SAT Reading Section

COMPARING THE SAT & ACT READING SECTIONS

Although the sentence completions and short passages were eliminated from the SAT Reading Section, the remaining long reading passages look more or less the same as they always have, with a few exceptions.
As part of the plan to make the reading texts more complex and therefore more similar to what you might read in school, the new SAT reading will include excerpts from classic texts from the Western canon, including stories and essays by famous authors, U.S. founding documents, and other historically important works.
Because these are often quite old, they include a lot more challenging language.

There are 52 questions in the Evidence Based Reading Test and students have 65 minutes to respond to queries based on four sections of reading passages.
Evidence questions require you to indicate which part of the passage supports your answer to a previous question. These questions are tricky, and if you're planning to take the new SAT, you'll definitely need to study how to approach them.
Questions are in chronological order. This is one aspect of the SAT reading that isn't changing and that really sets it apart from the ACT.
Two of the five passages on the redesigned SAT will cover scientific topics, and these will require you to decipher and respond to charts and figures.

The big difference between the ACT and the SAT remains how you need to budget time. While the SAT is more focused on analyzing specific points in the passage and understanding how the author constructs an argument, the ACT is more about reading comprehension.
Randomly ordered questions. The SAT reading tells you where to look for the answers to most questions, but one of the biggest challenges on the ACT reading is finding the information you need. The questions are ordered randomly and often do not give line numbers, which can make finding specific details very tricky.
Less time per question. The strict time constraints are the other big difficulty most students face with the ACT reading.
You have roughly eight and half minutes per ten question passage for the ACT reading, compared to 13 minutes per 10-11 question passage on the SAT.