The ACT tests you on English, math, and reading as its three core sections, with science and writing available as optional additions. Each section measures specific academic skills you’ve built through high school, and the composite score (the number colleges care about most) is calculated from the English, math, and reading sections. Here’s what each part actually covers and how it’s structured.
English: Grammar, Style, and Rhetoric
The English section gives you 50 questions to answer in 35 minutes (40 of which are scored). You’ll read passages with underlined portions and decide whether to keep the original wording, revise it, or delete it entirely. The questions fall into two broad skill areas.
The first is conventions of standard English: punctuation, sentence structure, subject-verb agreement, pronoun usage, and word choice. These questions test whether you can spot and fix grammatical errors. The second is rhetorical effectiveness, which asks you to improve the organization, style, and tone of a passage. You might be asked whether a sentence should be added or removed, where a paragraph fits best, or which transition word connects two ideas most clearly. About half the questions deal with grammar mechanics and half with these bigger-picture writing decisions.
Math: Algebra Through Early Trig
The math section has 45 questions in 50 minutes (41 scored), covering material you’d typically encounter through the start of 12th grade. You’re allowed to use a calculator on every question. The content breaks into two major categories.
Preparing for Higher Math (57–60% of questions) covers the concepts you pick up once algebra enters the picture. Within this category, you’ll see questions on:
- Algebra (12–15%): Solving, graphing, and modeling equations, including linear, polynomial, radical, and exponential relationships, plus systems of equations
- Functions (12–15%): Understanding function notation, translating between different representations of functions, and identifying key features of graphs for linear, polynomial, logarithmic, and piecewise functions
- Geometry (12–15%): Properties of shapes and solids, congruence and similarity, surface area, and volume
- Number and Quantity (7–10%): Real and complex numbers, integer and rational exponents, vectors, and matrices
- Trigonometry: Trig ratios, solving for missing values in triangles and circles, and equations of conic sections
Integrating Essential Skills (40–43% of questions) draws on foundational math and asks you to combine multiple skills in a single problem. These questions cover rates, percentages, proportional relationships, area and volume, averages, and medians. The twist is that they often require chaining several steps together or applying familiar concepts in unfamiliar contexts. If the “Preparing for Higher Math” questions test whether you learned each topic, the “Integrating Essential Skills” questions test whether you can pull them together under pressure.
Reading: Comprehension and Analysis
The reading section presents 36 questions in 40 minutes (27 scored), based on passages from prose fiction, social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. Beginning in 2021, one passage may include a graph, figure, or table that you need to interpret alongside the text.
The questions test three clusters of skills:
- Key Ideas and Details (52–60%): Identifying main ideas, locating important details, following sequences of events, understanding cause-and-effect relationships, and drawing logical conclusions from the text
- Craft and Structure (25–30%): Figuring out what a word or phrase means in context, analyzing the author’s tone and purpose, and understanding how the passage is organized
- Integration of Knowledge and Ideas (13–23%): Distinguishing facts from opinions, evaluating how well evidence supports an argument, and connecting information across multiple sources or between a passage and an accompanying graphic
You don’t need outside knowledge of the topics. Everything you need is in the passages. The challenge is reading carefully and quickly enough to handle roughly a passage every ten minutes.
Science: Data and Reasoning, Not Memorization
The science section has 40 questions in 40 minutes (34 scored). It’s now optional rather than required, a change ACT rolled out for state and district testing beginning spring 2026. When taken, it covers biology, chemistry, physics, and earth sciences, but the section is less about recalling facts and more about reasoning with data.
You’ll be given charts, graphs, experiment descriptions, and competing scientific viewpoints, then asked to interpret them. ACT describes the breakdown this way:
- Interpretation of Data (40–50%): Reading tables and graphs, spotting trends, translating data between formats, and doing basic math with scientific figures
- Scientific Investigation (20–30%): Understanding how experiments are designed, identifying control and experimental variables, and predicting what would happen if a study were modified
- Evaluation of Models, Inferences, and Experimental Results (25–35%): Judging whether conclusions are supported by the evidence, deciding which hypothesis a new finding strengthens or weakens
Some background knowledge from introductory science courses can help, but most answers come from carefully reading the provided information. Think of it as a reading comprehension test dressed in a lab coat.
Writing: One Argumentative Essay
The writing section is also optional. You get 40 minutes to write a single essay responding to a prompt that presents a complex issue and three different perspectives on it. You’re expected to develop your own position, analyze the relationship between your perspective and the ones given, and support your reasoning with evidence and logic. Scores on this section are reported separately and don’t factor into your composite score.
How the Sections Add Up
Each of the core sections (English, math, and reading) is scored on a scale of 1 to 36. Your composite score is the average of those three section scores, rounded to the nearest whole number. If you take the science section, it receives its own 1–36 score. The writing section, if taken, is scored on a separate scale.
Total testing time for the three core sections is about two hours and five minutes. Adding science brings it to roughly two hours and 45 minutes, and adding writing pushes it past three hours. Breaks are allowed between the core sections and the optional ones.
The ACT is ultimately a speed test as much as a knowledge test. Across every section, you have slightly over a minute per question on average, which means comfort with the material matters just as much as mastery of it. Knowing what each section actually asks you to do is the first step toward practicing efficiently.