ACT Reading Practice Test: Literary Narrative and Social Science

Passage A: Literary Narrative

This passage is from an original short story.

[1] When I came home in May after my first year of college, my room was gone. The door was the same, with the dent near the handle from a basketball I had once thrown too hard, but the bed, the desk and the posters had disappeared. In their place stood a pottery wheel, two plastic tubs of clay and a set of metal shelves crowded with bowls in various stages of drying. My mother, who had spent twenty-two years as an accountant for a trucking company, had not mentioned any of this on the phone.

[2] "Your things are in the basement," she said from the hallway, a dish towel over her shoulder. "Everything is labeled." She said it the way she used to tell clients that their paperwork was in order, as if nothing more needed to be discussed.

[3] I told her it was fine. It was not fine, but I had spent nine months assuring everyone, including her, that I loved living on my own, so I could hardly complain that she had taken me at my word. I carried my suitcase down to the basement and slept on the old couch beneath the stairs, listening to the furnace click on and off.

[4] For the first week I stayed away from the room. I noticed, though, that my mother came to dinner with gray clay under her fingernails and that she hummed while she washed the dishes, something I could not remember her ever doing. She had retired in January. On the refrigerator, where my report cards used to hang, there was a flyer for a craft fair in July with her name printed among the vendors.

[5] One evening I found her at the wheel, bent over a lump of clay that kept wobbling off center. She did not look up. "Sit," she said, nodding toward a stool, and for an hour I watched her ruin three bowls. Each time, she pressed the clay back into a ball without any sign of irritation and started over. I had seen her lose patience over a misplaced receipt, yet here she was, failing calmly and repeatedly, almost cheerfully.

[6] On the fourth try she let me take her place. The clay was colder and heavier than I expected, and it seemed to push back against my hands. My bowl leaned to one side like a hat in the wind. I reached to flatten it, but she caught my wrist.

[7] "Leave it," she said. "The first ones are supposed to look like that."

[8] She fired it the following week, glazed it a pale green and set it on the kitchen windowsill, where it began to hold her car keys. When I left for school again in August, I noticed that she had not put it in the basement with the rest of my things.

Passage B: Social Science

This passage is from an original article about behavioral economics.

[1] Suppose someone hands you a coffee mug with your school's name on it and, a few minutes later, offers to buy it back. What price would you ask? Now suppose that instead of receiving the mug, you are offered the chance to buy one just like it. What would you pay? Standard economic theory predicts that the two prices should be close, since the mug is the same mug either way. In practice, they usually are not.

[2] In a well-known study published in 1990, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and the economists Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler gave mugs to half of the students in a classroom and then let the class trade. Because the mugs had been handed out at random, economic theory suggested that about half of them should change hands, moving from owners who cared little for mugs to classmates who wanted them more. Far fewer trades took place. Owners typically asked for roughly twice as much as buyers were willing to pay, and most mugs stayed where they had landed.

[3] Thaler had earlier given this pattern a name: the endowment effect. People seem to value an object more once it belongs to them, even if they have owned it for only a few minutes and did nothing to earn it. A common explanation draws on loss aversion, the tendency for a loss to feel more painful than a gain of the same size feels pleasant. To an owner, selling the mug means losing something, and the price must be high enough to make up for that loss. To a would-be buyer, the mug is merely a possible gain.

[4] The effect is not limited to mugs. Researchers have reported similar gaps for pens, chocolate bars and lottery tickets, and the idea may help explain some familiar business practices. A company that offers a free thirty-day trial or an easy return policy may be counting on the fact that, once a product is sitting in a customer's home, sending it back feels like giving something up.

[5] The endowment effect has limits, however. In the 1990 study itself, no gap appeared when students traded tokens that could be exchanged for a set amount of cash, since everyone knew exactly what a token was worth. Later research suggested that experience matters as well: people who buy and sell goods regularly, such as dealers at sports-card shows, tend to show a much smaller gap than occasional traders do. Some economists have also argued that the size of the effect depends heavily on how an experiment is designed and explained to participants.

[6] These limits make the effect more revealing rather than less. They suggest that the extra value people place on their possessions is not fixed, but shaped by habit and expectation. The person who cannot bring herself to part with an old jacket and the dealer who sells one without a second thought are looking at the same object; they have simply learned to see it differently.