ACT Reading: Strategy & Drills

By Brian Stewart, Barron’s Author & ACT Perfect Scorer

After more than 20 years of ACT tutoring, I’ve found that the students who struggle most with ACT Reading are often making it harder than it needs to be. This section is not a test of how much you know, how fast you read, or how well you retain information under pressure. It is, at its core, an open-book test. Every answer to every question is right there in front of you. The students who internalize that and approach the section accordingly are the ones who improve the most. This guide covers how the section works, how to use your time, and the strategic principles that make the biggest difference. For comprehensive content review and full-length practice tests, check out my book Barron’s ACT Premium Study Guide. But let’s start with strategy.

How the ACT Reading Section Works

The ACT Reading section consists of 36 questions in 40 minutes. Passages cover four content areas: Literary Narrative (fiction or personal essay), Social Science, Humanities, and Natural Science. One passage set may be a comparative passage — two shorter passages presented together with questions asking you to analyze each individually and compare them.

Questions test a range of skills: identifying the main idea of a passage, locating specific details, drawing inferences, understanding the author’s purpose and tone, interpreting vocabulary in context, and — for comparative passages — comparing the perspectives and methods of two authors.

The Right Mindset: Treat It Like an Open-Book Test

The most important thing to understand about ACT Reading is that it is an open-book test. The passage is right in front of you the entire time. You are never expected to answer questions from memory alone. You are always expected to go back to the passage and find support for your answer.

This matters because many students approach reading comprehension as a memory exercise — they read the passage, try to absorb as much as possible, and then answer questions based on what they remember. This approach leads to errors, particularly on detail and inference questions where the exact wording of the passage matters. The correct approach is to use the passage actively: read it carefully first to understand what it’s saying, then return to it as often as you need to when answering questions.

How to Manage Your Time

With 40 minutes for 36 questions, you have roughly 10 minutes per passage set. The approach I recommend: spend approximately 4 minutes reading the passage carefully, then use the remaining 6 minutes to answer the questions. This split gives you a solid foundation for the big-picture questions — main idea, purpose, tone — while leaving enough time to go back to the passage for the detail and inference questions that require it.

The key is that 4 minutes of careful reading is not the same as 4 minutes of skimming. Read the passage with genuine attention. Track the main argument or narrative, notice how the passage is structured, and pay attention to shifts in tone or perspective. Students who skim to save time often spend more total time per passage because they have to re-read large sections when answering questions.

The Biggest Mistake ACT Reading Students Make

The most common error I see is students looking at the answer choices before they’ve formed their own answer. They read the question, glance back at the passage, and then start evaluating the options — and the options are designed to be persuasive. Wrong answers on ACT Reading are carefully constructed to sound plausible. They often contain words from the passage, address the right topic, and feel roughly correct on a quick read. Students who haven’t committed to a direction before looking at the choices get pulled toward these distractors constantly.

The fix is to treat every question the same way: read the question, go back to the relevant part of the passage, think about what the answer should say, and only then look at the choices. This takes discipline — especially under time pressure — but it is the single most effective way to reduce errors on this section.

Four Strategic Principles for ACT Reading

1. Formulate Your Answer Before Looking at the Choices

As discussed above: read the question, return to the passage, form your own answer, then match it to the choices. Don’t let the answer choices do your thinking for you. On main idea and inference questions, students who pre-commit to an answer pick the correct choice with much greater confidence and accuracy than students who evaluate the options cold.

2. Always Go Back to the Passage

Even when a question doesn’t reference a specific line number, go back and find the relevant section before you answer. This is the open-book test principle in practice. It takes a few extra seconds, but it protects you from the most common trap on this section: choosing an answer that sounds right based on your general impression of the passage but doesn’t actually match what the passage says.

For detail questions, this means locating the specific sentence or paragraph being asked about. For inference questions, it means finding the textual basis for the conclusion you’re drawing. For vocabulary-in-context questions, it means reading the full sentence — and often the sentences around it — to understand how the word is being used. In every case, the answer is in the passage. Your job is to find it.

3. Prioritize Big-Picture Questions Early

Main idea, author’s purpose, and overall tone questions don’t require you to locate a specific detail — they test your understanding of the passage as a whole. If you’ve read the passage carefully, these should be among your fastest questions. Answer them while your overall impression of the passage is freshest, then move to the detail and inference questions that require you to return to specific sections.

4. Handle Comparative Passages Sequentially

When you encounter a comparative passage set — two shorter passages instead of one long one — treat them in order. Read Passage A first and answer its questions, then read Passage B and answer its questions. The questions are organized to follow this sequence. This approach keeps your understanding of each passage clear and prevents the confusion that comes from trying to hold both authors’ arguments in your head simultaneously.

The comparison questions — which ask you to identify where the authors agree or disagree, or how one author might respond to the other — come after the individual passage questions. By the time you reach them, you’ll have a solid understanding of each author’s position from answering the earlier questions, which makes the comparison questions much more manageable.

How to Use These Drills Effectively

The ACT Reading drills below are organized by passage type. Each drill contains an original passage and five questions, with detailed explanations for every answer.

Practice the habits described above on every drill: read the passage carefully first, formulate your answer before looking at the choices, and go back to the passage to verify before you commit. After completing a drill, read every explanation — not just the questions you missed. Pay particular attention to any question where you chose a wrong answer that felt convincing, and use the explanation to understand exactly why the correct answer is better supported by the passage text.

For comprehensive ACT Reading instruction — full content review, complete practice tests, and in-depth passage analysis — check out Barron’s ACT Premium Study Guide.