ACT Reading Quiz: Rhetorical Devices

PASSAGE III

HUMANITIES:

Passage A is adapted from the essay The Universal Pantomime (1932).

Passage B is adapted from Voices in the Dark: The Dawn of Sound (1945).

Passage A

The sudden death of the silent film at the hands of the "talkie" is one of the greatest artistic tragedies of the twentieth century. Before the microphone invaded the studio, cinema was a universal language. A film starring Charlie Chaplin or Greta Garbo could be shipped to Tokyo, Paris, or Buenos Aires, and the audience would understand every beat of the emotional narrative. The actors did not rely on the crutch of spoken dialogue; they communicated through the pure, unadulterated art of pantomime. A slight widening of the eyes or the nervous flutter of a hand conveyed volumes more than a paragraph of exposition ever could.

Furthermore, the silence of early cinema demanded an active, imaginative engagement from the audience. When a locomotive crashed or a heroine wept, the viewer's mind supplied the sound. The musical accompaniment—usually a live pianist or an orchestra—provided the emotional color, but the ultimate interpretation belonged to the viewer. With the advent of synchronized sound, cinema ceased to be a visual poetry and became merely photographed theater. By giving characters literal voices, the industry stripped them of their mythological grandeur, reducing them to ordinary, chattering people. We traded a transcendent global art form for the mundane reality of everyday conversation.

Passage B

Nostalgia for the silent era often obscures the severe limitations of early cinema. While it is true that visual storytelling achieved impressive heights in the 1920s, it was fundamentally handicapped. Because actors could not speak, they were forced into a style of exaggerated, melodramatic acting that looks entirely unnatural to the modern eye. Villains had to twirl their mustaches and scowl; heroines had to faint with the back of a hand pressed dramatically against their foreheads. Subtlety was frequently sacrificed at the altar of clarity.

Moreover, the narrative flow of silent films was constantly interrupted by title cards—blocks of text spliced between frames to explain the plot or deliver dialogue. Reading a movie is not watching a movie. The arrival of synchronized sound in 1927 with The Jazz Singer shattered these limitations. Sound allowed for naturalistic acting, where a whispered confession could carry the emotional weight of a scene without a single grand gesture. It allowed screenwriters to craft complex, layered plots that did not have to pause every three minutes for a title card. Sound did not destroy the art of cinema; it matured it. It gave directors a new, vital tool to build immersive, realistic worlds that could resonate with audiences on a much deeper psychological level.

The rhetorical strategies of the two authors differ most significantly in that:

In a humanities lecture, a speaker argues that photographs are inherently more truthful than paintings. The speaker reasons that a camera "records what is there," while painters "interpret and distort." As evidence, the speaker notes that courts often accept photographs as evidence. The speaker concludes that photographs should be treated as the most reliable historical records.

Which of the following best describes a flaw in the speaker's reasoning?

A Social Science brief claims that later school start times improve adolescent mental health. The brief cites a district that moved start times from 7:20 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. and then saw fewer nurse visits for headaches and fewer reported depressive symptoms on an annual survey. The brief concludes that later start times caused the mental health improvements. It does not mention that the district also reduced homework loads and hired additional counselors that year.

Which of the following best describes a flaw in the brief's reasoning?

1 The composer's early symphonies swelled with certainty, brass sections 2 announcing themes as though delivering verdicts, timpani pounding out 3 conclusions no listener could question. Her final work, written 4 after decades of illness, does the opposite: the melodies 5 arrive tentatively, often unresolved, ending on suspended chords that 6 refuse to settle. Where the young composer commanded, the 7 older composer questioned. Where the early scores insisted, the 8 late scores wondered aloud. Critics who prefer resolution call 9 the final symphony unfinished; those who prize honesty call 10 it her truest work, the sound of a mind 11 that had stopped pretending to have all the answers.

The paired structure in "Where the young composer commanded, the older composer questioned" primarily functions to:

1 I did not learn to paint from a teacher 2 who corrected my grip on the brush. I learned 3 from the hours I spent staring at a single 4 wall until its shadows changed. I learned from ruining 5 four canvases before the fifth one held together. I 6 learned from watching my grandmother mix clay-red pigment from 7 dust she gathered near the riverbank, refusing to buy 8 what she believed the earth already offered for free. 9 I learned, most of all, from failing quietly enough 10 that no one thought to tell me to stop.

