ACT Reading

Practice session

Read the following passage, then answer the question. --- PASSAGE 23 — Humanities (Paired) Passage A: Architecture that aspires to permanence must negotiate an uncomfortable truth: buildings outlast the purposes for which they were built. A courthouse renovated into lofts, a factory converted to art studios — these transformations testify less to architectural failure than to civic resilience. The built environment is a palimpsest, its layers of use writing over each other while the stone or steel frame persists. Architects who design with only their original program in mind design fragile buildings; those who design for adaptability design for time. Passage B: The cult of adaptive reuse has a shadow side that is rarely acknowledged: it tends to favor structures with robust bones — thick masonry, wide column spacing, generous floor-to-ceiling heights — that were concentrated in an earlier era of construction. Mid-century commercial buildings with low ceilings, curtain-wall exteriors, and open-plan interiors often prove far less adaptable, yet they constitute the majority of the existing building stock. Celebrating adaptive reuse as a universal architectural virtue ignores the structural realities that limit its application. --- Passage B's relationship to Passage A is best described as:

Loading your practice session…