Free printable ACT practice test for Grade 11

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is from a story about a teenager who spends a Saturday with her grandfather while he prepares his old piano to be given away.

Nadia had expected the piano to be the easy part of the weekend. Her grandfather had sold the house on Alder Street in March, the movers would come on Monday, and everything that would not fit in his new apartment had already been sorted into boxes marked KEEP, GIVE, and DUMP in her mother's square capitals. The piano was going to a church across town. All Nadia had to do, her mother said, was sit with Grandpa Ivo while he got it ready, because he would not let anyone else touch it.

"Ready" turned out to mean tuning it. When Nadia came in from the car, her grandfather was already kneeling at the open front of the upright, his gray head halfway inside it, a felt wedge in one hand and a steel lever in the other. The piano's lid leaned against the wall like a door taken off its hinges.

"They have a tuner at the church," Nadia said. "Mom said they'd take care of it."

"They will take care of it after," he said, without coming out. "I am taking care of it before."

She sat on the arm of the sofa, which was the only furniture left in the room, and looked at her phone. For a while the only sound was a single note, struck again and again, and then the soft creak of the lever turning a pin a fraction at a time. The note wavered, a faint wah-wah-wah like a fan that needs oiling, and the wavering slowed as he worked until it disappeared. Then he moved to the next string and began again.

"How long does this take?" she asked after twenty minutes.

"For the whole piano? Three hours, when I was fast. Now, I don't know." He struck the note again. "You can go. I won't tell your mother."

She did not go, though she meant to. Something in the way he listened kept her there. He tilted his head the way the neighbor's dog did when someone said its name, and when the wavering stopped, his shoulders came down a little, as if he had been holding a weight and had finally set it on a shelf.

At noon he asked her to hold down a key while he adjusted the string beside it. She pressed the key with one finger, embarrassed by how badly she wanted to do it correctly. "Not so hard," he said. "You are not ringing a doorbell. Just let it speak." She held it more lightly, and the note bloomed in the empty room, ran along the bare floor, and came back from the walls. "There," he said. "You hear that? Before, it was arguing with itself."

She had taken lessons on this piano when she was seven, for exactly one year. She remembered the books with the cartoon owl on the cover and the way her feet had not reached the pedals. She remembered quitting, too, and the long quiet afternoon when her grandfather had said nothing about it at all. She had always taken that silence for disappointment.

"Did you mind," she said, "when I stopped lessons?"

He sat back on his heels and looked at her for the first time since she had arrived. "Mind? You were seven. You wanted to play soccer." He tapped the side of the piano with the lever. "This one I bought in 1979 with money from the factory, because your mother wanted to learn. She also stopped. Then I learned. A piano does not care who plays it. It cares that somebody keeps it in tune."

Nadia thought about that while he worked through the middle of the keyboard. She had imagined the day as something to get through, a chore standing between her and the rest of Saturday. Now the chore had become a kind of conversation, though most of it was carried on by the piano. Each string came into agreement with the one beside it, and each time it did, her grandfather made a small sound of satisfaction, not quite a word.

By three o'clock the light had moved across the floor and up the wall. He played a chord, then another, then a slow scale from the bottom of the keyboard to the top, and every note sounded clean and certain, like a voice that knows exactly what it means to say.

"Now it can go," he said.

Nadia helped him up. His knees cracked, and he laughed at them. When the church people came on Monday, she thought, they would find a piano that needed nothing, and they would never know why. She found that she did not mind their not knowing. She would know.

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is from an article about research on how practice testing affects memory.

Most students study the same way. They reread their notes, highlight the textbook, and go over the chapter once more the night before the test. The method feels productive: each pass is smoother than the last, and the material starts to look familiar. But a large body of research in cognitive psychology suggests that this feeling is misleading. One of the most effective ways to remember something is not to look at it again but to try to pull it out of memory, a phenomenon researchers call the testing effect, or retrieval practice.

The idea is older than it sounds. In the 1880s the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus memorized lists of nonsense syllables and tested himself at intervals to measure how quickly he forgot them. The result, his famous "forgetting curve," showed that memory fades fast at first and then more slowly. Ebbinghaus was measuring forgetting, not trying to prevent it, but his method contained a hint of what was to come: the act of checking what he remembered was itself a kind of practice. In 1917 the American educational psychologist Arthur Gates had schoolchildren study short biographies, and he varied how much of their study time they spent reading and how much they spent reciting from memory. The children who spent more of their time reciting recalled more.

For much of the twentieth century these findings sat quietly in the journals. Tests were seen mainly as a way to measure learning, the way a thermometer measures temperature without changing it. The thermometer comparison turns out to be misleading. In a widely cited set of experiments published in the 2000s, college students read short passages about scientific topics. Some students then read the passage again; others took a test in which they wrote down as much as they could remember, without seeing the passage and without being told what they got right. When the students were tested five minutes later, those who had restudied did slightly better. But when they were tested a week later, the pattern reversed: the students who had practiced retrieving the material remembered substantially more.

That reversal is the heart of the finding, and it helps explain why so many students choose the less effective method. Rereading produces fluency, the easy sense of recognition that comes from seeing something familiar. Fluency feels like learning, and in the short term it can even look like learning. Retrieval feels harder. It is uncomfortable to stare at a blank page and come up with only half an answer. Yet psychologists suspect that this effort is exactly what makes the memory stronger, because each successful retrieval appears to reinforce the paths by which the information can be found again. Researchers sometimes describe this kind of productive struggle as a "desirable difficulty."

The effect has proved surprisingly robust. It has been found with word lists, foreign vocabulary, maps, science concepts, and medical procedures, and in classrooms as well as in laboratories. It appears even when practice tests are not graded, which suggests that the benefit comes from the retrieval itself rather than from pressure or motivation. Feedback, such as checking answers afterward, adds to the effect, especially when a student retrieves something incorrectly and would otherwise go on believing the error.

None of this means that students should simply take more high-stakes exams. The research points instead toward low-stakes habits: closing the book and writing down what you remember, using flashcards that require an answer before the card is turned over, explaining a concept aloud to a friend, or answering a few questions at the start of class about last week's lesson. Spreading these sessions out over days, rather than packing them into one evening, appears to add to the benefit.

The irony is that the most common study habits are built on the very feeling the research warns against. A page that looks familiar is not necessarily a page that can be recalled. For a student who wants to remember a chapter next month instead of only tomorrow morning, the better question to ask is not "Have I seen this?" but "Can I find it without looking?"

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.