ACT Reading Practice Test: Sequence of Events and Cause and Effect

Passage I: Social Science

This passage is from an original article about a fictional mining town.

[1] When the Copperline Mine opened in 1902, the town of Rook's Ferry had fewer than three hundred residents. Within a decade it had more than four thousand. The mining company built rows of identical wooden houses, a company store and a schoolhouse, and it paid workers partly in tokens that could be spent only at that store.

[2] The arrangement held until 1921, when copper prices collapsed. The company cut wages twice that year. The miners, who could not shop anywhere else with their tokens, found that prices at the company store did not fall along with their pay. In the spring of 1922, they refused to go down into the shafts.

[3] The strike lasted eleven weeks. It ended with a compromise: wages would be paid entirely in cash, and the company would sell the store to a cooperative run by miners' families. Historians of the region often point to this agreement, rather than to the strike itself, as the turning point for Rook's Ferry. Once families controlled their own store, they began opening other businesses, among them a bakery, a hardware shop and a small newspaper, that did not depend on the company.

[4] That independence mattered in 1958, when the mine closed for good. Many company towns in the region emptied within a few years after their mines shut down. Rook's Ferry shrank, but it survived. The cooperative store still operates on Main Street, and the old company houses, now privately owned and painted in a dozen colors, draw visitors who come to photograph them.

Passage II: Natural Science

This passage is from an original article about forest fires.

[1] For much of the twentieth century, foresters in the western United States treated every wildfire as a disaster to be put out as quickly as possible. Ecologists now understand that some forests are built around fire. Lodgepole pine is a striking example.

[2] Many lodgepole pines produce cones sealed shut with a resin that melts only at high temperatures. These cones can stay on a tree for years without releasing their seeds. When a fire sweeps through, the heat melts the resin, the cones open, and seeds fall onto ground that the fire has just cleared of shrubs and fallen needles.

[3] The first plants to appear after a fire, however, are usually not pines. Within a season, the blackened ground is often covered with fireweed and grasses, whose light seeds blow in on the wind and whose roots can sprout again from below the burned surface. Ash from the fire adds minerals to the soil, and with the old trees gone, sunlight reaches the ground. Pine seedlings, which need that full sunlight, grow up among the fireweed.

[4] Over several decades, the young pines grow tall and close together, and their shade crowds out the sun-loving plants that came first. Fallen needles and dead branches pile up on the forest floor. In time, this buildup provides fuel for the next fire, and the cycle begins again.