PreACT Practice Test 11
10 free PreACT practice questions in the real exam format, covering the official content areas, with an explanation for every answer.
Question 1 of 10
ReadingINFORMATIONAL: Passage A is adapted from an original essay about unstructured free time. Passage B is adapted from an original essay about organized activities for teenagers.
Passage A
1When I was thirteen, my family spent a summer in a rented house with no internet, one bookshelf, and a television that received two channels, both of them fuzzy. For the first week I was miserable. For the second week I was furious. Sometime during the third week, without noticing exactly when, I began to build things: a lopsided birdhouse, a map of the creek behind the house, a comic strip about a detective who was also a raccoon. By August I had filled two notebooks and forgotten to be angry.
2I have thought about that summer often since becoming a parent, because my own children almost never experience what I experienced then: long stretches of time with nothing scheduled and nothing to scroll, no adult announcing the next activity. Their days are full of practices, lessons, and screens, and each of these is good in its way. But together they leave little room for the uncomfortable, empty feeling that comes before an idea.
3Boredom, I have come to believe, is not the opposite of creativity but often its starting point. When nothing outside us demands attention, the mind begins to supply its own material. It wanders, makes odd connections, and invents problems simply to have something to solve. The raccoon detective did not come from a class. He came from an afternoon so dull that inventing him felt like a rescue.
4None of this means that children should be left with nothing to do indefinitely, or that adults should refuse to help a child who is truly struggling. It means that adults might resist the urge to fill every quiet hour. A child who says "I'm bored" is not always presenting a problem for a parent to solve. Sometimes she is standing at the edge of something she will discover only if no one hands her a solution first.
Passage B
1Every few months, it seems, another essay appears urging parents to let their children be bored. The essays are usually charming, often nostalgic, and full of memories of summers spent building forts. I don't doubt the memories. I doubt that they apply to every child, and I worry about the children they leave out.
2For six years I have coordinated an after-school program in a neighborhood where many students go home to empty apartments because their parents work evening shifts. For these teenagers, unstructured time is not a rare luxury; it is the default. And what fills it is rarely a raccoon detective. More often it is hours of the same short videos, or nothing at all. Several students have told me that before joining the program, they had never finished a project of any kind, not because they lacked imagination, but because no one had ever shown them how to turn an idea into a plan.
3That is what good structured activities do. A robotics team, a theater production, or a community garden does not replace a young person's creativity; it gives that creativity tools, deadlines, and an audience. A student with a vague wish to "make something" learns, step by step, how to sketch, test, fail, and try again. The structure is a frame, not a cage.
4I am not arguing that teenagers should be scheduled from dawn to midnight, and I recognize that some families have filled their children's calendars beyond what is healthy. But the benefits of boredom described so warmly in many essays depend on conditions (books on the shelf, a creek out back, an adult nearby who eventually asks what you made) that not every child has. Before we celebrate empty time, we should ask who is likely to have too much of it, and what they need to use it well.
According to Passage A, the author began building things during the summer in the rented house: