Free printable ACT practice test for Grade 11

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is from a story about a high school student who runs the lights for his school's spring musical.

The light board in the booth at Hollins High was older than anyone who used it, a gray console with rows of sliders and a screen the size of a playing card. Ravi had learned it the way a person learns a difficult relative: slowly, with patience, and by never assuming it was in a good mood. For six weeks he had programmed every cue for the spring musical, all ninety-three of them, and for six weeks the board had done exactly what he told it.

On opening night it did not.

The first act went cleanly. Ravi pressed GO and the stage warmed into the amber of a village morning; he pressed GO and the light narrowed to a single cold circle for the heroine's song. From the booth at the back of the auditorium he could see the audience as a dark field of heads, and above it the stage, bright and small as a jewelry box. Ms. Okafor, the director, sat beside him with the script open on her knees, whispering each cue a beat before it came. "Standby forty. Forty, go." He loved that rhythm. It felt like being part of a machine that was also a living thing.

Forty-one was the storm. It was the most complicated cue in the show: the stage dimming to blue, a flicker that was supposed to be lightning, and then darkness for the scene change. Ravi pressed GO. The screen froze. The blue came halfway up and stopped, the lightning did not come, and the little screen showed a gray box with a message he had never seen before.

His hands went cold. On stage, the actors had begun the storm scene in a light that looked less like a storm than like a grocery store. He pressed GO again. Nothing. He felt the familiar rush he got before a hard test, the sense that his own mind was a room whose lights had just gone out.

"Ravi," Ms. Okafor said, not loudly. "What do you need?"

He heard himself say, "I can do it by hand." He did not know he was going to say it until he did.

The board had a manual mode, a row of faders that controlled each group of lights directly, without the computer. He had used it once, during the first week, to test the bulbs. Now he set his fingers on the faders the way his piano teacher had once taught him to rest his hands on the keys, light and ready. He brought the front lights down. He pushed the blues up. For the lightning he flicked the fader for the white backlights up and down twice, fast, and from the house came a gasp, real or polite, he couldn't tell.

"Good," Ms. Okafor breathed. "Blackout on the line 'until morning.'"

He listened. The actor playing the father said, "We'll wait it out until morning," and Ravi pulled every fader to the bottom, and the stage went black, and in the dark he could hear the crew moving the furniture and his own heart slowing down.

The board stayed frozen for the rest of the act. He ran the next nineteen cues by hand, with Ms. Okafor reading the script aloud beside him like a navigator calling out turns. Some of them were rougher than the ones he had programmed; a sunset came up a little too fast, and one scene began a second late. Nobody in the audience seemed to notice. By the last scene of the act he had stopped thinking about the frozen screen at all. He was watching the stage and listening to the actors and moving his hands, and it was, he realized, the most awake he had ever felt.

At intermission the technology teacher came up, restarted the board, and it woke as if nothing had happened. The second act ran on the computer, every cue smooth and exact. Ravi pressed GO for each cue that was left, and it was fine, and he found that he missed the faders a little.

After the curtain call, Ms. Okafor shook his hand as if he were an adult. "Most people think the job is pushing the button," she said. "The job is knowing what the button does."

He didn't sleep much that night. He kept seeing the stage turn blue under his hands.

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is from an article about how the interstate highway system changed American towns and cities.

In the summer of 1919, a convoy of about eighty Army trucks, cars, and motorcycles set out from Washington, D.C., to test whether military vehicles could cross the continent. It took sixty-two days to reach San Francisco. The convoy sank in mud, broke through wooden bridges, and in places moved more slowly than a person could walk. Among the officers who made the trip was a young lieutenant colonel named Dwight D. Eisenhower. Decades later, after he had also seen Germany's autobahns during World War II, he would remember both experiences when, as president, he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.

The act authorized a national network of about 41,000 miles of divided highways, and the federal government agreed to pay 90 percent of the cost, with money drawn largely from a tax on gasoline. The new roads were built to a common standard: at least two lanes in each direction, gentle curves and grades, and, most important, limited access. Drivers could enter and leave only at interchanges. There would be no stoplights, no driveways, and no cross streets.

That last feature changed the geography of everyday life in ways few people predicted. The older highways of the 1920s and 1930s, such as the famous Route 66, had run straight through the middle of towns. A traveler from Chicago to Los Angeles drove down main street after main street, past diners, motor courts, gas stations, and souvenir stands that depended on that traffic. The interstates, by design, went around such places. Where a two-lane road had once delivered customers to the front door, a four-lane highway now carried them past at full speed, often within sight of the water tower.

For many small towns, the effect was swift. When a stretch of interstate opened nearby, traffic on the old road could fall sharply almost overnight, and businesses that had depended on it began to close. Some towns lobbied hard to have an exit placed close to their downtowns; those that succeeded had a chance to adapt, and those that did not often watched their main streets empty. Williams, Arizona, was the last town on Route 66 to be bypassed, in 1984, and the old highway was removed from the federal highway system the following year.

The interstates did not simply drain business away, however. They moved it. Every interchange became a potential commercial site, and clusters of gas stations, motels, and restaurants grew up around exits, often on land that had been farm fields a few years earlier. Because these businesses served travelers who might never return, many of them belonged to national chains whose signs a driver could recognize from a distance. A traveler on the interstate could cross the country without ever seeing a town's center at all.

In cities, the story was different and often more painful. Planners routed many urban interstates through existing neighborhoods, where land was cheaper and residents had less political power. Thousands of homes and businesses were demolished, and communities, many of them Black or immigrant neighborhoods, were divided by elevated roadways and sunken trenches. At the same time, the highways made it easier for families who could afford it to move to new suburbs and commute to work by car, which drew residents and tax revenue away from city centers.

Not everything about this change was a loss. The interstates made travel far safer per mile than the old two-lane roads, cut shipping times for goods, and allowed trucking to grow into the main way freight moves across the country. Some bypassed towns eventually found new life by turning their old main streets into attractions for travelers curious about what the interstates had passed by.

Still, the interstate system is a reminder that a road is never only a road. A decision about where to put an exit ramp is also, in a sense, a decision about which towns will be reached and which will be passed by. The engineers of the 1950s set out to solve a problem of speed. In doing so, they redrew the map of where Americans would eat, sleep, shop, and live.

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.