The repeated phrase "I learned" at the start of several sentences primarily functions to:

1 According to certain commentators, the modern shopping mall did 2 not merely sell goods; it devoured entire generations whole, 3 swallowing weekends, appetites, and attention spans into an endless 4 corridor of storefronts that never closed and never satisfied. 5 Every purchase, they claimed, created a hunger for the 6 next one, until an entire nation had been trained 7 to mistake acquisition for happiness and to measure a 8 life's worth in shopping bags carried to the parking 9 lot. Such critics rarely paused to note that most 10 visitors left the mall after an hour or two, 11 having bought a pair of shoes and a sandwich, 12 unchanged in any deeper sense.

The description of the mall as devouring "entire generations whole" primarily functions to:

1 Geologists sometimes describe a river basin as a body's 2 circulatory system turned inside out and laid across the 3 land. The main channel functions like an artery, carrying 4 the bulk of the water toward its destination, while 5 hundreds of smaller tributaries act as capillaries, gathering runoff 6 from fields and forests too small to register on 7 most maps. When a dam interrupts the main channel, 8 the effect resembles a blocked artery: sediment that once 9 traveled downstream to replenish marshes and beaches instead piles 10 up behind the barrier, and the delta below, deprived 11 of its usual supply, slowly starves.

The extended comparison between a river system and a circulatory system primarily helps the reader understand:

1 A coral reef, seen from above, might resemble a 2 sprawling city built without a single central planner. Fish 3 dart through avenues of branching coral the way commuters 4 weave between buildings, cleaner shrimp operate at fixed stations 5 like tollbooths, collecting parasites from larger fish who queue 6 patiently for service, and clownfish retreat into anemones the 7 way residents retreat into apartment buildings at dusk. No 8 architect drew the blueprint; the reef assembled itself over 9 centuries as millions of individual polyps secreted calcium carbonate, 10 each contributing an almost invisible fraction to a structure 11 that now shelters a quarter of all known marine 12 species.

The comparison of the reef to "a sprawling city" primarily serves to:

1 It is tempting to imagine that bats "see" with 2 sound in exactly the way humans see with light, 3 translating echoes into a picture as vivid and continuous 4 as any photograph. Researchers do grant that echolocation produces 5 something functionally similar to vision, allowing bats to detect 6 obstacles the size of a human hair in complete 7 darkness. Still, the comparison breaks down under scrutiny: unlike 8 continuous visual images, echo information arrives in discrete pulses, 9 each call producing a fresh, isolated snapshot rather than 10 a flowing stream, and bats must stitch these snapshots 11 together mentally to approximate the smooth perception that human 12 vision provides automatically, moment to moment.

The author's acknowledgment that echolocation is "functionally similar to vision" primarily serves to:

1 He had spent fourteen months where the ground itself 2 seemed to flinch, where every truck engine could be 3 mistaken for something worse, and now he stood in 4 his mother's kitchen while she hummed over a pot 5 of soup and asked whether he wanted one spoon 6 of sugar in his coffee or two. The radio 7 murmured a weather report. A neighbor's dog barked twice 8 and went quiet. He gripped the edge of the 9 counter, waiting, without meaning to, for a sound that 10 never came, in a room where the worst thing 11 that could happen was that the soup might boil 12 over.

The author's juxtaposition of the soldier's memories with the details of his mother's kitchen primarily serves to:

1 When the ferry finally listed onto its side and 2 the deck tilted enough to send crates sliding into 3 the churning water, my uncle later described the experience, 4 over tea, as "a bit of an inconvenience." He 5 had swum for eleven hours, he mentioned almost as 6 an afterthought, holding onto a cooler lid because his 7 life vest had torn loose in the initial scramble. 8 Three of the passengers he had been traveling with 9 did not make it to shore. He mentioned this, 10 too, in the same even tone he used to 11 describe a delayed train, and then asked, without irony, 12 whether anyone wanted more sugar in their tea.

