ACT Reading — Social Science — Drill 3

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "Counting the Nation: The Science and Policy of the U.S. Census" by Martin Okafor (©2021, Public Policy Review). The United States Census, conducted every ten years, is one of the largest data-collection efforts in the world. Its results are used to apportion the 435 seats in the House of Representatives among states, to guide the distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding for programs such as highway construction and school lunch programs, and to draw the boundaries of congressional and state legislative districts. The accuracy of the census therefore has direct consequences for how political power and public resources are allocated. Achieving an accurate count is a significant logistical challenge. The Census Bureau must account for a population of more than 330 million people living in a wide variety of housing situations, across geographies ranging from dense urban centers to remote rural communities. Response rates vary considerably: historically, certain groups—including young children, renters, and residents of rural and remote areas—have been counted at lower rates than the general population, a phenomenon known as a differential undercount. The Census Bureau invests substantial resources in reducing the differential undercount. Outreach campaigns are conducted in multiple languages and through a variety of media channels. Enumerators are deployed to follow up with households that do not respond by mail or online. In recent decades, the bureau has also refined its questionnaire design based on extensive testing, with the goal of making questions clearer and responses more consistent across demographic groups. One area of ongoing refinement involves the questions used to categorize respondents by race and ethnicity. The 2020 census introduced a revised question format that had been tested over several years. Research found that the revised format produced higher rates of consistent responses and reduced the frequency with which respondents selected ambiguous answer categories, improving the overall reliability of demographic data.