Harun Al-Rashid Abbasid Caliph Profile

Harun Al-Rashid Abbasid Caliph Profile Harun Al-Rashid Was Also Known As Haroun ar-Rashid, Harun al-Raschid or Haroon al Rasheed Harun Al-Rashid Was Known For Creating a fabulous court at Baghdad that would be immortalized in The Thousand and One Nights. Harun al-Rashid was the fifth Abbasid caliph. Occupations Caliph Places of Residence and Influence Asia: Arabia Important Dates Became caliph: Sept. 14, 786 Died: March 24, 809 About Harun al-Rashid Born to the caliph al-Mahdi and the former slave-girl al-Khayzuran, Harun was raised at court and received the bulk of his education from Yahya the Barmakid, who was a loyal supporter of Haruns mother. Before he was out of his teens, Harun was made the nominal leader of several expeditions against the Eastern Roman Empire; his success (or, more accurately, the success of his generals) resulted in his earning the title al-Rashid, which means the one following the right path or upright or just. He was also appointed governor of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Syria and Tunisia, which Yahya administered for him, and named second in line to the throne (after his older brother, al-Hadi). Al-Mahdi died in 785 and al-Hadi died mysteriously in 786 (it was rumored that al-Khayzuran arranged his death), and Harun became caliph in September of that year. He appointed as his vizier Yahya, who installed a cadre of Barmakids as administrators. Al-Khayzuran had considerable influence over her son until her death in 803, and the Barmakids effectively ran the empire for Harun. Regional dynasties were given semi-autonomous status in return for considerable annual payments, which enriched Harun financially but weakened the power of the caliphs. He also divided his empire between his sons al-Amin and al-Mamun, who would go to war after Haruns death. Harun was a great patron of art and learning, and is best known for the unsurpassed splendor of his court and lifestyle. Some of the stories, perhaps the earliest, of The Thousand and One Nights were inspired by the glittering Baghdad court, and King Shahryar (whose wife, Scheherazade, tells the tales) may have been based on Harun himself. More Harun al-Rashid Resources Iraq: Historical Setting Encyclopedia article on Abbasids Harun al-Rashid on the Web Harun al-RashidInformative collection of data at NNDB. Harun al-Rashid (786-809)Brief overview of Haruns life at the Jewish Virtual Library. Harun ar-RashidConcise bio at Infoplease. Harun al-Rashid in Print The links below will take you to a site where you can compare prices at booksellers across the web. More in-depth info about the book may be found by clicking on to the books page at one of the online merchants. Harun Al-Rashid and the World of a Thousand and One Nightsby Andre Clot Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography: Harun al-Rashid and the Narrative of the Abbasid Caliphate(Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization)by Tayeb El-Hibri

The Bookstore v. Amazon

The Bookstore v. Amazon There are readers who like bookstores and readers who prefer Amazon. Pitting them against each other is like telling people they ought to like Coca Cola over Pepsi. They have their reasons, and you wont change them. Most of the time. â€Å"If the bookshops are good enough, if the relationship with your customers is truly there, if your booksellers are enjoying themselves and you’ve trained them and you’ve respected them and you’ve allowed them to develop their skills†¦ then our customers truly will remain loyal to us.† ~James Daunt, managing director of Waterstones, at the 2017 Australian Booksellers Association’s annual conference in Melbourne But sometimes bookstore employees forget. Sometimes they let their personal feelings float to the surface, and therein lies a key reason people go to Amazon versus a bookstore . . . to purchase a book of choice in a nonjudgmental atmosphere. They want to  feel the store is benign, much like a doctor who treats anyone, regardless of who they are or what disease they have. Take away that safe feeling , and both a bookstore and a doctor loses credibility . . . and business. I love the blog, The Passive Voice. Recently, PG (the blogger) wrote about a bookstore worker who struggled with store visitors when they asked about or purchased books that the worker did not believe in. PG mentioned in the end that readers prefer a judgment-free zone like Amazon over a meatspace retail with a side of attitude.  thepassivevoice.com/2017/07/a-booksellers-elegy/ I would like to take bookstore consideration one step further. How does a bookstore treat an author? Whether a fledgling indie author or a New York Times best selling author ten times over, the human is still there. And any writer is a rabid reader, with word-of-mouth power. And a small-time local author will tout that small-town indie bookstore much louder than that big-town author who flew in and out. Without a doubt, bookstores prefer best-selling authors for sales. But there are ways of delivering the message when a bookstore can only purchase so many books or house so many signings, and a smart bookstore owner would benefit A lot of this attitude concerning bookstores explains a lot. At a bookstore, we find atmosphere and personality . . . but is it the personality you want? At Amazon, we find the widest selection of books and a market that doesnt judge. Bookstore ownerlove  everyone who comes in the door and respect  their choices. Let them know they are cherished individuals, and youll do anything to make them happy. Theyll love you back, I promise.

Leading Edge Supply Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Leading Edge Supply - Essay Example The importance of logistic edge supply is to trail down the circulation of the company stock and performance analysis. Initiating the aspect of logistic edge supply, intelligent platform comes into play since this provides key management data that in turn enables one to analyze critically the strengths and weaknesses attached across the supply chain. Other key management information includes optimization of planning route, understanding fraudulent activities that comes within the supply chain and enhance the workflow that usually is driven by data caused by intelligence platform (Ballou, 2003). Many companies ensure that implementation and utilization of leading edge supply is taken into consideration within the logistic systems of any organization. For the articulations be fully met, an organization is required to operate within the pre-requisite objectives that influence achievement of organization goals. When there is a presence of effective logistic in a management system of an organization, success comes at hand. However, this comes because of an organization chipping in to make sure that they employ qualified personnel, and tap into labor market using and adopting new technology that in turn boots operation within the management of an

Roles of International Financial Institutions Essay

Roles of International Financial Institutions - Essay Example International financial institutions operate under international laws and this regulation applies to their roles. The institutions also operate and dispense their duties with a global focus according to the international laws and policies. The international financial institutions therefore implement international laws and policies. This paper will therefore analyze the roles of international financial institutions and their importance in the management of global risks. The World Bank is the largest and the most common international financial institution. The World Bank offers financial assistance to countries especially the developing countries as its main duty. The institutions mainly targets and finance development projects in the concerned countries with the aim of reducing poverty or assisting the countries to achieve global development goals. The international monetary fund the IMF has roles similar to the roles of the World Bank although the institution specializes in monitorin g global economy. International financial institutions (IFI) deals with global financial matters however, their duties are influenced by global politics. International financial institutions implements global policies and this link them with the global politics. The main duty of the IFI is maintaining economic and financial stability in different countries. Maintaining stable economies is an important part of international development. To play this role the institutions provides deposit and loans facilities to the concerned countries. This effort enables the institutions to actively control and monitor the flow of finances in these countries. These institutions work together with other international organizations such as the UN to carry out their duties. Although these multinational organizations have full control over the international financial institutions, the institutions have their own duties and agenda. Poverty eradication and economic stability of developing countries cannot be achieved without peace and stability in the involved countries and therefore the IFI have maintaining peace and stability in these countries as their secondary objective. The institutions influence the government of the concerned countries by altering their financial capabilities. This is achieved through offering of loan and financial sanctions to the concerned governments. This enables the IFI to control the monetary flow of the involved countries or their financial capabilities. The institutions also target the governments of the involved countries in order to maintain political stability. This enables the institutions to enhance global and regional stability through stable economies. Maintaining stability is an indirect role of the IFI aimed at enhancing global economic stability and development. The maintaining global and regional stability is a method of implementing international humanitarian law that is one of the duties of the institutions. Global financing operations a re financial procedures and analysis. Global financial operations include financial operation procedures such as accounting, strategic planning investment, financial analysis, and compliance (Hirschey, 2009). These procedures are carried out on a global scale and hence global financial operation reference. Global financial institutions have global duties and responsibilities. The institutions are therefore responsible for carrying out the global financial

Administrative Ethics Paper Grading Criteria Essay Example for Free

Administrative Ethics Paper Grading Criteria Essay Resource: Administrative Ethics Paper Grading Criteria on your student website Find a current administrative issue in a newspaper, magazine, or journal article relating to topics such as patient privacy, confidentiality, or HIPAA. Write a 1,050- to 1,400-word paper that includes the following: †¢ Describe the issue and its impact on the population it affects most. †¢ What arguments or facts are used in the article to support the proposed solution? †¢ What are the ethical and legal issues reported for your administrative issue? †¢ Explain the managerial responsibilities related to administrative ethical issues. If none were stated, what should have been done? †¢ Identify any proposed solutions. See more: Strategic Management Process Essay Include at least three sources in your paper. Resource: Administrative Ethics Paper Grading Criteria on your student website Find a current administrative issue in a newspaper, magazine, or journal article relating to topics such as patient privacy, confidentiality, or HIPAA. Write a 1,050- to 1,400-word paper that includes the following: †¢ Describe the issue and its impact on the population it affects most. †¢ What arguments or facts are used in the article to support the proposed solution? †¢ What are the ethical and legal issues reported for your administrative issue? †¢ Explain the managerial responsibilities related to administrative ethical issues. If none were stated, what should have been done? †¢ Identify any proposed solutions.

