ACT Reading Practice Test: Vocabulary in Context and Author's Craft

Passage I: Humanities (personal essay)

(1) My grandfather repaired clocks in a narrow shop between a bakery and a shoe store, and for most of my childhood I assumed that the ticking that filled the room was simply the sound the shop made, the way a river makes the sound of water. It took me years to understand that every one of those clocks had arrived silent. People did not bring him clocks that worked.

(2) He was not a talkative man, and he did not explain what he was doing so much as let me watch. He would open a case, study the movement for a long time without touching it, and then reach in with tweezers as fine as an eyelash. When I grew restless, he would tell me that a clock "keeps its secrets in plain sight." I took this for one of those sayings old people collect. Only later did I see that he meant it literally: the fault was almost always visible, if you were willing to look longer than felt comfortable.

(3) What he valued most was a quality he called patience, though I have come to think the word does not quite capture it. Patience suggests waiting for something to be over. His attention was more active than that. He would turn a single gear under the lamp, checking each tooth, as though the problem might reveal itself if he gave it a fair hearing. Customers who stopped by to ask whether a repair was finished often left with a short lecture on the difference between "finished" and "right."

(4) The shop did not make much money. Watches had become cheap enough to throw away, and the clocks that came in were mostly family heirlooms whose owners could not bear to replace them. My grandfather charged little and spent far more time on each job than the price could justify. My mother, who kept his books, called this a weakness. He called it the only way to do the work.

(5) I did not become a clockmaker, though for a few years he liked to introduce me to customers as "the girl who will take over the shop." I write software for a living, and most days nothing I touch has gears. But when a program fails in a way no one can explain, I find myself doing what he did: keeping my hands off the keyboard, reading the code slowly and assuming that the fault is sitting there, waiting to be seen. Colleagues sometimes ask how I found a bug so quickly. The honest answer is that I didn't find it quickly at all. I simply stopped looking for it in a hurry.

Passage II: Literary Narrative

(1) The ferry left at six-forty, and Hana reached the dock at six-thirty-eight, which her brother would later describe as "cutting it fine" and she would describe as "on time." She ran the last stretch with her violin case knocking against her hip, and the deckhand, a broad man with a gray beard, held the gate for her without a word.

(2) Inside, the cabin smelled of coffee and diesel. Hana took a seat by the window and set the case on her knees. The audition was at ten, in a city she had visited only once, and she had spent the night rehearsing the opening of the concerto in her head until the notes had lost their meaning, the way a word repeated too often turns into a strange, flat sound.

(3) Across the aisle, an old woman was knitting something long and blue. Her needles moved with a steady, unhurried rhythm, and every so often she paused, held the work up to the light and frowned at it before going on. Once she pulled out an entire row. Hana watched twenty minutes of work disappear in a few seconds and felt something close to alarm.

(4) "Doesn't that bother you?" she asked before she could stop herself.

(5) The woman looked up, not at all offended. "It bothered me when I was young," she said. "Now I think of it as part of the knitting. You can't get it right without getting it wrong first." She smiled and began the row again, and the needles went back to their quiet clicking.

(6) Hana turned back to the window. The water was gray and choppy, and the far shore was still only a smudge. She opened the case, though there was no room to play, and ran her thumb along the strings. For the first time in days, she did not hear the concerto in her head. She heard the clicking of the needles, patient and even, and she let it be the only sound for a while.