JentooACT®

ACT® · Reading — Key Ideas and Details: Relationships

Cause and Effect Inside One Sentence

A single sentence can bury a full cause-and-effect claim inside one clause, and words like because, since, so and therefore tell you which event is the cause and which is the effect. Reading past that word without noticing its direction is how wrong answers get chosen.

Watch it drawn3 questionsPractice

A sentence can carry two events and one hidden argument: that the first made the second happen. The passage doesn't always announce this with a drumroll. Often it's one clause folded into another, and the only signal is a small connecting word. Miss that word and you still read the sentence correctly as English, but you miss the claim the question is actually testing.

Because and since point backward: the clause they introduce is the cause, and the rest of the sentence is the effect. So and therefore point forward: the clause before them is the cause, and what follows is the effect. The arrow always runs from cause to effect, but the word's position in the sentence tells you which half is which. Find the connector first, then ask which side it's attached to.

This sits next to two other wires running under the same passage: sequence, where one thing merely comes before another, and comparison, where two things are set side by side without either causing the other. The trap is treating sequence as if it were causation. A reservoir fills, then fish vanish downstream a few seasons later, is a sequence. Nothing in that sentence claims the dam caused the vanishing, even though a careless reader supplies that cause for free. Questions in this cluster often ask you to tell these three wires apart in one sentence, not just find an event.

Key terms

Cause
The event or condition that a sentence claims makes something else happen.
Effect
The event a sentence claims results from the cause.
Causal connector
A word like because, since, so or therefore that marks a cause-and-effect link and shows its direction.
Sequence
Two events presented in time order, with no claim that one caused the other.

Watch it explained

  1. How it worksHow do because, since, so and therefore each point the causal arrow in a fixed direction?
  2. Worked exampleShow me the arrow in: the ice sheet thinned, so the bedrock beneath it slowly rebounded.
  3. Common mistakeWhy doesn't one event following another in a sentence mean the first caused the second?

Check yourself

Your turneasy1 of 3
Informational passage: Ice is heavy. A sheet 3 kilometres thick presses the crust beneath it down into the mantle, and the rock answers on a timescale of millennia rather than seasons. Loading and rebound are both slow, and both outlast the ice that caused them. Since the last sheet over Scandinavia began to thin, the bedrock under the Gulf of Bothnia has been rising at about 9 millimetres a year, and harbours built in 1824 now stand well back from the water. Fishermen there measure the change by the walk from the quay to the tide line, which lengthens within a working life. In the sentence about the Gulf of Bothnia, which relationship does the passage assert?

End of topic.

Next: Cause and Effect Inside a Paragraph →