The Airline Industry :: essays research papers

The topic in which I chose to do a scrapbook on was â€Å"How the government affects the airline industry in Canada†. Specifically I chose articles that related to the aftermaths of the September 11th tragedy. This event affected airlines in an enormous manner. Many airlines were facing economical problems and in turned asked the government for assistance. As a result, Canada 3000, which was Canada’s second largest airline carrier filed for bankruptcy protection on October 11th. Air Canada was also faced with many hard to make decisions. They turned to the Canadian government and asked for financial assistance. The Problem Solving Method will be examined to determine how the government came to the decision of actually granting Air Canada some assistance. Problem Solving Method 1. Decide on the "Issue" (Define it carefully to avoid arguments later.) The issue that is being discussed in whether or not the government should help Air Canada out financially. As can be seen in the articles presented in the scrapbook, it is known that the government controls many of the operations at Air Canada. 2. Examine various points of view and the opinions they have.  · Your own In my opinion, I think that the Canadian government should help Air Canada with financial assistance. I believe that if the government wants to have control over their fare prices, whether or not they can open a discount airline, and the amount of workers they are able to hire, that they have an obligation to the airline to help them out in these types of situations.  · Those of key groups or individuals (stakeholders) a) Air Canada Union Representatives – This group feels that the government should be active in financial aid relief. During the events after September 11th, the union stated in many national papers, that they felt that they deserved the same amount of support and relief that the US government was giving their airlines. b) The Canadian Government – The government had essentially three choices: i) They could help the airline. ii) They could do nothing and let the airline claim bankruptcy. iii) They could buy back into Air Canada. With the first choice, the government has to allocate some of their resources to the airline. The second option was not feasible for the government to partake in because of the fact that Canadian citizens would be loosing the biggest airline carrier. The third option, which the government did consider, involved two options. The government could either buy a minority of the shares or they could buy the entire operation and that would result in Air Canada becoming a crown corporation.

Disastrous Date Essay

I remember my first date. Not only because it was my first romantic experience with who I considered during that time â€Å"the boy of my dreams†, but also because it was one of the most embarrasing experiences of my life. I was 17 years old back then, but I remember it like if it was yesterday. We took a long road trip from Carolina to the Old San Juan. Along the way we were sharing experiences and funny anecdotes, we were telling each other the kind of stories you tell in highschool, about pranks, teachers, odd classmates and issues that only a highschool student can understand. We arrived to the restaurant and everything in it looked fancy. The sights were all bright because of the illumination of the place; everything was sorrounded with colorful lamps with different shapes, there were autographed pictures of what appeared to be various local celebrities who had visited the restaurant, such as Josà © Feliciano and Ednita Nazario, the tables were decorated with red and yellow roses, Dean Martin’s lovable music was comming out of the restaurant’s speakers and the smell of garlic frying in olive oil in the air gave me that sensation that only good Italian restaurants can give to a woman with a great taste like myself. As we walked in the host politely saluted us and asked my date if he had a reservation, to which he replied â€Å"yes†, after checking my date’s name and last name in a thick, old, black binder with Italy’s flag and the restaurant’s logo on its cover the host walked us to our table. The service was great, I can tell because only a few minutes after taking our seats the waiter was with our menus and offering us drinks. My date comfortably asked for the wine of the house, because apparently he already knew the place and he was eighteen years old, the legal drinking age in Puerto Rico, when the waiter turned to me and I got nervous, because at that time I never had a drink of alcohol in my life, not even a drop, so I pointed out the brownish looking drink of the lady in the next table and mumbled â€Å"iced tea for me please†¦Ã¢â‚¬ . I was nervous because I had this idea back then that alcohol plays an  important role in a teenager’s social live. When I was in highschool, all my friends under eighteen were drinking in parties, concerts or other social events, they even brought to school alcohol hidden in gatorade bottles and such, and, as every person who have experienced the highschool drama knows, all the â€Å"cool kids† were doing it. I felt inmature because my date was about to have some kind of fancy wine while I asked for iced tea like some fifth grader girl. I will not ever forget the face he made when he heard me ask for iced tea, he had this mixture of doubt and mock in his expression, like frowning and smiling simultaneously. â€Å"Come on†¦Ã¢â‚¬  he said sarcastically while winking his eye â€Å"†¦ I won’t tell your parents you had a glass of wine or two†, I stood strong to my principles by answering â€Å"no thank you, ice tea is fine†, I don’t know if I did it because I was being brave against the peer pressure or afraid that at some point of the night someone from the restaurant’s personnel would approach me asking for an ID. The waiter came back to take our order with a tray on his hands which contained a garlic bread basket, my date’s glass, a bottle of wine and a huge glass of what appeared to be my iced tea. I remember we asked that night for a pizza with eggplants, green peppers, tomato slices, onions and extra cheese with basil sauce on top, the pizza dough was dipped in olive oil and served in a hot pan. As we waited for the food to arrive I took a sip from my drink, I noticed it tasted weird, it was sour, a little bit bitter and it was also effervescent like soda, it didn’t tasted like any iced tea I had before, but since we were in a fancy place and I didn’t wanted to look unrefined, I assumed that’s how elegant people drink their iced tea, I thought to myself that if I drank fast the taste wouldn’t bother me. With the passage my drinking speed increased, a sip turned into a swig, a swig into a gulp and a gulp into three glasses. Little did I know the contents o f my drink. As the glasses were draining one by one I started feeling woozy, like if I just came out from a long rollercoaster ride. My face felt warm, my respiration got colder, my tongue got tangled when I spoke, I found almost impossible to control the volume of my voice, my eyelids were struggling to remain open, and my arms and legs became droopy. Suddenly, I found myself in  a good mood, laughing at each joke he told, even when they were not funny, and also I became very sincere, telling him almost every really deep and personal anecdotes and cofessing every single reason why I found him attractive in every way, I even told him, like I mentioned before, why he was the â€Å"boy of my dreams†, without knowing it, I was drunk for the first time in my life. He was not a fool whatsoever, he knew I was drunk, but he couldn’t explain himself why, since the only thing I had that night were three huge glasses of â€Å"iced tea†, he asked the waiter in an angry tone of voice how come I was drunk with three glasse of iced tea, the waiter replied that was because there were five differet types of liqueur in a Long Island Iced Tea, vodka, tequila, rum, gin and triple sec. Apparently our waiter got confused, because when he took our order the drink I pointed out from the lady on the table next to us was actually a Long Island Iced Tea. Needless to say we left the restaurant that momment with shame in our faces, to top it all off, on our way to the car we came across with my english school teacher, the one who talked like Edward James Olmos in that movie where he was a math teacher, he recognized me and greeted me and I greeted him back, until this day I think because of the distance I was from him he didn’t noticed how drunk I was but, who knows. I cannot say that our date was a total waste of time. Even tough I was drunk he behaved like a gentleman the whole time. He never took advantage of my state and I respect and admire that in a man. He carried me in his shoulders like a wounded soldier, he also made several stops in different business locations without complaining when I needed to go to the bathroom, he held my hair for it to avoid getting dirty when I puked, he even didn’t got mad because I did it in his new shoes. After sitting for a while in the park, having two water bottles and an energy drink I regained some sobriety, he gave me some mint bubblegum for the nausea and drove me back home, I puked once on the way but he was nice enough to pull over and open the door. I finally arrived home around 2:00 AM, I puked once more before going to bed and fall sleep, it is still a mistery for me how could I puke so much in one night. I woke up the next day with the sound of my cellphone ringing, I was dizzy, had a headache and it felt like the phone was ringing inside my skull, I answered and I heard the sound of his voice asking me if I was ok  and also if I remembered something about the night before, I answered him by apologizing several times, describing how I felt that morning and that I partially rememberd what happened during our date, he explained to me almost laughing that weird pehnomena I was experiencing was called a â€Å"hangover†. He called me again when I fully recovered, surprisingly enough to ask me out again, I told him that I would go out with him if we avoid going to the Old San Juan for a long while, because after what happened in our first date I could never show my face again around that area.

Culture and Formation of Culture Essay

The word culture can be referred to the behavior of the human beings specifically with the objects, things and commodities around them and these objects are used as an essential part of this behavior. In this sense it is only the ability of the mankind to create a culture. And culture itself will include all the norms and behaviors of human beings like language, customs, beliefs, religions, tool, techniques, arts, rituals, ceremonies and common practice of every day life. There are numerous definitions of culture and every anthropologist has a different view about it. Some has defined culture as â€Å"learned behavior† or â€Å"ideas in mind† or â€Å"a logical construct†, but the most favored definition is that culture is â€Å"the abstraction from behavior† (Culture). Certeau (xi) states that Culture is the combination of every day practices of the societies. But instead of making the unit force an individual he has taken a more economist perspective and regarded them as â€Å"consumers† (Certeau, xi). While John Fiske produced a two economic theory and regards culture as a parallel economy against the financial economy and has named it as â€Å"cultural economy† (Fiske, 538). As every economy has a capital the cultural economy’s capital consists of pleasure and meanings (Fiske, 541). Frederick Engels while speaking in the context of history defines culture as â€Å"traditions, which haunt human minds† (Engels, 10). Speaking conclusively culture is not only behavior neither an action, but it is the combination of abstraction and behavior or a behavior explicating a concept. Formation of Culture: According the theory of evolution, the advancement of the human behavior from natural to learned and freely variable behavior, the particulars of which have the tendency to be transferred to the next generation and has the ability to evolve into a system of things. Thus culture is a man made environment brought into existence by the human ability to symbol. When a culture is established then it has a life of its own. It is a range of things and events in a cause and effect relationship (Culture). Different theorists have argued about the formation of culture in their own specific way and style. According to Bourdieu â€Å"cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education† (Bourdieu, 42). He initially states that the production of cultural goods as well as the description of different ways of appropriating these goods as work of arts as well as providing social conditions, which are considered legitimate (Bourdieu, 42). He further emphasis that all social practices, which are the core of any culture, are traced back to education or social origin (Bourdieu, 42). On the other hand Fiske says that culture is the opposite force developed in response to the producers of consumer goods. He states that culture is the parellel economic system, which runs in response to the financial economic system. According to him it’s capital is meanings and pleasure (Fiske, 538). This is a more economic perspective of rather than the anthropological perspective. Theodor Adorno while discussing the evolution of popular music culture states that the popular music culture and its hold on the masses is because of the urge to distract the individuals from the current realities to the world of fantasy, and popular music has the ability to distract the listener from it (Adorno, 80,81). Thus according to him a culture evolves as a reaction of the current cultural norms. That is the main reason that the popular culture did not evolved before the industrial revolution. Social Relations: Social relations are the behaviors of different social groups related to and in response of each other. Thus speaking about the ruling class, which is also regarded as the elite class or aristocracy is the social group, which has the means of production at its disposal Thus the ruling ideas and concepts are the expressions of dominant material relationships (Marx & Engels, 8). According to Marx and Engels the historically speaking the relationship of the individual and the ruling class are reflected by the dominance of ideas and concepts during the dominance of that ruling class. For instance during the dominion of the aristocracy the concepts of loyalty and honor were dominant, while during the dominion of the bourgeoisie the concepts of equality and freedom were dominant (Marx and Engels, 8). The relation between the ruling class and the lower class has two ways. Either it leads or it dominates. The first relation is with its allies while the second is with its enemies (Gramsci, 12) Thus the social relations between the aristocracy has two conditions. If the aristocracy has friendly terms with the lower class, the lower class will follow accordingly under its leadership. But if the lower class does not consent the way the ruling class leads it will refuse to follow. As a result the ruling class will try to dominate the lower class in order to maintain its status. Marx has regarded the aristocracy as the material forces of production, which sometimes come into conflict with the property relations that is the lower class and results in the social revolution (Marx, 9). Engels says that the economic political and traditional i. e cultural factors are interrelated and they in combination play the determined role in the formation of history. Thus history is the product of the combine efforts of the economical, political and demographical factors. Thus one can very easily find the social relation between the economy, politics and cultural norms. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. â€Å"On Popular Music† Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences. 1941. Bourdieu, Pierre. â€Å"Distinction and The Aristocracy of Culture†. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. 1984, Routledge, London. Certeau, Michel de. â€Å"The Practice of Every Day Life† 1984, Berkley University California Press. â€Å"Culture. † Encyclop? dia Britannica. 2007. Encyclop? dia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD 8 May, 2007. Fiske, John. â€Å"The Popular Economy† Television Culture. 1987, Routledge, London. Gramsci, Antonio. â€Å"Hegomony, Intellectuals and the State† Princeton Notebooks, Lawrence & Wishart, London. Marx, Karl. â€Å"Base & Superstructure† A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. 1976, Foreign Languages Press, Peking. Marx, Karl & Engels, Federick. â€Å"Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas† The German Ideology. 1970, Lawrence & Wishart, London. Marx, Karl & Engels. â€Å"A Letter to Joseph Bloch† Selected Letters. 1977, Foreign Languages Press, Peking.

How to Improve Your ACT Reading Score 8 Expert Tips

How to Improve Your ACT Reading Score 8 Expert Tips SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips Are you struggling with ACT Readingscores between 14 and 24? You're not alone- hundreds of thousands of students are scoring in this range. But many don't know the best ways to break out of this score range and score 26 or higher. Here, we'll discuss how to improve your ACT Reading score effectively, and why it's so important to do so. Unlike other fluffy articles out there, I'm focusing on actionable strategies.Put these eight strategies to work, and I'm confident you'll be able to improve your ACT score. Brief note: This article specifically targets lower-scoring students- i.e., those scoring below 26 on ACT Reading. If you're already above this range, my perfect 36 ACTReading score article is more appropriate for you as it contains more advanced strategies. In this article, I'm going to discuss why scoring high is a good idea, go over what it takes to score a 26, and then jump into our top ACTReading tips andstrategies. Stick with me- this is like building a house. You need to lay a solid foundation before you can put up the walls and pretty windows. Similarly, we need to make sure we understand why you're doing what you're doing before we can dive into tips and strategies. In this guide, I talk mainly about getting to a 26. But if your goal is a 24 or lower, these concepts still equally apply to how you should study. This is a pretty long article, so here's what we'll be covering (in case you want to skip around or review a section): Getting a 26 on the ACT: Understand the Stakes Know That You Can Get a 26 ACT Score or Higher What It Takes to Get a 26 in ACT Reading Strategy 1: Save Time on Reading Passages by Switching Your Reading Strategy Strategy 2:Learn to Eliminate the 3 Wrong Answers Strategy 3:Find Your Reading Skill Weaknesses and Drill Them Strategy 4: Only Use High-Quality ACT Reading Sources Strategy 5:Don't Focus On Vocab Strategy 6:Skip the Most Difficult, Time-Consuming Questions Strategy 7:Understand All Your Reading Mistakes Strategy 8: Guess on EveryQuestion You Don't Know Getting a 26 on the ACT: Understand the Stakes At this score range of 14-24, improving your ACT Reading scoreto a 26 or higher will dramatically boost your chances of getting into better colleges. Let's take a popular school as an example: the University of California, Riverside. The average ACT score of admitted applicants to UC Riverside is 23(out of 36). Its 25th percentile score is 22, and its 75th percentile score is 28. Furthermore, its acceptance rate is 56%. In other words, a little more than half of all applicants are admitted.But the lower your ACT score is, the worse your chances are of getting in. In our analysis, if you score around 22, your chance of admission drops to just 43%. But if you raise your score to 26, your chance of admission goes up to 75%- that's a really good chance of admission!And the higher your score gets, the more certain you are to get in. In short, improving your ACT Reading score will bump up your average composite score.And improving your ACT composite score, even by just 5 points, can make a huge difference in your chances of getting into your target colleges. For the Reading section, this is especially true if you want to apply to humanities majors and programs, such as English or communications. They expect you to have a strong Reading score. If you have a low one, they'll doubt your ability to do college-level humanities work. Even if you're a math superstar and are applying to a science major, schools still need to know that you can process difficult texts at a college level. A low Reading score will cast huge doubt on you. It's really worth your time to improve your ACT score. Hour for hour,it's the best thing you can do to raise your chance of getting into college. Curious what chances you have with a 26 ACTscore? Check out ourexpert college admissions guide for a 26 ACT score. Know That You Can Get a 26 ACT Score or Higher This isn't just supposed to be a vague happy-go-lucky message you see in a fortune cookie. I mean, literally, you and every other student can do this. In my job here at PrepScholar, I've worked with thousands of students scoring in the lower ranges of around 14-20. Time after time, I see students who beat themselves up over their low scores and think improving them is impossible. They often say the following: "I know I'm not smart." "I just can't read passages quickly, and I don't know how to improve my ACT Reading score." "I was never good at English, and my English teachers have never told me I did a good job." This breaks my heart. Because I know that, more than anything else, your ACTscore is a reflection ofhow hard you work and how smartly you study. Not your IQ and not your school grades. Not how Mr. Crandall in 10th grade gave you a C on your essay. The key point here is thatACT Reading is designed to trick you- and you need to learn how. Here's why: the ACT is a weird test. When you take it, don't you feel as though the questions are different from those you've seen in school? I bet you've had this problem: withACT Reading passages, you often miss questions because of an "unlucky guess." You try to eliminate a few answer choices, but the remaining choices all seem like they are equally likely to be correct. So you throw up your hands and randomly guess. The ACT is purposely designed this way to confuse you.Literally millions of other students have the exact same problem you do. And the ACT lovesthis. Normally, in your school's English class, your teacher tells you that all interpretations of a text are valid. You can write an essay about anything you want, and English teachers aren't usually allowed to tell you that your opinion is wrong. They can get in trouble for telling you what to think, and they feel bad about restricting your creativity. But the ACT has an entirely different problem. It's a national test, meaning it needs a level playing field for all students around the country. It's even used in many states as a statewide standardized test. As a result, the test needs to be rock solid. And every question must have a single, unambiguously, 100% correct answer. There's only ever one correct answer. Find a way to eliminate three incorrect ones. Imagine if this weren't the case. Imagine that a Reading question had two answer choices, both of which might beplausibly correct. When scores come out, every single student who got the question wrong would probably complain to ACT, Inc., about the test being wrong or misleading. If this were true, ACT, Inc., would then have to throw out the question, which is a huge hassle. Have too many of these incidents, and there'd be a big scandal about the ACT failing to do its job. ACT, Inc., wants to avoid this nightmare scenario. Therefore, every single Reading passage question has only one correct answer. This is an important concept to remember. It makes your life a lot easier- all you have to do is eliminate the three wrong answer choices to get the single right one. But the ACT purposely disguises this fact to make life more difficult for you. It asks questions that are typically worded as so: It can reasonably be inferred that: Which of the following best describes: The author's contemporaries for the most part believed: Notice a pattern here? The ACT always disguises the fact that there's only one unambiguous answer. It tries to make you waver between two or three answer choices that are most likely. And then you guess randomly. And then you get it wrong. You can bet that students fall for this. Millions of times every year. Students who don't prepare for the ACT in the right way don't appreciate this. But if you prepare for the ACT in the right way, you'll learn the tricks the ACT plays on you.And you'll raise your score. The ACT Reading section is full of patterns like these. To improve your score, you just need to do the following: Learn the types of questions the ACT tests, such asthe ones above Learn strategies to solve these questionsusing skills you already know Practice with a lot of realistic questions so you learn from your mistakes The point is that you can learn these skills, even if you don't consider yourself a good reader or a great English student.I'll go into more detail about exactly how to do this. First, though, let's see how many questions you need to get right to get a 26 on Reading. What It Takes to Get a 26in ACTReading If we have a target score in mind, it helps to understand what you need to get that score on the actual test. Remember that we're aiming for a Reading test score of 26,out of 36. Here's the raw score to ACT Reading Score conversion table. (If you could use a refresher on how the ACT is scored and how raw scores are calculated, read this guide.) Raw Scaled Raw Scaled Raw Scaled Raw Scaled 40 36 29 26 19 19 9 12 39 35 28 25 18 18 8 38 34 27 24 17 17 7 10 37 33 26 23 16 16 6 10 36 32 25 23 15 16 5 8 35 32 24 22 14 15 4 7 34 31 23 21 13 14 3 6 33 30 22 21 12 14 2 5 32 29 21 20 13 1 3 31 28 20 19 10 12 0 1 30 27 Source: Official ACT Practice Test 2017-18 Note that if you're aiming for a 26 in ACT Reading, you'll need a raw score of 29/40.This is a 72% score. This has serious implications for your testing strategy. In essence, you only need to get right about 3/4 of all Reading questions.We'll go into more detail below about what this means for your approach to this ACT section. Whatever you're scoring now, take note of the difference you'll need to get to a 26. For example, if you're scoring a 20, you'll need to answer about eight more questions correctly on ACT Reading in order to get a 26. Once again, if your goal is a 20, the same analysis applies. Just find your target raw score using the chart above. OK- so far we've covered why scoring a higher ACT Reading score is important, why you're fully capable of improving your score, and the raw score you'll need to get in order to hit your target score of 26. I hope a lot of this was useful and changed how you thought about ACTprep. Now, we'll get into the real, working strategies you should use in your ACT Reading prep. 8 Strategies to Improve Your Low ACT Reading Score In this section, we introduce our eight best strategies that are guaranteed to raise your low ACT Reading score. Strategy 1: Save Time on Reading Passages by Switching Your Reading Strategy From the thousands of students I've worked with, by far the most common problem students have with ACTReading passages is that they keep running out of time before they can get through all the questions. This is a problem because, unlike ACT Math, the passage questions aren't arranged in order of difficulty. Therefore, by not completing all the questions in time, you could miss easy questions at the end that you would have gotten right if you'd only had enough time. What's the cause of this? The most common one I see is that students are reading the passages in far more detail than they actually need to be.Once again, this is a consequence of what you learn in English class. In English, you've probably gotten (stupid) tests that quiz you about what Madame Bovarysaid in a particular scene, or what color Tom's T-shirt was. So of course you've learned to pay attention to every single detail. The ACTis different. For a passage that's 90 lines long, there will be only 10 questions. Many of these don't even refer to specific lines- they talk about the point of the passage as a whole,or the tone of the author. The number of questions that focus on small, line-by-line details is low. Therefore, it's a waste of time to read a passage line by line, afraid that you'll miss a detail they'll ask you about. The best way to read a passage: skimming it on the first read-through. This is why I recommend thatall students try this ACT Reading passage strategy: Skim the passage on the first read-through. Don't try to understand every single lineor write notes predicting what the questions will be. Just get a general understanding of the passage. You want to finish reading the passage within three minutes, if possible. Next, go to the questions. If the question refers to a line number, go back to that line and try to make sense of the text around it. If you can't answer a question within 30 seconds, skip it. (More on this strategy later.) These steps are important because Reading questions ask about far fewer lines than the passage actually contains. For example, lines 5-20 of a passage might not be relevant to any question that follows. Therefore, if you spend time trying to deeply understand lines 5-20, you’ll be wasting time you could've spent elsewhere. Some students take this strategy to the extreme by reading the questionsbefore the passage. If a question refers to any specific line or lines, they mark those in the passage. This then gives them a guide to focus on important lines when they actually start to read the passage. Different strategies work for different students. You need to try out different ones so you can see which one gives you the best results. But by and large, I'm confident that you're spending way too much time reading the passage. Strategy 2:Learn to Eliminate the 3 Wrong Answers I talked above about how the ACT always has one unambiguously correct answer. This has a huge implication for the strategy you should use to find the right ACT Reading answer. Here's the other way to see it: out of the four answer choices, three of them have something that is totally wrong about them.Only one answer is 100% correct, which means the other three are 100% wrong. You know how you try to eliminate answer choices and then end up with a few at the end that all seem equally likely to be correct? You're not doing a good enough job of eliminating answer choices. Remember- every single wrong choice can be crossed out for its own reasons. You have to learn how to eliminate three answer choices for every single Reading question. "Great, Allen. But this doesn't tell me anything about how to eliminate wrong answer choices." Thanks for asking. There are a few classic wrong answer choices the ACTloves to use. Here's an example: Imagine you just read a passage focusing on how human evolution shaped the environment. It offers a few examples. First, it talks about how the transition from earlier species such asHomo habilus to neanderthals led to more tool usage like fire, which caused wildfires and thus shaped the ecology. It then talks about Homo sapiens 40,000 years ago and their overhunting of certain species, such as the woolly mammoth, to extinction. Sounds like a plausible passage, right? It fits into that weird style of ACT Reading passages that's oddly specific about a topic you've likely never thought deeply about before. We then run into a question asking, "Which of the following best describes the main subject of the passage?" Here are our possible answer choices: A: The transition between Homo habilus and neanderthals B: The study of evolution C: How the environment shaped human evolution D: The plausibility of evolution E: The influence of human development on ecology (Note that we're using five answer choices for illustration even though the ACT only has four.) As you're reading these answer choices, a few of them probably started sounding really plausible to you. Surprise! Each of the answers from A-D has something seriously wrong with it. Each one is a classic example of a wrong answer type given by the ACT. Let's look at how we can tell these are incorrect. Wrong Answer 1 (A): Too Specific A: The transition between Homo habilus and neanderthals This type of wrong answer focuses on a smaller detail in the passage. It’s meant to trick you because you might think to yourself, "Well, I see this was mentioned in the passage, so it’s a plausible answer choice." Wrong! Think to yourself: can this answer choice really describe the entire passage? Can it basically function as the title of this passage? In this case, you’ll find that A is just way too specific to convey the point of the overall passage. Wrong Answer 2 (B): Too Broad B: The study of evolution This type of wrong answer has the opposite problem than the one above- it’s way too broad. Yes, theoretically the passage is about the study of evolution, but only one aspect of it (human evolution) and particularly as it relates to its impact on the environment. To give another crazy example- let's say you talked to your friend about losing your cell phone. He saysthe main point of your conversation was the universe. Well, while you were talking about the universe in some form (you're part of the universe just like everyone else is!), this was actually only a tiny, tiny fraction of your conversation. Just the same, answer choice Bis far too general. Wrong Answer 3 (C): Reversed Relationship C: How the environment shaped human evolution This wrong answer choice can be tricky because it mentions all the right words. But of course the relationship between those words needs to be correct as well. Here, the relationship is flipped.The passage is about how humans affected the environment- not the reverse. Students who read too quickly make careless mistakes much like these because all the words sound right at a glance! Wrong Answer 4 (D): Unrelated Concept D: The plausibility of evolution Finally, this kind of wrong answer preys on the tendency of students to overthink the question. If you’re passionate about arguing about evolution in your personal life, this might be a trigger answer since any discussion of evolution becomes a chance to argue about its plausibility. Of course, althoughthis concept appears nowhere in the passage,some students just won’t be able to resist choosing answer choice D. Do you see the point? On the surface, each of the answer choices sounds possibly correct. But possibly isn't good enough. The right answer needs to be 100%, totally right. Wrong answers might be off by even one word- and you need to eliminate those. Carry this thought into every ACT Reading passage question you do. Next strategy: find your weak links and fix them. Strategy 3:Find Your Reading Skill Weaknesses and Drill Them ACT Reading passage questions might look similar, but they actually test very different skills. At PrepScholar, we've categorized the major passage skills as follows: Big Picture/Main Point Little Picture/Detail Vocabulary in Context Inferences Author Function That's a good number ofskills! More than is obvious when you're reading a passage on the test. Each of these question types uses different skills in regard to how you read and analyze the passage.They each require a different method of prep and focused practice. If you're like most students, you're better at some areas in Reading than you are at others. You might be better at getting the big picture of a passage compared to an inference. Or you might be really strong at understanding the author's tone but not so strong at figuring out the meaning of a phrase in context. If you're like most students, you also don't have an unlimited amount of time to study. You have a lot of homework, you have extracurriculars (for example, maybe you're an athlete or a member in your school band), and you have friends to hang out with. This means that for every hour you study for the ACT, it needs to be the most effective hour possible. In concrete terms,you need to find your greatest areas of improvement and work on those. Too many students study the "dumb" way. They just buy a book and read it cover to cover. When they don't improve, they're shocked. I'm not. Studying effectively for the ACTisn't like painting a house. You're not trying to cover all your bases with a very thin layer of understanding. What these students did wrong was this: they wasted their time on subjects they already knew and didn't spend enough time on their weaknesses. Studying effectively for the ACT is like plugging up holes in a leaky boat. You need to find the biggest hole and fill it. You then need to find the next biggest hole and fix that, too. Soon you'll see that your boat isn't sinking at all. How does this relate to ACT Reading? You need to find the sub-skills you're weakest in and then drill those until you're no longer weak in them. Fixing up the biggest holes. With ACT Reading, you need to figure out whether you have patterns in your mistakes. Are you consistently running out of time on reading passages? Having trouble with Inference questions? Really struggling with interpreting details? For every question you miss, you must identify what type of question it is. Once you notice patterns in the questions you miss, you need to practice this sub-skill extra hard. Say you miss a lot of inference questions (this is typically the hardest type of question for students to get). Your goal is to find a way to get focused practice questions for this skill so you can drill your mistakes and improve. Bonus: If all of this is making sense to you, you'd love our ACTprep program, PrepScholar. We designed our program around the concepts in this article, because they actually work.When you start with PrepScholar, you’ll take a diagnostic that will determine your weaknesses in over forty ACT skills - in Reading, English, Math, and Science. PrepScholar then creates a study program specifically customized for you. To improve each skill, you’ll take focused lessons dedicated to each skill, with over 20 practice questions per skill. This will train you for your specific area weaknesses, so your time is always spent most effectively to raise your score. There’s no other prep system out there that does it this way, which is why we get better score results than any other program on the market. Check it out today with a 5-day free trial: Strategy 4: Only Use High-Quality ACT Reading Sources ACT Reading passages are very specific in how they work. ACT Reading questions, too, are very specifically phrased and constructed to have bait answers. If you want to improve your Reading score, you have to use realistic ACT Reading sources.If you don't, you'll develop bad habits and end up training the wrong skills. Think about it like this: let's say you're trying out for a baseball team. Instead of practicing with real baseballs, you decide to practice with Wiffle balls instead.It's a lot cheaper and easier, and hitting the ball makes you feel good. So you train and train and train with a Wiffle ball. You understand how the Wiffle ball curves when it's thrown, how to hit it, and how to throw it. Finally, you try out for the baseball team. A pitch comes, but it's way faster than you've ever practiced with before. It doesn't curve like a Wiffle ball does. Swing, and a miss. You've trained with the wrong thing, and now you're totally unprepared for baseball. This is not real baseball. ACT Reading works in the exact same way. Train on badly written tests, and you'll develop poor habits and unhelpful strategies. The very best sources for ACTReading passages areofficial ACT practice tests.This is why we include official practice testsin our ACT prep program- we can gauge your progress and train you on the real thing. Unfortunately, there's a limited number of official practice tests: five free PDFs online, and five in the old third edition of theofficial ACT prep guide(the newest edition includes three practice tests, but these overlap significantly with the free ones online). Thus, to have enough questions to practice on, you'll need to find other sources of questions. The first suggestion is to use prep resources customized for the ACT.Be careful, though- most companies release poor quality passages and questions (most books you see on ACT Reading are pretty terrible, frankly). This is especially harmful for ACT Reading because the style of passages and what questions ask are complex, as opposed to ACT Math which is more straightforward. To write realistic questions, you need to understand the test inside and out. That's why at PrepScholar, we've created what I believe are the highest quality Reading questions available anywhere. This is what we've done: We've deconstructed every available official ACT practice test, question by question, answer choice by answer choice. We've statistically studied every question type on the test, and we understand exactly how questions are phrased and how wrong answer choices are constructed. As head of product, I'm responsible for content quality. I hire only the most qualified content writers to craft our test content. This means people who got perfect scores on the ACT, who have hundreds of hours of ACT teaching experience, and who graduated from Ivy League schools. This results in the most realistic, highest quality ACT Reading questions. Even if you don't use PrepScholar, you should be confident that whatever resource you do use undergoes the same scrutiny as we use.If you're not sure, or you see reviews saying otherwise, it's best to avoid it. For more tips on what ACT resources to use,learn what my favorite ACT Reading books are. Strategy 5:Don't Focus On Vocab Vocab gets way too much attention from students. It feels good to study vocab flashcards because it seems like you're making progress. "I studied 1,000 vocab words- this must mean I improved my score!" This is why other test prep programs love teaching you vocab- you feel as though you're learning something and it's worth your money. But the truth is, learning vocab doesn't really help you. Fortunately, vocab doesn't play more than a minor role in your ACT Reading score. This has always been less of a problem for the ACT than the SAT, which used to feature vocab-heavy Sentence Completion questions. Thankfully, the SAT removed these questions in 2016. But still, a lot of students look for ACT vocab lists to study with, and it's just not a good use of time. The only real questions you'll need to use vocab skills for are the Vocab in Context questions. Here's an example of one from an official ACT practice test: As it is used in line 13, the word popular most nearly means:A)well likedB)commonly knownC)scientifically acceptedD)most admired Wait- "popular"? They're asking a question about the word "popular"? Yes, it's a common word, but the key to this question is understanding how it's used in context.Popular can mean all the things listed in the answer choices, but only one of them is actually correct in this case. Here's the source sentence: It includes the area known in popular legend as the Bermuda Triangle. In this case, popular is used to describe a legend that's well known, so answer choice B is the best choice. Here are examples of words you'll need to understand in context on the ACT: adopted concentrated humor nostalgia read something These are all reasonable words you've probably heard before. The trick to these questions is to actually understand how the word is used in the passage- not to focus on what you think it means. So don't waste too much of your time studying vocab, and think twice before you're convinced by someone that it's a good use of your ACT prep time. Don't spend a lot of time studying vocab- most likely, it's not the best use of your time. This time is far better spent learning how to deal with Reading passages better.There are so many more questions about passages that it's a better use of your time to learn passage strategies and how to answer Reading questions. Strategy 6:Skip the Most Difficult, Time-Consuming Questions Here's an easy strategy most students don't do enough. Remember what I said above about raw scores? To score a 26, you only need a raw score of about 29 (that's 29 correct answers out of a total of 40 Reading questions). This varies from test to test, but it's pretty consistent in general. What does this mean?You can completely guess on 15 questions, get four of them right by chance, and still score a 26 on Reading. Once again, you can completely guess on almost 40% of all questions and still hit your goal! Skip questions carefree like this woman. Why is this such a powerful strategy? It gives you way more time on easy and medium difficulty questions- the questions you have a good chance of getting right. If you're usually pressed for time on the ACT Reading section, this will be a huge help. Here's an example: on the Reading section, you get 35 minutes to answer 40 questions. This is usually pretty hard for most students to get through- it's just 52 seconds to answer each question, including the time it takes to read each passage. The average student will try