Free ACT Word and Phrase Meanings practice questionsEnhanced ACT, 2026 format
What a word or phrase means as it is used in the passage, where the everyday meaning of the word is usually the wrong answer.
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 article about how the history of earthquakes is read out of lake sediment.
Seismometers have been recording ground motion for roughly 120 years. That is an impressive archive by the standards of most instruments and a useless one for the question geologists most want to answer, because a fault capable of a damaging rupture may go three or four centuries between them. An instrumental record shorter than a single recurrence interval cannot say whether a fault is overdue, or even whether it is active. Extending the record means finding something that wrote itself down.
Deep lakes turn out to have done so. Fine sediment settles on a lake floor in thin, regular layers, and in a lake that stratifies each year the layers are annual and countable, like tree rings. Strong shaking interrupts that quiet accumulation. It destabilizes the sediment piled on the lake's steep flanks and sends it down as a dense slurry, which spreads across the flat basin floor and settles out with the coarsest grains at the bottom and the finest at the top. The result is a graded bed, a few centimeters thick, wedged between ordinary layers that look nothing like it. A core pulled from the basin floor reads as a stack of quiet centuries punctuated by these intrusions.
Dating them is the first difficulty. Where annual layers are preserved, a bed's age can be had by counting down to it, which is precise but only as good as the layers are continuous. Elsewhere, plant fragments in the sediment can be radiocarbon dated. Both methods accumulate error with depth, so a bed three thousand years down may be placed only to within about a century — adequate for estimating how often the fault ruptures, and not nearly adequate for matching a bed to an event in a written chronicle.
The second difficulty is that not every graded bed is an earthquake. A flood, a severe storm, or a fast spring melt can also dump sediment down a slope, and the bed it leaves looks much the same in a single core. Two tests separate the causes, and both depend on collecting more than one core. Shaking arrives everywhere in the basin at once, so an earthquake bed appears at the same level in cores taken from separate sub-basins, including sub-basins that no stream enters. A flood bed, by contrast, is thickest near the mouth of the stream that delivered it and thins with distance, and it may be absent altogether from a sub-basin on the far side of a sill.
A third limitation has resisted every attempt to solve it. A graded bed records that shaking crossed the threshold needed to destabilize the slope. It does not record by how much. Researchers hoped bed thickness might serve as a proxy for magnitude, but thickness turns out to depend mainly on how much loose sediment had gathered on the flanks since the last event, so a moderate shock after a long quiet interval can leave a thicker bed than a severe one that follows soon after. The archive counts earthquakes well and sizes them badly.
What the method has delivered is nonetheless hard to get any other way. Along one well-studied fault, cores from four lakes contain beds that recur at intervals of two to four centuries over the past six thousand years, and the most recent bed is 480 years old — a longer gap than any other in the record. That is a real and useful statement, and it is also weaker than it sounds. A recurrence range describes what a fault has done. It is not a schedule.
As it is used in the first paragraph, the word archive most nearly means:
Question 2
Reading
INFORMATIONAL: Passage A and Passage B are adapted from essays on how ruined historic buildings should be treated.
Passage A
A building is not a design; it is a deposit. Every repair, every change of use, every fire and cheap patch after the fire has left a mark in the fabric, and those marks are the only evidence we have of how the building was actually lived in. Drawings record what an architect meant. Only the stone records what happened next.
This is why restoration is a form of destruction that presents itself as care. To return a roofless hall to the state of 1610 is to decide that the following four centuries were noise, and then to remove them. The decision is rarely stated so plainly, because it is usually taken piecemeal: a wall is rebuilt because it is unsafe, a floor is replaced because visitors need somewhere to stand, and each step is defensible while the sum of them leaves a new building wearing an old name.
The alternative is unglamorous and available. Stabilize what stands. Shelter it from water, which does nearly all the damage. Consolidate a wall head so it stops shedding stones, and stop there. A visitor to such a place sees a ruin, and a ruin is a legible thing: the line where a vanished floor met the wall, the blocked door, the soot above a hearth that has not been swept for two hundred years. None of that survives a good restoration.
