ACT Reading: Key Ideas & Details

The MAJORITY of the ACT Reading section falls under Key Ideas & Details. In fact, 52-60% of the reading section will be these types of questions! With such high stakes on understanding this section, here's a guide to help you get started!

🧐 What are Key Ideas & Details Questions?

The Key Ideas & Details questions will ask you to do the following:

• • read texts closely to determine central ideas and themes
• • summarize information and ideas accurately
• • show an understanding of relationships and draw logical inferences and conclusions- - understanding sequential, comparative, and cause-effect relationships

In simple terms, you have to read a text and understand what it's saying! The key ideas and details in a text are all aspects of your understanding of the text. This means that you want be conscious about your process of understanding a text. We'll talk about how to do that later on in this guide.

What should I know?

All you really need to know is how to comprehend texts!

Central ideas and themes are just recurring ideas in the text, or ideas that you see throughout. As you read the text, maybe try jotting ✍️ down a few words for each paragraph so that you can remember the key ideas you read! This will help you answer the questions when they come up later. Look at the topic sentences of paragraphs! They might be helpful in identifying central ideas to the text.

For summarizing information, try to find the exact information that the question references and summarize it in your own words first. Then, choose an answer choice that aligns with your thought process. Make sure that all the information from the answer choice is found in the text! Once again, jotting down a few words for each paragraph might be helpful.

In order to understand relationships, look for:

• • sequential 🔢 : transition words (first, second, then), and the structure of the passage (it may be organized in chronological order)
• • comparative 🆚: look for similarities and differences between two ideas, key words (similarly, opposingly, on the other hand)
• • cause-effect relationships 🔄 : look for the results of certain events/ideas, or the reasons behind events/ideas

What do these questions look like?

Key idea questions will often look something like the following:

• • The main purpose of the passage is...
• • One central idea of this passage is...
• • One claim heavily supported by this passage is...
• • The purpose of paragraph 3 (lines 21-28) is...

In order to solve these types of questions, it might be helpful to write a few words (around 5 words) about each paragraph's main idea as you read it. This will help you think critically about the passage and identify the key ideas. Once you do this, you just have to match your already-written key ideas with answer choices on the question. This also helps you ensure that the answer choices you are choosing are backed by textual evidence. If you don't want to write a few words in the margins, re-read the first and last sentences of each paragraph to get an idea of the contents of each paragraph.

Detail questions look something like the following:

• • According to the passage, the reason for Natalie to avoid her grandmother's tea parties was...
• • According to the passage, Goldilocks did not prefer the mother's porridge because...

In order to answer these types of questions, you want to go back to the text and find the specific text where the question refers to. You then want to read a few sentences before and after and understand what's going on in the text! After that, go back to the answer choices and choose the answer choice that is repeated in the text.

For example, let's look at the following passage and question:

The Men of Brewster Place  Clifford Jackson, or Abshu, as he preferred to be known in the streets, had committed himself several years ago to use his talents as a playwright to broaden the horizons for the young, gifted, and black--which was how he saw every child milling around that dark street. As head of the community center he went after every existing grant on the city and state level to bring them puppet shows with the message to avoid drugs and stay in school; and plays in the park such as actor rapping their way through Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Abshu believed there was something in Shakespeare for everyone, even the young of Brewster Place, and if he broadened their horizons just a little bit, there might be enough room for some of them to slip through and see what the world had waiting. No, it would not be a perfect world, but definitely one with more room than they had now.

Image Courtesy of ACT.org

In this question, we can start by looking at the wording of the prompt. In other words, the question is asking "What did Abshu dream of doing?" Looking at the text this question references, we can see that "Clifford Jackson, or Abshu, as he preferred to be known in the streets, had committed himself several years ago to use his talents as a playwright to broaden the horizons for the young, gifted, and black—which was how he saw every child milling around that dark street." From this sentence, let us try to reword the information given, which gives us the idea that "Abshu, as a playwright, wanted to broaden the horizons of the children around him." This statement precisely matches the ideas expressed in answer choice H, and by re-reading the text that the question refers to, as well as re-wording the ideas expressed to make sure we understand it all (!), we were able to get this answer! 

Key tips from this question: Make sure to go back to the text, and if you don't seem to be getting the answer, try quickly jotting down some notes in your own words, so that you're making sure you understand the questions and texts 💯.

Another example!

You cannot see any of this. But Dr. Harry Chugani can come close. With positron-emission tomography (PET), Chugani, a pediatric neurobiologist, watches the regions of a baby's brain turn on, one after another, like city neighborhoods having their electricity restored after a blackout.  He can measure activity in the primitive brain stem and sensory cortex from the moment the baby is born. He can observe the visual cortex burn with activity in the second and third months of life. He can see the frontal cortex light up at 6 to 8 months. He can see, in other words, that the brain of a baby is still forming long after the child has left the womb-not merely growing bigger, but forming the microscopic connections responsible for feeling, learning and remembering.

Image Courtesy of ACT.org

In this example, we can see that the question is fairly straightforward. Our main task is identifying where in the text this information is written. We can see information about the usage of PET scans around lines 16-25, and we can summarize the information presented in these lines as "PET scans show regions of baby's brains turn on, including the primitive brain stem, sensory cortex, visual cortex, and frontal cortex". This closely matches answer choice A, as the idea of observing activity in the frontal cortex of the baby's brain is mentioned in these lines. Thus, our answer is A. 

Key takeaways: The main difficulty in solving these questions is identifying where in the text the information to answer the question is located. Searching for keywords, or writing out notes on the information presented in the text can help with this. In terms of reading comprehension, rewording the text in your own words can help ensure that you are understanding the information correctly. This can help you match up the information presented in the text with an answer choice pretty easily!

However, practice and try what works for you! Maybe writing down notes in the margins doesn't work for you, but you like the idea of rewording the text in your head. Maybe you need to circle and highlight key terms in the text in order to be able to find them later. Try what works for you, and take a shot at using the strategies mentioned in this guide!

Summary

These types of questions often just require practice! Try the strategies mentioned in the guide (summarizing the text, writing in the margins, rereading topic sentences) and see how they work for you!