ACT WorkKeys Sample Questions - Question List

56. The U.S. Congress (Government and Civics 3­)
Did you ever wonder where federal laws come from? For example, who proposed that it be illegal to (1) operate a vehicle without a driver’s license? Who is responsible for making decisions about war? In the United States rules and decisions that affect its citizens (and visitors) are proposed and put into effect by what is known as the U.S. Congress.
The U.S. Congress is made of up two (2) bodies: the Senate and the House of Representatives. Both representatives and senators are elected by voters. Congress has 535 members: 435 members in the House of Representatives and 100 members in the Senate. Each member of the House of Representatives serves two-year terms and each state in the union has at least one representative. Each of the 50 states has two senators; therefore, there are 100 senators in Congress, and each member of the Senate serves a six-year (3) term.
Congress works together to create (4) bills that are then later signed into law by the President of the United States. It also has power over financial concerns. It is the Congress who has the authority to make and collect taxes. Congress also plays an important role in the decisions of the national defense. It alone has the power to (5) wage war on another country.
So, next time your hear someone say they dislike a President’s decision to go to war with another country, you can tell them that Congress has the ultimate say, and not the President, in how the country is run.



According to the passage, why are there 100 senators in Congress?

57.

Sawyer's Pet Store has averaged a net profit of $2,500 for the past 11 weeks. What is the total net profit over this length of time?

58. 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.



In paragraph 1, why does the author include the information that African Americans do not participate in the NCS?

59. Which of the following problems best describes what is wrong with the given sentence?

Few surveyors who are practicing in the industry recognize their responsibility to the public for providing well written and clear documents for the sake of future generations who will be using the information to determine important things such as land ownership, property boundaries, as well as many other things.

60. Spanish in the U.S.
Did you know that the United States has the second largest Spanish-speaking population in the world? With over 37 million speakers the age of five and older the U.S. alone has more inhabitants that speak Spanish than the whole country of Venezuela.
Spanish students don’t have to study abroad to get a good look into Latin-American culture. There are many cities here in the U.S. with (1) thriving Latino (2) districts that any student of Spanish can visit to practice speaking. Miami, for example, is home to a multitude of diverse Hispanics from all over Latin America and Europe. When walking down the streets of Little Havana (one of the predominantly Hispanic barrios, or neighborhoods) you will hear the Cuban Spanish (3) language variety. In Chicago, the place to hear Mexican Spanish is La Villita.
Since Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are the fastest growing linguistic group in the United States, it is common to find Spanish-language television channels (such as Univisión and Telemundo) in larger cities. In fact, it’s thanks to these mass media that there are people (although few) that spend their whole lives in the United States without ever having to learn or speak English. The governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, even commented once that Hispanics in the U.S. need to “turn off the TV in Spanish” in order to learn English more quickly.
But Governor Schwarzenegger ought to know that, according to linguistic research on (4) bilingualism, families of Hispanic heritage (as well as other non-English speaking families) produce English dominant (or English only) speakers by the third generation after their immigration. That means, it is more common than not that the grandchildren of the Mexican immigrant cannot communicate with their grandparent in Spanish. Thus, the Spanish language does not seem to (5) pose a threat in the U.S. society, contrary to what many politicians often suggest in their political rhetoric.



The word “bilingualism”, in bold after the (4) in paragraph 4, can best be defined as