I am not arguing that ruins should be left to fall. I am arguing that the point of intervening is to slow loss, not to supply an appearance.
Passage B
The case against reconstruction rests on a view of buildings as documents, and it is a view held almost entirely by people who read documents for a living. To everyone else, a roofless hall with a mown lawn inside it is not legible; it is a puzzle with the answer withheld. Ask visitors leaving such a site what the room was for and they will not know, because the thing that would have told them — the height of the ceiling, the direction of the light, the sound of a voice in the space — is exactly what has been allowed to disappear.
Reconstruction has a bad reputation earned by bad practice. Nineteenth-century restorers invented freely, and their inventions are now indistinguishable from the fabric they replaced. But that is an argument about method, not about aim. Where measured drawings, photographs, salvaged fittings, and archaeological survey establish what a room was, rebuilding it from that evidence is not invention, and the resulting space teaches something a wall stub cannot.
There is also the plain matter of use. A building that houses a library, a court, or a school is inspected, heated, repaired, and paid for. A consolidated ruin is a maintenance liability with no constituency but specialists, and the record shows what happens to such places when a budget tightens. Use is not a threat to a historic building. It is the only thing that has ever kept one standing.
The honest requirement is not that we refrain from rebuilding. It is that we publish what we knew, what we inferred, and what we guessed, and that the rebuilt work be identifiable as ours to anyone who looks for it.
As it is used in Passage A, the word fabric most nearly means:
Question 3
Reading
INFORMATIONAL: This passage is adapted from an essay about how cities count the people who use their streets.
Every American city of any size knows how many cars crossed a given intersection last Tuesday, and almost none can say how many people walked across it. The asymmetry is not an oversight. It is the residue of a measuring technology and of what that technology made cheap.
The pneumatic road tube, a rubber hose stretched across a lane that registers a pulse each time an axle passes, was adopted widely in the 1930s. It is cheap, it needs no operator, and it counts one thing very well. Traffic engineering built its methods around what the tube could deliver, and the resulting units — vehicles per hour, level of service, delay per vehicle — became the vocabulary in which a street's performance is described and, eventually, the vocabulary in which its problems are defined.
A pedestrian does not depress a road tube. For most of the twentieth century, counting people on foot required a person with a clipboard, which meant a short window, a single location, and a cost per data point roughly two thousand times that of a vehicle count. Cities therefore did it rarely, at intersections already suspected of being interesting, and for durations too brief to establish a seasonal pattern.
The consequence was not that anyone concluded pedestrians did not exist. It was subtler. A street redesign is justified by a projected improvement in a measured quantity, and the measured quantities were all vehicular. A proposal that would move a thousand people per hour more efficiently on foot and slow four hundred cars by eleven seconds each had, in the arithmetic available, a negative benefit. Engineers were not ignoring walkers. They were doing correct arithmetic with the only numbers anyone had collected.
Automated pedestrian counters — infrared beams, thermal sensors, and more recently computer vision — have brought the cost of a foot count within a factor of three of a vehicle count. Cities that have installed them describe the same experience in almost the same words: the counts came in higher than expected, and the surprise was concentrated at the locations where nobody had thought to send a person with a clipboard.
It would be satisfying to end there, with better instruments correcting an old bias. The more uncomfortable finding is what happened next in the cities that got the data. In several of them the new counts changed nothing, because the decision rules had been written in vehicular units and rewriting them required an authority that no traffic department holds. A number is only as consequential as the rule that has to consider it. The tube shaped the vocabulary, the vocabulary shaped the rules, and the rules outlived the instrument by fifty years.
As it is used in the first paragraph, the word residue most nearly means:
Want Word and Phrase Meanings at your level, every day?
The app has hundreds more ACT questions, serves them at the difficulty you are ready for, and brings back the ones you miss until they stick. Start with a free diagnostic and a projected score range.