In this Magoosh ACT Science Lesson, we're going to talk about how to read the ACT Science Test. Specifically, we're gonna talk about the order you should read the provided information in so that you can find the right balance you need to succeed in the Science test, your happy place or your sweet spot that will maximize your understanding of the passage.

Your accuracy and the number of questions you can get to within the time limit. First of all, it is important to know there is a lot of information on the passages on the ACT Science Test that you wont ever need to answer the questions so you shouldn't waste time reading everything. The trick to success on the ACT Science is to read only what is necessary. And, to make sure that you're reading only what is necessary there is a specific reading order that I suggest you follow to best manage your time and energy.

The next screens are gonna give you these steps in order and we'll walk through an example together. But, before I go any further I should say that this tip applies to six out of the seven passages that you'll see on any given ACT Science Test, but not all of them. The conflicting viewpoint passage is a must read passage, and I will get to that a little bit later.

All right, so Step one, is to orient yourself. At the very most, give the passage just a quick glance to get a general sense of the scientific situation. Is it about, researchers investigating a new vaccine? Is it, a chemistry experiment about the boiling point of an organic compound?

Is it about the composition of ice on the moon of Saturn? You should be able to glean this information by both glancing over any figures or charts or graphs and by skimming the intro paragraphs. I suggest that you pay particular attention to the beginning and end of any textural information, because this is often where you find a lot of key information on the Science Test.

So, let's go ahead and illustrate this by taking a quick look at the sample passage available for free on the official ACT student website. Often you'll find that the scientific situation is provided at the very beginning of the passage, so, here it is. A student performed two studies to investigate the factors that affect the germination of peony seeds.

All right, so that's what this experiment is about. Was actually being tested is often concentrated at the end of the information, so, right about here. Each set of seeds was placed in a separate Petri dish, each Petri dish was maintained at one of four temperatures for 30 days. The temperature and time periods were defined as the germination temperature, and the germination period respectively.

Table one shows the number of seeds have germinated in each dish. Okay, so we can guess that we're going to be looking at, what's the best temperature to germinate these seeds? That would seem to make se, sense as a scientific experiment based on the information that I'm seeing here. But, don't worry if you don't understand everything I can't emphasize that enough.

I know that that is something that is very difficult for a lot of students to do, but don't panic at the unfamiliarity of the scientific situations you're encountering. The ACT Science test overwhelms students with some very high level and complicated scenarios, but the more you practice, the more you will realize that you don't need to fully understand what is going on to do well on this test. That some students entirely skip the passage and go straight to the questions and then figure out the necessary information they need as they go.

You can check to see if you're comfortable with this strategy when you practice, but in general, for most people, I suggest giving the passage at least a quick glance to get the gist of what's going on. But spend no more than 15 to 30 seconds doing this, you don't get any credit for reading time on the ACT Science test. After you've skimmed the passage for general overview, the next step is to read the question noting the key scientific terms.

So, what do I mean by key terms? These are the terms that you're going to be looking up. On the charts, graphs, figures, or in the passage. So here is an example question from the passage we just glanced at. In Study two, at the storage temperature of five degrees Celsius, as germination temperature increased from 13 degrees Celsius to 28 degrees Celsius, the number of seeds that germinated dot, dot, dot.

Okay. So what are the key terms that we are going to be looking up in the passage? You always want to note where you are going to be looking. So in this case, we are going to be looking at Study two. So we know there's going to be multiple studies. In this passage, and for this question, we want to be only be looking at Study two.

Any numbers are generally also key terms since these are going to point you to specific data on charts and graphs. So I'm going to mark five degrees Celsius, and 13 degrees Celsius, and 28 degrees Celsius, as key terms. Now we can also notice here that we have two different types of temperature. We have storage temperature and germination temperature.

So you can bet that, somewhere in the passage we'll be able to find the distinction between storage temperature and germination temperature because otherwise, how would we ever answer this question? And finally, we need to know what we're looking for. What is the question specifically asking us to find? And here, we can see that it is the number of seeds that germinated, so I am going to underline that.

Number that germinated. Reading the question and noting key terms is crucial to helping your brain sort through all of the stuff that the test throws at you and pull out the key information that you really need to be honing in on. Step three is to read the answer choices, which also provides you with some key terms that will point you to the right place in the passage.

So here are our answer choices for the sample question I just gave you. You can see that our options have to do with whether the number of seeds decreased, or increased, or decreased, then increased, and visa versa. So from this information and the answer choices, we know that we're going to be looking for a trend. And the respective chart, or graph, in Study two.

