ACT Reading Practice Test: Inferences and Relationships

Passage A: Literary Narrative

This passage is from an original short story.

[1] The bell over the door of Kessler Watch Repair had not rung all afternoon, and Nora was beginning to think it never would again. Her grandfather sat at the bench by the window, a magnifying loupe held in one eye, bent over a wristwatch that a customer had dropped off in March and never picked up.

[2] "You know nobody is coming for that one," Nora said.

[3] "Then it will be finished for nobody," he said, without looking up. "A watch does not know who owns it."

[4] She had come to help him pack. The landlord had sold the building, and the new owners wanted the space by the end of the month for a phone store. Nora had brought a roll of tape and a stack of flattened boxes, and so far she had filled exactly one of them, with old receipt books her grandfather insisted on keeping.

[5] The drawers were the problem. There were sixty of them in the cabinet along the back wall, each no bigger than a deck of cards, each labeled in her grandmother's slanted handwriting: crowns, stems, mainsprings, crystals 28-30 mm. Nora pulled one open and found a hundred tiny screws, sorted by size into folded paper. She tried to imagine pouring them into a box and could not.

[6] "Leave the drawers," her grandfather said. He had taken the loupe out and was watching her. "I will do the drawers."

[7] "Grandpa, you said that last week."

[8] He was quiet for a moment. Then he held up the wristwatch. The second hand was moving, a thin gold line sweeping across the dial.

[9] "Forty years," he said, "and I still like this part best. The moment it decides to go again."

[10] Nora set the tape on the counter. Outside, a bus hissed at the curb, and the bell over the door stayed silent. She pulled a stool up to the bench beside him and asked him to show her how he had done it.

Passage B: Humanities

This passage is adapted from an original essay on the history of mapmaking.

[1] Mapmakers have long faced an awkward problem. A map takes years of surveying, drawing and checking to produce, but once it is printed, a competitor can copy it in weeks. Proving that a rival had copied rather than surveyed was difficult, because two honest maps of the same place should look almost the same. A river is where it is; a road bends where it bends.

[2] One solution was to make the map slightly wrong on purpose. A publisher might add a tiny street that did not exist, give a lake an extra inlet, or place a small town on an empty stretch of road. These inventions, often called trap streets or paper towns, were chosen to be harmless: no traveler would be badly misled by a dead-end lane that led nowhere important. But if the same imaginary lane appeared on a rival's map, the copying was hard to deny.

[3] The method has a strange side effect. Because maps shape what people expect to find, a fictional place can sometimes become real. In one well-known case in New York State, a town that existed only on a road map later gave its name to a real store built near that spot, and for a time the name appeared on other maps as if the town had always been there.

[4] Dictionaries and encyclopedias have used similar traps, inventing a word or a biography that no one would ever need to look up. The practice raises a fair question about trust. A reference work asks its readers to believe every entry; a single deliberate falsehood, however small, seems to break that promise. Defenders reply that the falsehoods are chosen so that no reader will ever be harmed by them, and that without some protection, careful publishers could not afford to compete with careless copiers.

[5] Digital maps have changed the problem without ending it. Satellite images and information shared by millions of users make it easier to check a map against the world, but they also make it easier to copy one. The trap street, a small lie told in the service of honest work, has not entirely disappeared.