The narrator's account of the uncle's description primarily illustrates his use of understatement in order to:

1 My mother repeated the same three tasks each morning 2 before the mail arrived: she swept the porch twice, 3 she straightened the mat, and she wiped the mailbox's 4 small brass door until it caught the light. She 5 never spoke of what she expected, though the postman 6 later told me she asked, every single day for 7 six years, whether a letter addressed to a Mrs. 8 Eleanor Voss had come. Sweep, straighten, wipe. Sweep, straighten, 9 wipe. The words fell into the same rhythm as 10 her hands, a small liturgy performed for an audience 11 of no one, as if repetition itself might summon 12 the envelope she was certain, against all reason, would 13 eventually arrive.

The repetition of "Sweep, straighten, wipe" in lines 8-9 primarily serves to:

1 Critics of higher minimum wages insist that raising labor 2 costs forces employers to cut jobs, and in some 3 narrow cases, particularly among small firms with thin profit 4 margins, that prediction bears out. Yet the broader evidence 5 assembled over the past two decades tells a different 6 story: across most regions studied, modest wage increases have 7 coincided with stable or even rising employment, as workers 8 spend their added income locally and firms adjust through 9 slightly higher prices rather than layoffs. To dismiss the 10 minimum wage as a simple job-killer, then, is to 11 mistake an occasional exception for the general rule that 12 the data, taken as a whole, stubbornly refuse to 13 support.

The author's acknowledgment that job losses occur "in some narrow cases" primarily functions to:

1 Ask any commuter trapped in a forty-minute delay on 2 a six-lane highway whether adding a seventh lane will 3 finally solve the congestion, and most will say yes, 4 more space must mean more room to move. But 5 traffic engineers have watched this promise fail for half 6 a century: new lanes fill within a few years, 7 drivers who once avoided the route return, and delays 8 creep back to where they started. If widening roads 9 truly cured congestion, why do the same cities keep 10 widening the same roads every decade without ever arriving 11 at the relief they were promised? The pattern suggests 12 something structural, not a shortage of pavement.

The rhetorical question in lines 9-11 primarily functions to:

1 The gallery's placard praised the canvas—a single gray rectangle 2 six feet wide—for its "raw, unmediated emotional honesty," as 3 though the artist had bled directly onto the canvas 4 rather than mixed paint from a hardware-store can. Visitors 5 stood before it in reverent silence, murmuring about the 6 painting's courage, its refusal to flinch from truth. One 7 elderly patron, dabbing her eyes, called it the most 8 moving work she had seen all year. Meanwhile, in 9 the corner, the artist himself waited for the crowd 10 to disperse so he could quietly retouch a smudge 11 he had left, by accident, three days earlier while 12 moving the canvas into place.

The final detail about the artist retouching an accidental smudge primarily creates irony by:

A natural science report claims that a new fertilizer increases tomato yield. In a field trial, plots using the fertilizer produced 12% more tomatoes by weight than control plots. However, the fertilized plots also received 20% more irrigation because their soil dried faster. The report concludes the fertilizer caused the yield increase.

Which statement, if true, would most strengthen the report's conclusion?

A humanities article claims that public murals reduce neighborhood crime. The author notes that in one district, three large murals were painted in 2022, and police reports show burglaries fell from 40 to 28 in 2023. The author adds that murals "signal community pride," which supposedly discourages illegal activity. The article concludes that funding murals is an effective crime-prevention strategy for any city.

The author's conclusion relies on which of the following assumptions?

A natural science editorial claims that switching from meat to plant-based diets will substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. The author cites estimates that livestock contribute a significant share of methane emissions and argues that if most people ate plant-based diets, demand for livestock would fall and methane emissions would decrease. The author concludes that promoting plant-based diets is one of the most effective climate strategies.

Which statement, if true, would most strengthen the author's argument?

A social science researcher argues that public transportation expansions reduce air pollution. The researcher notes that after a city opened a new subway line, average weekday ridership increased by 60,000 trips, and particulate pollution measured at two downtown monitors fell by 8%. The researcher concludes that the subway line caused the pollution reduction.

Which statement, if true, would most strengthen the researcher's argument?

A humanities critic argues that streaming services have improved music quality. The critic notes that listeners can now access "nearly all music ever recorded," and reasons that because more music is available, artists must work harder, so the average quality of music must be higher today than in the past.

Which of the following best describes a flaw in the critic's reasoning?