What is happening to the number of seeds? Are they increasing? Are they decreasing? Are they doing a little of both? So step four is to go straight to the figures, charts, or graphs and look for your key terms on the labels of the diagrams.

So, here are key terms for the questions that we're looking at. I've put them in this box for your reference. Study two, so we're going to look there. The storage temperature, the germination temperature, and finally, what we're looking for. What happened to the number of seeds.

So the question. Asked us to look at a storage temperature of five degrees Celsius. So I'm gonna find storage temperature and five degrees Celsius right here. And, then look for our next key term, germination temperature. So I see that here, and we're looking for 13 to 28, so you can see we're going to be looking at the whole range of data across this chart here.

So at five degrees Celsius. What happened to the number of seeds? I can see that these numbers in the chart and graph, sorry, in the chart here, are, telling us the number of seeds that germinated. So, what's happening to these numbers at five degrees Celsius as we go across the chart.

And you can see that between 13 and 18 degrees Celsius, it increased a little bit from 16 to 23. But then it decreased across the rest of it, so our answer is going to be d, the number of seeds increased and then decreased. And then we're done. So that question was pretty straightforward.

On a more difficult question you may find that all of your key terms aren't covered by the labels of the given diagram or diagrams. If this is the case, then the next step is to read the key of the diagram. Here's an example from another passage on the free ACT Science practice section on the official ACT website. Let's say that this question is asking us what happens to the thermal conductivity of granite as temperature increases.

The key terms we're to be looking for then would be thermal conductivity, temperature and granite, but oops, we don't see granite directly on our diagram here, so we need to look at the key. And there it is. And now we know which line to look at on our graph. It's going to be this one, with the dash and the dots.

For most questions that's going to be enough. But sometimes you'll find that even after you look at everything about the given charts, the graphs, or the diagrams, you'll still find that you need information that just isn't there. You have more key terms.

So, in that case, you need to go to step six, skimming the passage to find what you need, your key terms. And then reading the selected section. For this reason, these questions often take a bit longer. But, remember to read only as much as you need to get your answer, not everything. That will help you save some valuable time.

Finally, your last step is to double-check your question. It's really easy to make simple mistakes on the ACT Science Test. Maybe you accidentally looked at the wrong chart, or the wrong study. Maybe you thought the question was asking, what happens to a solution when the temperature increases, but it's actually asking what's happening as the temperature decreases.

Reread the question and make sure that you read it correctly and didn't miss anything. Now this is not, I repeat, not the same thing as redoing the question. If you still have time to spare at the end of the test, then you can come back and rework questions that you were uncertain about, but this rarely happens because the test is so demanding on your time, so it's better to just do a quick check, of the question when you're there, just to make sure you've read it correctly, and then move on.

Now, finally I should mention that this reading strategy applies to almost all of the passages you will encounter on the ACT Science Test, but there's one exception that I mentioned at the beginning of this video, and that is the Conflicting Viewpoints passage. The Conflicting Viewpoints passage can appear in any order.

But you generally recognize it because it has a lot of text and it is set up to ask you to compare and contrast the opinions of two or more different students, scientists, or theories. Because the questions that follow the Conflicting Viewpoints passage are going to depend on your understanding, the text. You do actually have to read this passage in it's entirety, although it is certainly possible to read it in parts.

And because it is such a special passage, we'll be covering the specific reading strategies to use on this conflicting viewpoints passage in a separate video. Okay, so to recap, here are your reading steps in order. Step one, Orient yourself briefly to what's the situation in the passage but don't read everything.

Step two, Go straight to the question, read it, underline your key terms. Step three, Read your answer choices, looking for the key terms there, these are gonna be significant key terms as well that are going to tell you what you're supposed to be looking for, on your charts or graphs or figures. Step four, Look for these key terms in the labels of your figures, this means, the horizontal axis of a line graph, or the vertical axis of a line graph, or the labels on a chart or a figure.

Finally, Step five, if, not finally, we're not quite there yet, but if you need to, Step five, Look for key terms in the keys of figures if necessary. Step tick, six, Skim the passage to find key terms, and read only what is required, this is also if necessary. Like I mentioned, most questions on the test you're going to be able to go down to step four or maybe step five, and be done with it.

And finally Step seven, this applies to all of the questions, Double-check the question, make sure you didn't miss anything.