handled it. Postal clerks stood at sorting cases, wooden cabinets with dozens of pigeonholes, and tossed each piece of mail into the slot for its destination. A good clerk might know thousands of town names and the train routes that served them. The system worked, but it worked at the speed of a human hand, and after World War II the volume of mail began to outpace it.

Part of the problem was growth, and part was the kind of mail being sent. Businesses had discovered that they could reach customers by the thousands through advertising circulars, magazines, and bills. By the early 1960s the Post Office Department was handling more than sixty billion pieces of mail a year, more than twice the volume of the late 1930s. Many of those pieces passed through big-city post offices where clerks were expected to sort mail for places they had never seen.

An earlier fix had helped, but only within cities. In 1943, with many experienced clerks away at war, the department assigned numbered postal zones to the largest cities. A letter might be addressed to "Chicago 14, Illinois," and the "14" told a newer clerk which local station would deliver it. The zones made sorting inside a city simpler, but they did nothing to speed a letter on its way between cities.

The plan that replaced them was called the Zone Improvement Plan, and its abbreviation was chosen partly because it suggested speed. A postal inspector named Robert Moon had proposed a code based on regional sorting centers as early as 1944, and his idea for the first three digits became the backbone of the new system. When the ZIP code was introduced on July 1, 1963, each of its five digits had a job. The first digit stood for a broad group of states, running from 0 in the Northeast to 9 in the far West. The next two digits identified a sectional center, a large post office that served as a hub for its region. The last two digits pointed to a particular post office or delivery area. A letter, in other words, carried directions to itself.

The public did not immediately cooperate. Many people saw the new numbers as one more thing to memorize, and some saw them as a sign that the government preferred numbers to names. The department responded with a publicity campaign built around a cheerful cartoon mail carrier known as Mr. ZIP, who appeared on posters, in advertisements, and in the margins of sheets of stamps. Songs and television spots urged people to use the code. Large mailers had a stronger reason to comply: beginning in 1967, businesses sending bulk mail at the cheaper rates were required to sort it by ZIP code.

The codes made mechanization possible. Because a number can be read in the same way every time, it could eventually be read by machines rather than people, and over the following decades automated equipment took over much of the sorting that clerks had done by hand. In 1983 the Postal Service added four optional digits after a hyphen, a system called ZIP+4, which could narrow a destination to a single side of a city block, one building, or even a large company's mailroom.

The most surprising effects, however, had little to do with mail. Because a ZIP code marks out a small and fairly stable area, it became a convenient way to describe a neighborhood. Marketers began using the codes to decide where to send catalogs, insurers used them to estimate risk, and researchers used them to study differences in income and health from one area to the next. A system designed to move envelopes became, almost by accident, one of the most familiar ways Americans locate themselves on a map. Many people now know their ZIP code as well as they know their own telephone number.

The solubility of a salt is the greatest mass of it that dissolves in a given mass of water at a given temperature. A solution holding that much is saturated.

Students added Salt X, a little at a time, to 100 g of water held at a fixed temperature until no more would dissolve, and recorded the mass dissolved. They repeated this at six temperatures, then did the same with Salt Y. Figure 1 shows the results.

Yeast are single-celled fungi. When they break down sugar without much oxygen, they give off carbon dioxide gas.

In each trial, students mixed 2 g of dry yeast with sugar in 100 mL of water in a flask, connected the flask to an upside-down cylinder of water, and measured the volume of gas collected in 30 minutes.

Experiment 1. Four flasks with different masses of sugar were kept at 25°C. The results are in Table 1.

Experiment 2. Four flasks with 10 g of sugar each were kept at four different temperatures. The results are in Table 2.