Free ACT Arguments and Evidence practice questionsEnhanced ACT, 2026 format
Claims and the evidence behind them: what supports an argument in the passage, and what the author would most likely agree with.
Answer each question, then read why the right answer is right and why the tempting one is wrong.
Question 1
Reading
INFORMATIONAL: This passage is adapted from an essay about the player piano and the early recording industry.
Before the phonograph could reproduce a piano convincingly, the piano learned to play itself. The player piano — a conventional instrument fitted with a pneumatic mechanism that read perforated paper rolls — was, for roughly two decades beginning in the 1890s, the dominant way Americans heard music at home. By 1919 more than half of the pianos manufactured in the United States were players, and the roll catalogues ran to tens of thousands of titles.
The rolls came in two kinds. Most were "arranged": a technician punched holes into a master roll from sheet music, note by note, with no performer involved. These rolls were mechanically perfect and musically flat; every note sounded at exactly the same volume, and the rhythms had the regularity of a clock. The second kind, the "reproducing" roll, was recorded from a live performance. A pianist played a specially wired instrument that marked a moving paper strip; editors then added perforations that coded the performer's dynamics — the louds and softs — so that a reproducing piano could restore them on playback.
The reproducing roll is why the player piano matters to historians of performance. Sound recording in the same years was poor: acoustic horns captured a piano as a tinny clatter, and a 78-rpm disc held about four minutes. The roll had no such limits. It captured a complete performance, note for note, and the great pianists of the era — Paderewski, Rachmaninoff, Debussy playing his own preludes — sat down at the recording piano. What survives on those rolls is not the sound of their playing but its shape: which notes were held, which were rushed, where the hands did not quite align.
That distinction turns out to matter. When the rolls are played back today on restored instruments, listeners are often startled by how freely the pianists treated the printed score. Chords written to sound together are spread; tempos surge and slacken within a single phrase; the left hand lags behind the right by fractions of a second in ways that no modern conservatory would permit. Skeptics argued for decades that the rolls exaggerated these liberties — that the recording mechanism, or careless editing, had introduced the irregularities. But comparisons with the few surviving acoustic discs of the same pianists show the same habits, more faintly. The rolls were not distorting the performances. They were preserving a style that the later, cleaner recordings would gradually train out of pianists and audiences alike.
The player piano's commercial life ended abruptly. Electrical recording arrived in 1925 and radio in the same decade, and by 1932 roll production had all but ceased. The instruments were pushed into basements and dance halls, where they acquired the honky-tonk reputation they still carry. It is an odd fate for a device that holds, in strips of perforated paper, the most detailed record we have of how the nineteenth century actually played the piano.
According to the passage, what evidence answered the skeptics who claimed the rolls exaggerated the pianists' liberties?
Question 2
Reading
INFORMATIONAL: This passage is adapted from an essay about field research on communally held resources.
The prediction was elegant, and for two decades it was close to consensus. A resource held in common, the argument ran, will inevitably be destroyed by the people who depend on it. Picture a pasture open to all. Each herder who adds one more animal collects the whole benefit of that animal and bears only a fraction of the cost of the crowding it causes, since the crowding is shared. Every herder faces the same arithmetic, so every herder adds animals, and the pasture is ruined. The policy conclusion followed directly: commonly held resources must be handed to private owners or taken over by the state.
Beginning in the 1970s, a scattered group of political scientists and anthropologists set out to test the prediction the way a biologist tests a claim about a species, by going and looking. Over roughly twenty years they assembled several thousand case studies of resources actually held in common — grazing land, forests, inshore fisheries, and above all irrigation systems, which are unusually good subjects because water is scarce, divisible, and easy to steal. Many of the cases had collapsed exactly as predicted. But a substantial minority had not. Irrigation networks in the Philippines, the huertas outside Valencia, high pastures in the Swiss Alps: these had been governed by the people who used them, without private title and without state administration, in some instances for six or seven hundred years.
