ACT® · Science: The Section, the Clock, and the Optional Decision
The Order to Attack a Science Passage
On a science passage, every question is worth the same, so answer the cheap look-it-up questions first, group questions that share a figure, and save the slow, reasoning-heavy questions for last.
Printed order is not attack order. The questions under a passage usually mix three kinds: look-it-up questions that just want a single value read off a table or graph, compare-two questions that make you check two data points or two figures against each other, and think-hard questions that want a multi-step comparison, an extrapolation, or a why. All of them are worth the same. If you start at item 1 and it happens to be the three-figure think-hard question, you spend your first, coldest minute on the passage's hardest point instead of its easiest one.
The fix is to scan the item stems before answering anything, sort them in your head into those three piles, and clear the look-it-ups first. Each one banks a point fast and also forces you to read the figure it points to, so you arrive at the harder questions already knowing where the axes, units, and trends live. Then take the compare-two questions, since you have already decoded most of the relevant figures. Finish with the think-hard questions, now that you are warm on the data.
This ordering logic is why Conflicting Viewpoints needs special handling: it has almost no figures to look up and instead demands reading two or three dense paragraphs of competing explanations, so its items cannot be rushed through in whatever time is left. It is also why two questions that both point at the same figure should be answered back to back even if they sit far apart in the printed list: you pay the cost of understanding that figure once, not twice, and spend the savings on the passage's hardest item.
Key terms
- look-it-up question
- A question answered by reading a single value directly off one table, graph, or figure.
- compare-two question
- A question that requires checking two data points, trials, or figures against each other.
- think-hard question
- A multi-step question requiring synthesis, extrapolation, or reasoning across several figures.
- Conflicting Viewpoints
- The passage type built from two or three competing explanations in prose rather than data figures.
- attack order
- The sequence in which a student chooses to answer a passage's questions, as opposed to their printed order.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow do you sort the questions on a science passage into look-it-up, compare-two and think-hard piles?
- Common mistakeWhy isn't it smart to leave a Conflicting Viewpoints passage for the last three minutes of the section?
- Going furtherWhat changes about your attack order when two Science questions both point at the very same figure?
Check yourself
End of topic.