Today’s ACT question of the day comes from a fiction passage – the same passage we saw last week, in fact, in the question about the hat.  Our question asks us to consider evidence given throughout the passage as support for why the children are saying “no” at the end of the text.

We know from the text that Mrs. Sennett is a sort of nanny to these children, and that she travels with them from home to the cape.  She has said several times in this passage that she will go back to the cape to rest when she can, but the children have indicated that she won’t really go; they cried at dinner because they don’t want to be apart from her.

Given this evidence, the children say “no” to her statement that she will be back as soon as the children are off her hands because…they don’t want her to go back to the cape!  Now we just need an answer choice that keeps with the answer we derived from the passage.

“[T]hey are continuing their battle against Mrs. Sennett’s intention to return to the Cape.”

Yep, that works.

Two of the other answer choices are pretty classic wrong answer choices, so let’s look at them briefly:

F. has the wrong tone; if you, as the reader, did not understand Mrs. Sennett’s gentle sarcasm, or if you did not read carefully, you might not have picked up on the warm tone of the passage. Takeaway: the right answer has to have the right tone.

G. is outside the scope of the passage; we might assume that children don’t want to end their summer vacations, but that has nothing to do with what is written in the text. Takeaway: don’t infer too much.