ACT Subject Tests
English
The ACT English Test assesses your ability to write clearly, organize your thoughts, and follow the
rules ofgrammar and punctuation. The 45-minute test is made up of five prose passages, each
followed by 15 multiple-choice questions for a total of 75 questions. The questions can be broken
down into two categories:
Rhetorical skills
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writing strategy (12 questions)
organization (11 questions)
style (12 questions)
Usage and mechanics
 punctuation (10 questions)
 grammar and usage (12 questions)
 sentence structure (18 questions)
Common questions in the English test involve reordering passages to make the text more clear,
substituting alternate passages, fixing basic punctuation like commas, apostrophes and semicolons,
eliminating redundancy, and improving the clarity or word choice in a passage.
Math
The 60-minute, 60-question ACT Math Test covers subjects taught in most high schools up to the start
of 12th grade:
 Pre-algebra (14 questions)
 Elementary algebra (10 questions)
 Intermediate algebra (9 questions)
 Coordinate geometry (9 questions)
 Plane geometry (14 questions)
 Trigonometry (4 questions)
Like the other sections of the ACT, the math test requires you to use reasoning skills. This is good
newssince it generally means that you do not need to remember every formula you were ever taught
in algebra class. You will, however, need a strong foundation of all the subjects above in order to do
well on the math test.
Reading
The 35-minute ACT Reading Test assesses your ability to read and understand what ACT considers
college freshman-level material. The test presents four passages, each of which is followed by ten
multiple-choice questions. The four passages (each around 800 words) come directly from original
sources in four subjects or genres:
 Prose fiction: either a short story or a novel
 Social studies: anthropology, archaeology, business, economics, education, geography,
history, political and sociology
 Humanities: anthropology, archaeology, business, economics, education, geography, history,
political science, psychology, and sociology
 Natural science: anatomy, astronomy, biology, botany, chemistry, ecology, geology, medicine,
meteorology, microbiology, natural history, physiology, physics, technology, and zoology
The ACT includes different types of passages to test your ability to read and understand many styles
of writing. Thankfully, this does not mean that you have to brush up on your meteorology or
archaeology, or even your vocabulary, for that matter, since all the information you need to answer
the questions can be gleaned from the passages themselves.
 14 of the 40 questions ask for information that is taken word for word from the passages (ACT
calls these “referring” questions).
 26 of the 40 question answers must be “inferred” from the information you read in the
passages. In order to answer these questions, you need to fully understand the passages as
well as be able to infer meaning from them and draw some reasonable conclusions from the
passages themselves.
Science Reasoning
The 35-minute ACT Science Reasoning Test aims to test your ability to think scientifically. You are
given seven passages, which are followed by 40 multiple-choice questions that test your ability to
interpret, analyze, and evaluate data.
The seven passages fall into three categories:
 Data representation (15 questions on scientific data in the form of charts or graphs)
 Research summaries (18 questions on the outcome of scientific experiments)
 Conflicting viewpoints (seven questions based on scientists’ differing hypotheses on the same subject)
Like the math test, you will not need to memorize a lot of facts, but you will be asked to draw upon your
knowledge of biology, earth and space sciences, chemistry, and physics to answer the questions.
Source: ACT Exam Success