ACT WorkKeys Sample Questions - Question List

66. Tomato Fights as Tradition in One Spanish Town
Have you ever heard of people throwing rotten tomatoes at actors who perform poorly on stage? Well, in Spain they take the tomato throwing one step further. Each year in the village of Buñol, located in the eastern region near the Mediterranean, there is a tomato throwing festival known as the Tomatina. It is a food fight in which over 400,000 pounds (200,000 kilograms) of tomatoes are smashed and juiced over the bodies of more than 40,000 people each year.
This festival began in 1945 and there are several different (1) theories about where it got its start. According to one theory, once a group of teenagers were attending a religious procession in the main (2) plaza or town square. It is said that one person aggressively pushed another, and everyone started fighting. There just happened to be a vegetable stand in the street and the teens began throwing the tomatoes at each other until the police came and broke the fights up. The same teens decided to repeat the fighting match the next year, for fun, with tomatoes that they took from home. Since then people meet up the same day, on the last Wednesday of August, at the same plaza, to participate in this unique tomato fight.
During the Tomatina the (3) participants, dressed in old clothing, throw tomatoes at each other from balconies, trucks, throughout the streets…there is no way to escape it. The streets and the participants all end up covered in tomato sauce. The tomatoes have to be (4) ripe. One of the rules of this battle is that before throwing the tomatoes you must crush them in your hands to prevent hurting someone. The fight only lasts an hour. Trucks full of tomatoes arrive at the plaza and everyone gets prepared. A (5) rocket signals the beginning and the end of the fun battle. When the second rocket is heard, the fight stops, but the party continues.
Apart from having a great time at this celebration, all that tomato juice is apparently good for your skin. It’s an excellent treatment that helps with cleansing and toning.



In paragraph 1, why does the author ask the reader if he or she has ever heard of people throwing rotten tomatoes at people who perform poorly on stage?

67. The Marianas Trench
We often learn that top of Mount Everest is the tallest point above sea level (5.49 miles). But what about the lowest point below sea leave? The Mariana Trench-found in the waters of the Mariana (1) Archipelago, or Islands, in Micronesia-holds the record for deepest part of the oceans around the world. The trench, or ditch, can be compared to an underwater valley. Its depth has been recorded to reach over 6.8 miles (over 10.9 kilometers) below the sea surface. If you were (2) to stick Mount Everest in the trench, the top of this tallest mountain in the world wouldn’t touch the surface of the water. In fact, there would be a one-mile gap between the tip of the mountain and the surface’s waves.
Also known as Marianas Trench, The Mariana Trench gets its name from the Mariana Islands due to the (3) proximity of the trench to the Islands. The islands were named after Queen Mariana of Spain by the King’s explorer Fernando Magellan, who claimed the archipelago as a Spanish (4) colony. The trench was discovered in the late-19^th century by a British team of scientists and oceanographers who sought to map the ocean floor by dragging lines, also known as sounding. Later, echo sounding was used to acquire a more accurate reading of the oceans’ depths.
The Mariana Trench is found at the (5) boundary of two tectonic plates, the Pacific Plate and the Mariana Plate. For millions of years, the Pacific Plate has been pushed below, or subducted beneath, the Mariana Plate, causing pressures leading to the formation of the Mariana Islands. Because of the formation of these plates, governments have proposed dumping nuclear waste deep into the trench, in hopes that because of the subduction of the Pacific Plate, the waste will be pushed down under this plate and therefore covered up. However, international law prohibits the dumping of nuclear waste in the ocean.



Based on the information in the passage, how would you best describe the term “colony”, in bold after the (4) in the second paragraph?

68. 1% is equal to 100 basis point. 44.5 percent is how many basis points greater than 34.5 percent?

69. Which of the following sentences provides a reader with a logical transition?

70. The Northern Cities Vowel Shift and Speakers That Adopt It

“The Northern Cities Vowel Shift” is not adopted by all speakers that live in the geographic regions where it is in progress. Studies (1) illustrate that it is mostly European Americans who show evidence of taking on the shift; however, there is little to no research indicating that speakers of African American Vernacular English employ the shift in their speech. Canadians that share proximity to the Great Lakes with speakers that live in the United States also show no evidence of adopting the shift.
This shift, also called “The Northern Cities Shift” (NCS), is a (2) linguistic phenomenon that occurs in the northern geographic area of the United States known as the Inland North, which includes such cities as Rochester, Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago. Although prominent among some urban inhabitants of the region, NCS is not considered the standard. (3) Linguists describe one change that occurs in speakers of NCS in which the vowel in milk (4) “shifts” down and back (the tongue is lowered and travels back) from a short “i” to a short “e” that could be represented as melk.
William Labov, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the largest contributors to research on the subject of the NCS. His theory is that the shift possibly started when speakers from different (5) language varieties were brought together in the early 1800’s when the Erie Canal was being constructed. People from the East Coast moved to the Great Lakes region, and their dialects mixed resulting in an ongoing shift. However, not all speakers of the Great Lakes region participate in this linguistic variation.



According to the passage, a possible reason that the NCS began is...