from 24 to 35 on ACT Reading
How to Achieve a Leap from 24 to 35 on ACT Reading
From 2016, in ACT exams, we've seen students achieving high scores of 35 in both the composite and reading sections almost every year.
Here are the main challenges of the ACT Reading section and the exclusive strategies we've developed:
1) ACT Reading demands the highest speed in the world. If you carefully read every sentence, you won't finish.
Globally, 99% of ACT test-takers (including native English speakers from the US) fail to complete the reading section, with average scores lingering around 20-22.
Most international students also struggle to surpass the 26-27 mark. However, many of our coached students achieve 30+ in reading, and each year, some reach 34-35. The key to mastering ACT Reading lies in identifying focal points - sentences or keywords likely to be tested, even without looking at the questions. Memorize these key sentences and words, and prioritize selecting the original or synonymous words during the test. We've helped many students score high in reading, proving the effectiveness of this method. This approach enables timely completion of ACT Reading with high scores. Conversely, using traditional methods of summarizing entire paragraphs, translating sentences, and then translating options makes it challenging to excel in ACT Reading, let alone complete it.
2) Key to increasing ACT Reading speed lies in directly anticipating focal points while reading passages!
Most ACT questions assess understanding of specific sentences, followed by rewriting them, often with synonymous replacements. If a test-taker fails to identify the focal sentence corresponding to a question, even if they understand all other sentences in the passage, they may still get it wrong. Thus, anticipating focal points is crucial.
These focal points are usually specific sentences, often characterized by negations such as "not...but...", transition words, comparison sentences, cause-and-effect sentences, inverted sentences, parallel sentences, relative clauses, rhetorical sentences, opinion sentences, quoted sentences, and other special sentence structures. These patterns are conclusions drawn from analyzing focal sentences in ACT Reading questions over the years. Mastering these patterns not only helps in scoring well in ACT but also improves rapid reading skills, benefiting future academic pursuits. Excelling in ACT enhances students' information analysis abilities.
3) Summarizing the entire passage's meaning is not a good reading method.
Some vocabulary and grammar in ACT can be challenging. Test-takers may think they've understood a paragraph or sentence but may actually misunderstand, resulting in choosing the wrong option based on their interpretation. Our approach is to identify keywords in focal sentences, then quickly select answers based on the original or synonymous words. This method allows test-takers to answer questions correctly even when they don't understand some words. Understanding every word in the focal sentence may be difficult, but understanding the key words isn't hard. Moreover, most keywords tested in ACT questions aren't too difficult (excluding some difficult words in humanities and novels; it's advisable to learn these vocabulary words in advance). Therefore, answering with keywords makes it easier to choose the correct option.
Also, when answering ACT questions, it's not necessary for every word in the option to match the original text. We propose the 2/3 principle and the 1/2 principle - if 2/3 of the real content in an option corresponds to the original text, it can be selected; sometimes, even a 1/2 correspondence is sufficient. This is a crucial decision-making principle - information doesn't require complete fulfillment.
A well-known military commander in the US proposed the 40%-70% principle, suggesting that the optimal decision-making time is when one possesses 40%-70% of the necessary information; making decisions before having 40% of the information is premature, while waiting until more than 70% of the information is available is too late. The decision-maker's judgment is also essential. This military decision-making method is quite similar to our proposed 1/2 to 2/3 principle. Therefore, we believe that learning ACT is a process of improving decision-making abilities.
4) ACT requires rapid problem-solving methods.
We advocate for selecting keywords in focal sentences and then examining each option for corresponding keywords. This is an effective method because recognizing keywords is much simpler than translating sentences! Identifying keywords follows patterns, such as negation words, parallel words, repeated words, adjectives, adverbs, important verbs, and abstract nouns, which are generally the keywords and thus the focal points. Conversely, translating sentences is not a good solving method. ACT examinees haven't learned translation; translating focal sentences into Chinese and then translating options into Chinese may lead to two errors, greatly reducing the accuracy of problem-solving. Therefore, using translation as a solving method is not good.
