Today’s ACT question of the day comes from the same social sciences passage about the medieval court system that we read a few days ago.  (Sorry that the ACT doesn’t publish a permanent link to its questions of the day like the SAT does!  I’m looking for an online link to their questions, but the general principles still apply to the questions that you will see on test day – and those principles are more important than solving specific questions, since you won’t see these exact questions on your test, anyhow!)

We have a detail question that asks about a specific term from the passage: when was this specific kind of trial used?  Let’s start by finding that term in the passage.

Luckily for us, paragraph 2 not only starts with this exact term, it’s all about this term! We learn that this type of trial involved others (“oath-helpers”) that had to swear along with the accused.

Paragraph 3 also has key information, even though it’s about another kind of trial, because we learn that the other kind of trial was used for people with bad reputations and serious crimes.  Now we know that the compurgation trials were used for less serious crimes and upstanding citizens.  On to the answer choices!

Choice I – eliminate.  Oath-helpers were a mandatory part of this type of trial.

Choice II – sounds like what we predicted when we read paragraph 3.  Keep this one around.

Choice III – we don’t even need to check choice III since there’s no answer choice that includes II and III. If we do check it, we see that it’s the opposite of what we read in paragraph 3, because these trials were for people with good reputations.

Not too bad, right?  Sometimes passages will be misleading like this one, in that the term will appear in one paragraph but the detail you need to answer your question will be somewhere else.  Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see the detail where you think it should be – just keep reading until you find it!