Comparing the survivors against the failures produced a short list of shared features. In the durable systems, boundaries were unambiguous — everyone knew which parcels carried a right to water and which did not. Rules were fitted to local conditions rather than copied from a national template, so a system in a narrow valley did not have to follow a scheme written for a delta. The people bound by the rules had a hand in making them and could change them. Disputes had a cheap local forum, so a quarrel between two neighbors did not require a lawyer or a trip to a provincial capital. Penalties for taking water out of turn began small and grew with repetition. And, crucially, someone was watching.
That last feature is the one standard theory handles worst. If monitoring is a chore, economics predicts too little of it: watching costs the watcher and benefits everyone, so each user would rather someone else did it. The durable systems solved this in two ways. Some hired the watching out and paid for it themselves — in the Valencia huertas the ditch rider holds a salaried post funded by the irrigators, who elect the officials he answers to. Others arranged the work so that no one had to be assigned it. In several Philippine systems the rotation places each farmer immediately downstream of a neighbor, which means that a farmer taking his own turn is necessarily in a position to see whether the farmer above him took more than his. Monitoring as a byproduct of ordinary use, rather than as an added duty, distinguishes a striking number of the long-lived systems from the fragile ones.
The findings are often compressed into the slogan that communities can manage their own resources, which claims far more than the evidence supports. The successful cases share conditions that are not available everywhere: a population stable enough that users expect to still be there in twenty years, a resource whose boundaries can be observed at a cost someone can afford, and a scale small enough for the local forum to function. An open-ocean fishery meets none of these; neither does the atmosphere. What the research established is narrower and more useful than the slogan. Ownership form by itself predicts very little. The rules under which a resource is used predict a great deal.
The practical lesson turned out to be a procedural one. Through the middle of the twentieth century, development agencies replaced farmer-built canals with engineered systems administered from a capital, on the assumption that anything unwritten was inefficient. Follow-up studies of those projects found maintenance worse and water delivery less reliable than before, because the new arrangements had dissolved the local obligations that kept the old canals dredged. The recommendation that emerged was not to leave every traditional arrangement alone. It was to find out, before replacing one, whether it is among those that work.
Based on the passage, the author would most likely advise an agency considering replacing a farmer-built canal system with an engineered one to first:
Question 3
Reading
INFORMATIONAL: This passage is adapted from an article about how cities decide where to put bus stops.
Every bus stop is a compromise. Riders want stops close to their doors; a bus that stops every block, however, spends most of its time pulling over and pulling out, and the riders already on board pay for the convenience of the ones waiting. Transit planners call this the access–speed tradeoff, and the way a city resolves it says a great deal about whom the system is designed to serve.
For most of the twentieth century, American agencies resolved it in favor of access. Stops were placed roughly every 200 meters, a spacing inherited from streetcar lines laid out when the alternative to riding was walking. The result was routes that looked generous on a map and felt interminable on the bus: a typical urban line in 1990 averaged under 12 kilometers per hour, slower than a bicycle.
Beginning in the 2000s, a wave of "stop consolidation" projects removed as many as a third of the stops on major routes, spacing the survivors at 400 meters or more. The logic was straightforward. Each stop removed saved roughly 20 to 30 seconds per trip; on a route with 60 stops, consolidation could cut a 50-minute journey to 40. Faster buses could run more often with the same number of vehicles, and higher frequency, the planners argued, would attract more riders than proximity ever had.
The evidence mostly bore them out. In Portland, San Francisco, and Toronto, consolidated routes saw travel times fall by 10 to 20 percent and ridership rise, in some cases substantially. But the gains were not evenly shared. Riders with limited mobility — older adults, people with disabilities, parents with strollers — found that a stop 200 meters farther away could be the difference between using the bus and not. Surveys in several cities found that these riders were the least likely to have been consulted and the most likely to report that consolidation had made their trips harder.
Some agencies have responded by treating stop spacing as a variable rather than a rule. Stops near hospitals, senior housing, and steep grades stay closer together; stops along flat commercial strips are spread farther apart. Others have paired consolidation with investments the removed stops never had — shelters, benches, real-time arrival signs — on the theory that a longer walk to a better stop is a fair trade.
Whether it is fair depends, as it always has, on who is asked. The rider on the bus and the rider at the curb want different things from the same route, and the stop sign in the pavement is where the city decides between them.
Based on the passage, the author would most likely agree with which of the following statements about bus stop spacing?
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