ACT Reading Practice Test: Prose Fiction and Paired Passages

Passage I: Prose Fiction

(1) The bakery's ovens were already warm when Priya let herself in through the back door at four-thirty. For three summers she had worked the counter in the afternoons, handing out loaves and making change, but this was the first morning her aunt had asked her to come in early. "Mr. Ferreira's wrist," Aunt Lata had said on the phone the night before, as if that explained everything. It did, more or less. Mr. Ferreira had shaped the bread at Lata's Bakery for nineteen years, and now he was going to spend six weeks in a cast.

(2) He was there anyway, sitting on an overturned flour bucket near the worktable, his right arm in a sling. "I am not working," he announced when he saw her. "I am supervising. There is a difference, and your aunt has promised to explain it to my doctor."

(3) The dough had risen overnight in large plastic tubs. Priya had watched Mr. Ferreira handle it a thousand times from the doorway, the way he tipped it onto the floured table and cut it into pieces without ever seeming to measure. She tipped the first tub, and the dough came out all at once, a pale, sighing mass that spread farther than she expected. She reached for the scale.

(4) "Weigh the first one," Mr. Ferreira said. "Then lift it. Then put the scale away."

(5) She weighed the first piece, nine hundred grams, and held it in both hands, trying to memorize its heaviness. The second piece she cut by eye. It weighed nine hundred and sixty. The third weighed eight hundred and forty. Mr. Ferreira said nothing, and she was grateful, though she suspected his silence was a kind of comment too. By the tenth piece her hands had started to learn what her eyes could not: the numbers on the scale, when she sneaked a look, stayed within twenty grams of one another.

(6) Shaping was worse. Her loaves came out lopsided, with seams that split in the oven, and when the first tray came out she had to stop herself from apologizing to the bread. Mr. Ferreira leaned forward and studied a loaf that had cracked along one side like a dry riverbed.

(7) "That one," he said, "you will sell for the same price as the others. Somebody will buy it and make toast, and they will never know they are eating your first morning." He paused. "On my first morning, I made forty loaves, and the owner fed thirty of them to his pigs. There are no pigs here, so you are already ahead."

(8) By six o'clock the shelves at the front of the shop were full. Priya's arms ached in places she had not known were arms. When Aunt Lata came in to unlock the door, she walked along the shelves slowly, picking up a loaf here and there and turning it over, and Priya waited for her to say something about the cracked ones. Instead her aunt only asked whether Priya could come in at four-thirty again tomorrow.

(9) "Four-fifteen," Mr. Ferreira said from his bucket. "She is slow at shaping."

Passage II

Passage A

(1) When a city lets an old building fall, it loses more than bricks. A neighborhood's older buildings are a record of how people there have lived: the corner store with an apartment upstairs shows a time when owners lived above their shops, and a row of narrow houses reveals how close together workers once had to live in order to walk to the mill. A new building may be more efficient, but it cannot tell those stories.

(2) Preservation also makes practical sense. Older buildings often house the small businesses that cannot afford the rents in new construction, in part because the buildings were paid for long ago. Replacing the buildings tends to replace the businesses as well. And demolition is wasteful: the materials and energy already invested in a sturdy building are thrown away, while its replacement requires new ones.

(3) None of this means that every old structure deserves protection. But the burden of proof should rest on those who want to tear a building down, not on those who want to keep it.

Passage B

(1) Historic districts were created to save landmarks, and many have done exactly that. But in a growing number of cities, preservation rules now cover large neighborhoods in which most buildings are ordinary houses of no particular distinction. In those areas, adding a story to a house or replacing a parking lot with an apartment building can require years of hearings, and many projects are simply abandoned.

(2) The result is not a frozen museum but a quiet shortage. When a desirable neighborhood cannot add homes, the people who want to live there compete for the homes that already exist, and prices rise. The residents who benefit most are those who already own property; those shut out are often the young families and workers the old neighborhood was built for.

(3) A city can honor its past without treating every building as a monument. It should protect structures of real historic or architectural value, and it should let the rest of the neighborhood change, as neighborhoods always did before the rules were written.