Humanities Passages · Overview

Humanities Passages

Humanities passages are essays about the arts and ideas: painting, music, dance, books, buildings, language, and crafts. Most are written in the first person. The writer describes something, often through a memory or a scene, and then tells you what it means, whether it works, or how the writer's view of it has changed.

The questions test whether you can separate description from judgment, find the writer's claim, name the writer's attitude precisely, explain what a paragraph does in the essay, and track a change of mind from then to now. Every answer comes from the passage; you never need to know anything about art or music beforehand.

How often it appears

The passages you'll meet on ACT-style Reading are usually fiction or memoir, social science, humanities, or natural science. Reading is 36 questions in 40 minutes, about 67 seconds per question including reading time. Some sets pair two shorter passages, and one passage may include a graph or table.

Humanities essays are a common passage type, and their questions lean toward craft and structure: tone, function, point of view, and word meaning. The routines in this module (claim, tone, structure, shift) carry over to any essay-style passage.

The question you’ll see

The author's attitude toward x is best described as: / The main function of paragraph 2 is to: / In paragraph 3, the author suggests that she once believed:

In this module

  1. Overview Paid
  2. Reading essays on art, music and ideas Paid
  3. Tone and attitude in a personal essay Paid
  4. How the essay moves from anecdote to idea Paid
  5. Then and now: a writer's changing view Paid
  6. A humanities passage at pace Paid
  7. Strategy summary Paid
  8. Mastery quiz Paid
  9. Pace check Paid