to push through all the questions. "I've got to get through them all since I've got a shot at getting each question right," they think. Along the way, they'll probably rush and make careless mistakes on questions they should have gotten right. And then they spend five minutes on really hard questions, making no progress and wasting time. Wrong approach. Here's what I suggest instead. Tryeach question but skip it if you're not getting anywhere after 30 seconds.Unlike math, the Reading passage questions aren't ordered in difficulty, so you can't tell right away which questions are harder or easier. You need to try each one but then skip it if it's costing you too much time. By doing this, you can raise your time per easy/medium question to 100 seconds per question or more. This is huge! It's a 100% boost to the time you get per question.As a result, this significantly raises your chances of getting easy/medium questions right. And the questions you skipped? They're so hard you're honestly better off not even trying them. These questions are meant for 30-36scorers. If you get to 26, then you have the right to try these questions- but not before you get to 26. How do you tell which questions are going to take you the most time?This varies from person to person, but here are a few common question types: Questions without a line number that make you hunt for a detail: You'll spend a lot of time rereading the passage looking for a certain detail if you can't remember where it was originally mentioned. "EXCEPT" questions: These are specifically designed to waste your time. They'll ask something like, "The author mentions all of these details EXCEPT: ... " and your job is to find which three are mentioned and which one isn't. Inference questions that ask you what the author most likely meant: These are usually quite difficult because they take multiple steps to solve: (1) What did the author explicitlysay in the passage? and (2) What does the author most likely mean? But don't just take my word for it. You need to figure out your own weaknesses after doing a lot of practice. They might not be the same question types as the ones above. Approach your Reading prep with this in mind. If you notice yourself getting stuck on a question, pay attention to what type of question it is and see whether there's a pattern. For example, do you always get stuck on that particular question type? Strategy 7: Understand All Your Reading Mistakes Every mistake you make on a test happens for a reason. If you don't understand exactly why you missed a question, you'll make that mistake over and over again. Think about it like learning how to cook. The first time you learn to chop vegetables, you might cut your finger accidentally. Ouch- that hurts. But you quickly learn from your mistakes- you start to keep your fingers away from the knife and hold the knife differently. After all, if you don't learn from your mistake, you'll keep cutting your finger over and over again. Why would you treat ACT prep any differently? Too many students scoring at the 18-24 level refuse to study their mistakes. It's not fun.I get it. It sucks to stare your mistakes in the face. It's draining to learn skills you're not good at. So the average student will skip reviewing their mistakes and instead focus on areas they're already comfortable with. It's like cozying up with a warm blanket. Their thinking goes like this: "So I'm good at Big Picture questions? I should do more Big Picture problems! They make me feel good about myself." The result? No score improvement. You don't want to be like these students. So here'swhat you need to do instead: On every practice test or question set you take, mark every question that you're even just 20% unsure about. When you grade your test or quiz, review every question you marked and every incorrect question. This way even if you guessed a question correctly, you'll make sure to review it. In a notebook, write down the gist of the question, why you missed it, and what you can do to avoid making this mistake in the future. Have separate sections by subject and sub-topic (e.g., Big Picture, Little Picture, Inference, etc.). It's not enough to just think about it and move on, or to just read the answer explanation. You have to think hard about why you specifically failed on this question. For Reading Passage questions, you must find a way to eliminate every incorrect answer. If you were stuck between two answer choices, review your work to figure out why you couldn't eliminate the wrong answer choice. If you don't do this, I guarantee you will not make progress. But if you do take this structured approach to your mistakes,you'll now have a running log of every question you missed, and your reflections on why you might've missed them. No excuses when it comes to your mistakes. Strategy 8: Guess on EveryQuestion You Don't Know You probably already know this one but if you don't, you're about to earn some serious points. The ACT has no guessing penalty. This means you have no reason not to guess and fill up every blank on your answer sheet. So before you finish the Reading section,make sure every blank question has an answer filled in.When you look at your answer sheet, you shouldn't see any blank questions. For every question you're unsure about, make sure you guess as best you can.If you can eliminate even just one answer choice, this gives you a much better shot at getting it right- from 25% to 33%. If you have no idea, just guess! You still have a 25% chance of getting it right, after all. Most people know this strategy already, so if you don't do this, you're at a serious disadvantage. Here's a bubbling tip that will save you a few minutes per section. When I first started taking tests in high school, I did what many students do: after I finished one question, I went to the bubble sheet and filled it in. Then I solved the next question. This was my pattern: finish question 1, bubble in answer 1. Finish question 2, bubble in answer 2. And so forth. This approach actually wastes a lot of time. You're distracting yourself between two distinct tasks: solving questions and bubbling in answers. This costs you time in both mental switching costs and in physically moving your hand and eyes to different areas of the test. Here's a better method: solve all your questions first in the book, and then bubble all of them in at once at the end. This has a couple of huge advantages: You focus on each task one at a time, rather than switching between two different tasks. You eliminate careless entry errors, like if you skip question 7 and bubble in question 8's answer into question 7's slot. By saving just five seconds per question, you get back three minutes and 20 seconds on the Reading section. This is huge! These extra secondscan buy you time to solve three more questions, which will dramatically improve your score. Be very careful, though, as you do not want to run out of time before you've bubbled in all your answers. Definitely make sure you bubble in your answers to that point with at least 10 minutes remaining. If the proctor calls time and you haven't bubbled in any answers yet, you're going to get a 1 on Reading! Overview: How to Raise Your Low ACT Reading Score These are the eight main strategies I have for you to improve your ACT Reading score. If you're scoring 12, you can improve it to 18.If you're scoring 20, you can boost it to 26.I guarantee you'll get a score increase, as long as you put in the right amount of work and study using the tips I've given you above. The main point is this: you need to understand where you're falling short and constantly drill those weaknesses. You also need to be thoughtful about your mistakes- in other words, don't ignore any of them. This is really important to your future. Make sure you give ACT prep the attention it deserves- before it's too late and you get a rejection letter you didn't want. If you want to go back and review any of the strategies, here's a quick listing: Strategy 1: Save Time on Reading Passages by Switching Your Reading Strategy Strategy 2:Learn to Eliminate the 3 Wrong Answers Strategy 3:Find Your Reading Skill Weaknesses and Drill Them Strategy 4: Only Use High-Quality ACT Reading Sources Strategy 5:Don't Focus On Vocab Strategy 6:Skip the Most Difficult, Time-Consuming Questions Strategy 7:Understand All Your Reading Mistakes Strategy 8: Guess on EveryQuestion You Don't Know What's Next? We have a lot more useful guides you can use to raise your ACT score. For ACT Reading, learn the#1 fundamental, most important strategy.It's an expansion of one of the strategies in this guide and certain to raise your score. Curious how to prep to get a perfect ACT Reading score? Read our in-depth guide to getting a perfect 36 on the Reading sectionfor our best tips. What's a good ACT score for you? Figure out your ACT target score todayusing our step-by-step guide. Want to improve your ACT score by 4 points? Check out our best-in-class online ACT prep classes. We guarantee your money back if you don't improve your ACT score by 4 points or more. Our classes are entirely online, and they're taught by ACT experts. If you liked this article, you'll love our classes. Along with expert-led classes, you'll get personalized homework with thousands of practice problems organized by individual skills so you learn most effectively. We'll also give you a step-by-step, custom program to follow so you'll never be confused about what to study next. Try it risk-free today:

Macbeth Quotes Explained

'Macbeth' Quotes Explained Macbeth, William Shakespeares bloodiest play, is one of the most quoted dramatic works in the English language. Memorable lines from the tragedy explore themes like reality and illusion, ambition and power, and guilt and remorse. Famous quotations from Macbeth are still recited (and sometimes spoofed) today in movies, TV shows, commercials, and even the daily news. Quotes About Reality and Illusion Fair is foul, and foul is fair:Hover through the fog and filthy air.(Act I, Scene 1) The Tragedy of Macbeth opens with an eerie, supernatural scene. Amidst thunder and lightening, three witches moan into the wind. They tell us that nothing is as it seems. Whats good (fair) is evil (foul). Whats evil is good. Everything is strangely reversed. The witches- also called weird sisters- are odd and unnatural. They speak in sing-song rhymes, but describe filth and evil. Theres an unexpected rhythm to their words. Most of  Shakespeares characters speak in iambs, with the emphasis falling on the second syllable: da-dum, da-dum. Shakespeares witches, however, chant in  trochees. The emphasis falls on the first syllable: Fair is foul, and foul is fair. This particular quote is also a paradox. By pairing opposites, the witches disrupt the natural order. Macbeth aligns himself with their twisted thinking when he echoes their words in Act I, Scene 3: So foul and fair a day I have not seen[.] Shakespeares witches are fascinating because they force us to question the natural order of things, as well as our notions about fate and free will. Appearing at key moments in Macbeth, they chant prophesies, spark Macbeths lust for the throne, and manipulate his thinking. Is this a dagger which I see before me,The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.Art thou not, fatal vision, sensibleTo feeling as to sight? Or art thou butA dagger of the mind, a false creation,Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?(Act II, Scene 1) The witches also set the tone for moral confusion and hallucinatory scenes like Macbeths encounter with a floating dagger. Here, Macbeth is preparing to murder the king when delivers this haunting soliloquy. His tortured imagination (heat-oppressed brain) conjures the illusion of the murder weapon. His soliloquy becomes a chilling apostrophe in which he speaks directly to the dagger: Come, let me clutch thee. The dagger, of course, cannot respond. Like many things in Macbeths distorted vision, its not even real. Quotes About Ambition and Power Stars, hide your fires;Let not light see my black and deep desires.(Act I, Scene 4) Macbeth is a complex and conflicted character. His comrades call him brave and worthy, but the witches prophecy has awakened a secret longing for power. These lines, spoken by Macbeth as an aside, reveal the  black and deep desires he struggles to hide. Lusting for the crown, Macbeth plots to kill the king. But, on reflection, he questions the practicality of such an action. I have no spurTo prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which oerleaps itselfAnd falls on the other.(Act I, Scene 7) Here, Macbeth acknowledges that ambition is his only motivation (spur) to commit murder. Like a horse spurred to leap too high, this much ambition can only result in downfall. Ambition is Macbeths tragic flaw, and its possible that nothing could have saved him from his fate. However, much of the blame can be placed on his wife. Power-hungry and manipulative, Lady Macbeth vows to do whatever it takes to advance her husbands murderous plan. †¦Come, you spiritsThat tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,And fill me from the crown to the toe top-fullOf direst cruelty! make thick my blood;Stop up the access and passage to remorse,That no compunctious visitings of natureShake my fell purpose, nor keep peace betweenThe effect and it! Come to my womans breasts,And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,Wherever in your sightless substancesYou wait on natures mischief!(Act I, Scene 5) In this soliloquy, Lady Macbeth braces herself for murder. She rejects Elizabethan notions of womanhood (unsex me), and begs to be rid of soft emotions and female visitings of nature (menstruation). She asks the spirits to fill her breasts with poison (gall). Womens milk is a recurring motif in Shakespeares play, representing the soft, nurturing qualities Lady Macbeth renounces. She believes that her husband is too full o the milk of human kindness (Act I, Scene 5) to kill the king. When he waffles, she tells him that she would rather murder her own infant than abandon their murderous plan. †¦I have given suck, and knowHow tender tis to love the babe that milks me:I would, while it was smiling in my face,Have pluckd my nipple from his boneless gums,And dashd the brains out, had I so sworn as youHave done to this.(Act I, Scene 7) In this shocking rebuke, Lady Macbeth attacks her husbands manhood. She implies that he must be weak- weaker than his wife, weaker than a nursing mother- if he cannot keep his vow to take the throne. Elizabethan audiences would have been repulsed by Lady Macbeths raw ambition and reversal of traditional sex roles. Just as her husband crossed moral boundaries, Lady Macbeth defied her place in society. In the 1600s, she may have appeared as weird and unnatural as the witches with their eerie incantations. Todays attitudes are very different, yet ambitious and powerful women still arouse suspicion. Critics and conspiracy theorists have used the name Lady Macbeth to deride public figures like Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard. Quotes AboutGuilt and Remorse Methought I heard a voice cry Sleep no more!Macbeth does murder sleep.†¦What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.Will all great Neptunes ocean wash this bloodClean from my hand? No, this my hand will ratherThe multitudinous seas in incarnadine,Making the green one red.(Act II, Scene 2) Macbeth speaks these lines immediately after murdering the king. To murder sleep has a double meaning. Macbeth has killed a sleeping man, and hes also killed his own serenity. Macbeth knows that because of this action, he will never be able to rest peacefully.   The guilt Macbeth feels stirs hallucinations and gruesome visions of blood. Hes shocked by the sight of his murderous hands. (They pluck out mine eyes.) In his tormented mind, his hands are soaked with so much blood, they would turn the ocean red.   Lady Macbeth shares Macbeths crime, but does not immediately show guilt.  She coldly returns the daggers to the crime scene and smears blood on the kings sleeping grooms so that they will be blamed. Seemly unruffled, she tells her husband, A little water clears us of this deed (Act II, Scene 2). Out, damned spot! out, I say! - One: two: why,then, tis time to dot. - Hell is murky! - Fie, mylord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need wefear who knows it, when none can call our power toaccount? - Yet who would have thought the old manto have had so much blood in him.†¦.The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now? - What, will these hands neer be clean? - No more othat, my lord, no more o that: you mar all withthis starting.†¦Heres the smell of the blood still: all theperfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this littlehand. Oh, oh, oh!†¦Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not sopale. - I tell you yet again, Banquos buried; hecannot come out ons grave.†¦To bed, to bed! theres knocking at the gate:come, come, come, come, give me your hand. Whatsdone cannot be undone. - To bed, to bed, to bed! (Act V, Scene 1) The king is only one of many killings during Macbeths bloody reign. To hold onto his ill-gotten crown, he orders the slaughter of his friend Banquo and the entire household of Lord Macduff, the Thane of Fife. Macbeth suffers fits of hysteria and hallucinates Banquos ghost with blood-clotted hair. But its the hard-hearted Lady Macbeth who eventually collapses under the weight of guilt, and she is the one who gives this monologue. Sleepwalking, she wrings her hands and babbles about the stain of so much spilled blood.   The phrase Out, damned spot! can seem comical to modern readers. Lady Macbeths distraught words have been used in advertisements for products ranging from household cleaners to acne medicines. But this is the raving of a woman who teeters on the brink of madness.   Parts of Lady Macbeths monologue, like the incantation of the witches, depart from the traditional iambic pentameter. In a metrical pattern called a spondee, she strings together syllables that have equal weight: Out-damned-spot-out. Since each one-syllable word is equally stressed, the emotional tension is heightened. Readers (or listeners) are more likely to feel the impact of each word. The words themselves seem nonsensical. They are non sequiturs, jumping from thought to thought. Lady Macbeth is reliving all the crimes, remembering sounds, smells, and images. One after the other, she names murder victims: the king (the old man), Macduffs wife, and Banquo. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to dayTo the last syllable of recorded time,And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!Lifes but a walking shadow, a poor playerThat struts and frets his hour upon the stageAnd then is heard no more: it is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.(Act V, Scene 5) Unable to recover from her guilt, Lady Macbeth kills herself. When this news reaches Macbeth, hes already in deep despair. Abandoned by his noblemen and knowing his own days are numbered, he delivers one of the most desolate soliloquies in the English language. In this extended metaphor, Macbeth compares life to a theatrical performance. Days on earth are as short-lived as the candles that illuminate the Elizabethan stage. Each person is nothing more than a shadow cast by that flickering light, a silly actor who struts about and then vanishes when the candle is snuffed. In this metaphor, nothing is real and nothing matters. Life is a tale told by an idiot†¦ signifying nothing. American author William Faulkner titled his novel The Sound and the Fury  after a line from Macbeths soliloquy. Poet Robert Frost borrowed a phrase for his poem, Out, Out - . Even the cartoon Simpson family embraced the metaphor with a melodramatic rendition by Homer Simpson. Ironically, Shakespeares tragedy ends soon after this somber speech. Its easy to imagine audiences blinking from the theater, wondering, Whats real? Whats illusion? Are we part of the play? Sources Garber, Marjorie. â€Å"Shakespeare and Modern Culture, Chapter One.† 10 Dec. 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/books/chapters/chapter-shakespeare.html. Excerpted from the book, Pantheon Publishers.Liner, Elaine. â€Å"Out, Damned Spot!: The Best Pop Culture References That Came from Macbeth.† 26 Sept. 2012, www.dallasobserver.com/arts/out-damned-spot-the-best-pop-culture-references-that-came-from-macbeth-7097037.Macbeth. Folger Shakespeare Library, www.folger.edu/macbeth.Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Arden. Read online at shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/index.htmlThemes in Macbeth. Royal Shakespeare Company, cdn2.rsc.org.uk/sitefinity/education-pdfs/themes-resources/edu-macbeth-themes.pdf?sfvrsn4.Wojczuk, Tana. The Good Wife – Hillary Clinton as Lady Macbeth. Guernica, 19 Jan. 2016. www.guernicamag.com/tana-wojczuk-the-good-wife-hillary-clinton-as-lady-macbeth/.

CORPORATE RESEARCH PAPER about US airways Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

CORPORATE about US airways - Research Paper Example The company’s maximum frequency is between New York, Boston and Washington D.C., where it provides hourly services. In order to diversify their operations internationally, the US Airlines decided to merge with American Airlines in February 2013. From the research it was found that if the merger is successful then it has the potential to create the largest airline in the world in terms of global market access. The deal is expected to close by the end of third quarter this year. The key shareholding pattern of the merger is that US Airways would hold 28% stake of merged company where as the American Airlines will hold the remaining 72%. It was also decided between the shareholders’ of both the companies that the merged entity would carry the name and brand of American Airlines and the holding company will be named American Airlines Group Inc. The airline company has reported operating income over USD 425 million for the year ending 2011, with net income over USD 71 millio n. The total asset of the company was found to be USD 8.34 billion for the year ending 2011. The subsidiaries of US Airways are Piedmont Airlines, Inc., Shuttle inc., PSA Airlines, Inc., US Airways Express, Material Service Company, Inc., Airways Assurance Limited, LLC, Mesa Air Group, and Potomac Air, Inc. The following table highlights the breakdown of sales assets and income of US Airways and their involvement in international trades: B. Foreign Exchange (FX) Risk Management Policy The company is centrally managed and the management actively participates in corporate governance. The company also has many subsidiaries that are located in the domestic market as well as the international markets. The subsidiaries of US Airways are Piedmont Airlines, Inc., Shuttle inc., PSA Airlines, Inc., US Airways Express, Material Service Company, Inc., Airways Assurance Limited, LLC, Mesa Air Group, and Potomac Air, Inc. In order to maintain accountability between various divisions, the Board of Directors is represented by the chairman of the company who is the most important individual regarding execution of strategic decisions taken by the Board. The chairman of the company is assisted by vice chairman and many professionals belong to different areas of expertise such as the Finance committee, labor committee, and so on. The parent company of US Airways is the US Airways Group which is headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, United States. The company operates in Aviation sector which requires fuel consumption. The underlying of fuel is the crude oil prices that are very volatile and uncertain. This exposes the company to transactional risk. Also, the company has prominent exposure in international markets which implies that US Airways operates in different currencies. Any appreciation or depreciation of home currency with respect to foreign currency may turn out to be favorable or unfavorable, ultimately exposing the company to translational risk when the company would prepare its consolidated financial statements from collecting data from different subsidiaries (Triantis, pp.558-562). In order to manage these risks the company used currency hedge and forward contracts prior to the year 2008 and reported them in their consolidated financial reports using hedge accounting at fair value of hedged assets and liabilities. C. Use of Derivatives for Funding, Investing and Other price Risk After the third quarter of 2008, US