📝 Category 1: English Essentials
The punctuation mark used to end a declarative sentence.
What is a period?
The total number of degrees in a straight line.
What is 180?
A passage written to tell a story or describe fictional events falls into this literary genre.
What is prose fiction?
On a standard graph, this axis runs horizontally from left to right.
What is the X-axis?
The total number of penalty points you lose for a wrong answer on the ACT.
What is zero?
You use this punctuation mark along with a coordinating conjunction (like "and" or "but") to combine two complete sentences.
What is a comma?
In the linear equation y = mx + b, the letter "m" represents this.
What is the slope?
If a question asks for the "main idea," you should look for an answer that summarizes the entire passage, not just a single one of these.
What is a paragraph (or detail)?
A visual tool in a science passage that organizes raw data into rows and columns.
What is a table?
If you have one minute left and five blank questions, this is the statistically smartest thing to do.
What is fill in every bubble (or guess the same letter)?
The word "it's" with an apostrophe always means this.
What is "it is" (or "it has")?
The acronym FOIL is used to multiply two binomials; the "F" stands for this.
What is First?
The term for the author's underlying attitude or feeling toward the subject they are writing about.
What is tone?
When a graph shows a line consistently going up from left to right, it represents this type of relationship or correlation.
What is positive (or direct)?
If you are completely stuck on a math question but there are variables like "x" in the answer choices, you can use this strategy to solve it.
What is plug in your own numbers?
If two complete, independent sentences are joined by only a comma, it creates this common grammatical error.
What is a comma splice?
If a math problem asks for the "perimeter" of a shape, you must do this to all the outside edges.
What is add them together?
Words like "however," "therefore," and "although" signal a shift in the text and are known as this type of word.
What are transition words?
The variable that is measured or observed as the result of an experiment.
What is the dependent variable?
On the English section, if all four answer choices are grammatically correct and mean the same thing, this type of answer is usually the right one.
What is the shortest (or most concise)?
A semicolon functions exactly the same as this punctuation mark when connecting two independent clauses.
What is a period?
The specific formula used to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle when you know the other two sides.
What is a squared plus b squared equals c squared (the Pythagorean theorem)?
If a question asks what a word means "in context," this is the best strategy to use before looking at the answer choices.
What is plug in your own word?
The specific type of ACT Science passage that has no graphs or tables, but instead requires you to compare the opinions of different students or scientists.
What is Conflicting Viewpoints?
The exact phrase used to describe the strategy of picking one consistent column to bubble down your scantron when you are out of time.
What is the Letter of the Day?