Omniac Attack!

We're coming back to the Four Advantages for the English Section as part of our ACT Test Prep tips.  We've already gone over the first two:  Mistakes are Underlined and The Answers are Provided, and our third should be even more helpful.

 
It's a pretty safe bet that if you're taking the ACT, then you can speak and read English.  And that by having lots of experience speaking and reading English, you have an instinctual ability to pick out things that sound or look good from things that sound or look bad.  We call that the Golden Ear.  It may seem obvious that if you read something and it just looks off, that you would eliminate it as a possible answer.  But students often fail to use their Golden Ear for two main reasons.  

First, the Golden Ear is so good, that people will often read typos and mistakes and autocorrect it in their head without really realizing that they've done that.  This is especially dangerous when students do this, believe the sentence is correct as it is and answer 'No Change' without looking at the other answers.  So it's extremely important not only to pay extra attention when reading these sentences, but to always go through every answer choice.  

The second is that many students will psych themselves out by worrying if the test will make things 'that easy' or not.  To hopefully put an end to these misgivings, questions on the English section really can be 'that easy'.  This may not be true for students who take the SAT, but the ACT has never gone to such extreme lengths to trick students.  Most students don't miss English questions because they're tough or tricky.  They miss them because they only have about 30 seconds to answer each question that makes students hurry and make mental mistakes.

If we look at an example from an English section, we can see just how easy using the Golden Ear can be:

Just by reading that sentence, we know that the underlined portion just doesn't sound right.  And by knowing that, we can tell that A. is incorrect.  Now, all we need to do is replace the underlined portion with the other answer choices to find that D. also doesn't sound right, but that B. and C. both sound pretty good.  

An important thing to remember about using the Golden Ear is that, even though it's very helpful in eliminating obviously wrong answers, it will often leave you with more than one answer choice that both sound as though they will work.  So, you will often have to use something else to get you all the way to the correct answer.  Fortunately, our Fourth Advantage is great at doing this, and we'll be talking about that next time!

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