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ACT Reading: Humanities (Drill 4)

Drill 4 · Reading · Humanities

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About This Drill

ACT Reading: Humanities (Drill 4) 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, literature, philosophy, and cultural history. As you read, pay attention to the author's perspective, the way they develop their central idea, and how specific examples or references support the larger argument.

Passage

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the essay "The Edited Self: Photography and the Problem of Authenticity" by Yusuf Adebayo (©2021, Visual Culture Quarterly). We have been selecting which images of ourselves to share since long before the smartphone. The formal portrait, the holiday photograph tucked into a Christmas card, the wedding album, each was a curated artifact, a negotiation between how we appeared and how we wished to be remembered. What has changed in the age of social media is not the impulse to curate but the scale, the speed, and the relentlessness of the enterprise. A portrait painted in the seventeenth century required hours of sitting and resulted in a single, expensive image. A photograph taken in 1975 required film, cost money per frame, and waited days for development. Each constraint imposed a natural discipline: you chose your moments carefully because the cost of choosing poorly was real. The digital image has abolished those constraints entirely. The cost of a photograph is now effectively zero, which means the cost of a bad photograph is also zero, and so we take hundreds, select the best, and discard the rest without a second thought. What this abundance produces is not, as one might expect, a more accurate record of a life. It produces a more intensively managed one. The sheer volume of images creates the illusion of transparency, look how much I share!, while the selection process ensures that what is shared is ruthlessly filtered. We have more photographs of ourselves than any previous generation and, arguably, a less honest visual record. The philosopher's question, what is authentic self-presentation?, has become a practical one that millions of people navigate daily, mostly without noticing that they are doing philosophy at all.

Questions & Explanations

Question 1. The central claim of the passage is that social media has:

  • A) introduced the practice of curating one's self-image for the very first time in human history
  • B) intensified an existing human tendency to manage self-presentation, producing greater volume but less honesty. ✓
  • C) made it impossible for people to present authentic versions of themselves in any medium.
  • D) created a generation that is more self-aware about image management than any previous generation, as the passage has it.

Explanation: B is correct. The passage opens by establishing that curating self-image is not new, then argues that digital abundance has scaled this up while making the record less honest, "more photographs...arguably, a less honest visual record." A directly contradicts the passage's opening. C is too strong, the author says we have a less honest record, not that authenticity is impossible in any medium. D is the opposite of the passage's implication; the author suggests people navigate this "without noticing they are doing philosophy at all."

Question 2. According to the passage, earlier constraints on photography, cost, film, development time, served to:

  • F) prevent most ordinary people from documenting their lives at all
  • G) impose a discipline that made people more careful about which moments they photographed. ✓
  • H) ensure that the images produced were more technically accurate than modern photographs.
  • J) limit photography to wealthy individuals and professional photographers.

Explanation: G is correct. The passage states: "Each constraint imposed a natural discipline: you chose your moments carefully because the cost of choosing poorly was real." F is too strong, the passage doesn't say photography was inaccessible, only that it required care. H introduces technical accuracy, which is not mentioned. J is not stated; cost is mentioned but the passage does not say photography was limited to the wealthy.

Question 3. The passage most strongly suggests that the "illusion of transparency" created by social media sharing is:

  • A) the result of a deliberate and conscious strategy by most users.
  • B) misleading because the volume of images conceals the intensity of the selection process behind them. ✓
  • C) a wholly new problem created entirely by the spread of smartphone technology
  • D) something only professional photographers and public figures need to worry about.

Explanation: B is correct. The passage describes the illusion as: "The sheer volume of images creates the illusion of transparency, look how much I share!, while the selection process ensures that what is shared is ruthlessly filtered." The abundance appears honest but the filtering makes it less so. A is contradicted by the final paragraph, which says people navigate this "without noticing." C contradicts the opening, which traces the impulse back centuries. D is contradicted by the final paragraph's reference to "millions of people" doing this daily.

Question 4. As it is used in the passage, the word "relentlessness" most nearly means:

  • F) deliberate cruelty
  • G) ceaseless, unrelenting continuity. ✓
  • H) competitive intensity.
  • J) speed of production.

Explanation: G is correct. The author uses "relentlessness" alongside "scale" and "speed" to describe what has changed about self-curation in the social media age, the fact that it never stops. "Ceaseless, unrelenting continuity" captures this. F (cruelty) is a different connotation of "relentless" that doesn't fit the context. H (competitive intensity) and J (speed of production) describe related but distinct qualities that are not what "relentlessness" conveys here.

Question 5. The author's mention of the "philosopher's question" in the final paragraph primarily serves to:

  • A) suggest that the problem of authentic self-presentation has now been fully solved by technology
  • B) argue that people should study philosophy in order to navigate social media more thoughtfully.
  • C) elevate the passage's subject by connecting everyday image-sharing to a longstanding philosophical question, while noting that most people engage with it unconsciously. ✓
  • D) introduce a new argument about the relationship between technology and academic philosophy.

Explanation: C is correct. The closing line reframes the essay's subject, everyday social media decisions, as a form of applied philosophy, while the phrase "without noticing they are doing philosophy at all" adds a gentle irony. A is wrong, the passage does not suggest the problem has been solved. B is not implied; the author is not prescribing a course of action. D is wrong because the relationship between technology and academic philosophy is not the subject; the author is connecting ordinary behavior to philosophical questions, not to the academic discipline.