Avoid This Typical ACT Science Mistake

Hi everyone. Alexis Avila, Prepped & Polished LLC here at South Natick, Massachusetts.ACT Science section is one of the trickier sections on the ACT test. Half the battle to doing well on the ACT Science is pacing yourself wisely. You’ve got 35 minutes to do roughly 40 questions. You basically want to spend about five minutes per passage. There are seven passages. You have to read the questions really carefully. A lot of students make mistakes on the easier science ACT questions.Let’s go to the whiteboard. I’ll want to show you one of these questions students often miss. Here is a pretty typical data representation of an ACT Science question. So which graph best illustrates the relationship between heat released by foods and the change in water temperature? Here are your four graphs.So what you have to do is go to Table 1, make sense of the information and translate this information from the table to a graph. Now, what a lot of students will do is they’ll see the four different types of foods in the table, right? Bread, cheese, egg and potato, all the same mass. And then they’ll see that the change in water temperature goes up and then it goes down so they automatically assume that the graph is going to fluctuate. So they are going to deduce that it’s either F or G.

But this is not a fluctuating graph. This is a linear graph because if you start with the least amount of change of water temperature, it’s the potato at 2.7 degrees Celsius. And then you work your way to the egg, 5.6 Celsius and then to bread and then the cheese. So if you notice the output, the heat released for the smallest change in temperature is 3.2 kilojoules. So it’s like about right here. And then you go over to the egg, 5.6 degrees Celsius is the change in water temperature. It renders 6.7 kilojoules.

Then you go to the next food source, which is the bread at 8.3 degrees Celsius, and
it renders 10 kilojoules heat released. And then finally, the highest degree of water
temperature change is the cheese at 14.1 Celsius rendering 17 kilojoules of heat released.

You have to put the graph back into order from least to greatest change of water temperature and then see what the outcomes are. And clearly, this is a linear relationship between the two. Go with choice G.

So remember, guys. Half the battle to doing well on the ACT Science is pacing yourself well and reading the questions really carefully, rearranging the tables if needed. So I wish you good luck in your ACT test, and I will talk to you soon.