Nice work!
Review your answers above to learn from any mistakes.
About This Drill
ACT Reading: Humanities (Drill 2) is a Reading practice drill covering Humanities. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.
Humanities passages cover topics in art, music, architecture, philosophy, film, literature, and cultural history. As you read, pay attention to the author's perspective, the significance of specific examples, and the relationship between ideas. Questions may ask about the main idea, specific details, the author's purpose, vocabulary in context, or inferences supported by the passage.
Passage
HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the book The Buildings We Forget: Memory and Architecture in the Postwar City by Claudia Fernandes (©2017).
There is a particular kind of building that architects rarely photograph and critics rarely write about: the functional vernacular structure, the kind of building that appears on nearly every commercial block in America and registers to most people as background rather than foreground. The strip mall, the drive-through bank, the three-story medical office building with a flat roof and a parking lot: these structures were not designed to be noticed. They were designed to be used.
This absence from critical discourse matters more than it might seem. Architecture criticism, like most criticism, tends to direct attention toward the exceptional rather than the typical, toward the singular work of genius rather than the fabric of the built environment that most people actually inhabit. The result is a discipline that produces brilliant analysis of a handful of canonical buildings and near-total silence about the landscape most Americans experience every day.
When cultural geographers began studying the strip as a distinct form, the commercial strip, the arterial corridor lined with chain stores, fast-food restaurants, and gas stations; they found it remarkably consistent across the country. The same structures appear in Phoenix and Pittsburgh, in coastal suburbs and inland small towns, creating what one geographer called a "geography of sameness." For many critics, this homogeneity represents a failure of architecture and urban planning, evidence that market forces, left unchecked, produce monotony.
An opposing view holds that the strip's consistency is not a failure but a form of legibility. The traveler in an unfamiliar city can navigate by recognizable signs and structures; the predictability that critics find deadening is, for the person far from home, reassuring. This argument does not necessarily redeem the strip aesthetically, but it suggests that the values embedded in the built environment are more complicated than aesthetic critique alone can capture.
What would it mean to take these ordinary buildings seriously, not to celebrate them uncritically, but to analyze them with the same rigor applied to celebrated works? The answer might tell us more about American culture than any number of essays about landmark buildings.
Questions & Explanations
Question 1. The main argument of the passage is that:
-
A) the strip mall represents the most significant architectural development of the postwar era.
-
B) architecture criticism should pay serious attention to ordinary buildings, not just exceptional ones. ✓
-
C) chain stores and fast-food restaurants have damaged the visual character of American cities.
-
D) cultural geographers are better equipped to study architecture than traditional critics are, as the passage presents it.
Explanation: Choice B is correct. The passage argues throughout that ordinary buildings, strip malls, drive-through banks, medical offices, are ignored by architectural criticism, and that this is a significant oversight given how much of American life takes place in these spaces. The final paragraph calls explicitly for taking ordinary buildings seriously. Choice A makes an unsupported superlative claim. Choice C presents one view discussed in the passage but not the author's main argument. Choice D is not a claim the passage makes.
Question 2. According to the passage, which of the following best describes what cultural geographers found when they studied the American commercial strip?
-
F) The strip varied from region to region, reflecting local economic conditions.
-
G) The same kinds of structures appeared consistently across different parts of the country. ✓
-
H) The strip was declining in most major American cities by the time geographers began studying it.
-
J) Strip development was most pronounced in coastal suburban areas rather than in inland cities.
Explanation: Choice G is correct. The passage states that cultural geographers found the strip 'remarkably consistent across the country,' with the same structures appearing in Phoenix and Pittsburgh and in 'coastal suburbs and inland small towns.' Choice F directly contradicts this. Choice H introduces a decline not mentioned in the passage. Choice J contradicts the passage, which explicitly states that the strip appears in both coastal suburbs and inland small towns.
Question 3. The passage most strongly suggests that those who defend the strip's consistency argue that its predictability:
-
A) is evidence of successful market competition among architectural firms.
-
B) makes unfamiliar environments easier to navigate for travelers. ✓
-
C) reflects a conscious design choice by urban planners to promote efficiency.
-
D) has been mischaracterized as monotony by critics with elitist tastes.
Explanation: Choice B is correct. The passage states that defenders of the strip argue its consistency functions as 'legibility,' allowing 'the traveler in an unfamiliar city' to navigate by 'recognizable signs and structures.' Choice A introduces market competition among architectural firms, which is not the defenders' argument. Choice C attributes the consistency to urban planners' conscious intent; the passage attributes it to market forces. Choice D introduces a claim about elitism not present in the passage.
Question 4. As it is used in the passage, the phrase 'geography of sameness' most nearly means:
-
F) an area where buildings have been standardized through government regulation.
-
G) a landscape characterized by uniform commercial structures across different locations. ✓
-
H) a map of the United States showing regions with similar population density.
-
J) an approach to urban planning that prioritizes consistency over innovation.
Explanation: Choice G is correct. In context, the phrase is used to describe the finding that the same commercial structures, chain stores, fast-food restaurants, gas stations, appear in cities and towns across the country, creating a landscape that looks the same from place to place. Choice F introduces government regulation not mentioned in the passage. Choice H misreads 'geography of sameness' as a literal map of demographics. Choice J describes an urban planning philosophy, not a geographical observation.
Question 5. The author's primary purpose in asking 'What would it mean to take these ordinary buildings seriously?' in the final paragraph is most likely to:
-
A) suggest that architecture students should be required to study strip malls.
-
B) imply that the answer to this question is unknowable.
-
C) propose a direction for architectural criticism that the rest of the passage has argued is missing. ✓
-
D) concede that ordinary buildings are ultimately too uninteresting to analyze rigorously, as the passage frames it.
Explanation: Choice C is correct. The rhetorical question in the final paragraph follows the passage's argument that ordinary buildings are ignored by criticism, asking what serious analysis of them would look like is a call to pursue the direction the passage has argued is needed. Choice A introduces a specific institutional recommendation not made in the passage. Choice B is incorrect: the author implies the answer would be illuminating, not unknowable. Choice D contradicts the passage's overall argument.