No clue, Munch. I honestly have never really “gotten” directions.
Draw it on a piece of paper if you can’t find a flagpole.
N
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W--------E
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S
YOU
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V
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FLAGPOLE
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Which really represents:
N
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W--------E
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YOU
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V
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SUN
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==========EQUATOR==========EQUATOR==========EQUATOR==========EQUATOR==========
Okay, the flag pole and sun are south?
OK, forget the flagpole. Imagine a rock. A rock that rolls. It’s a rolling rock. On the ground.
It zips around on the ground at 1,000 mph. It starts in the East and goes to the West. So it takes 24 hours to go all the way around the Earth. When it hits an ocean, it floats. When it hits a mountain, it plows through it. Nothing can stop this rock. Got that in your mind’s eye? OK, great.
In June, it’s at the Tropic of Cancer, which runs through Mexico City, Saudi Arabia, and India. Now, if you’re in Alaska, which way would you have to look to see the zipping rock? Well, at first, you’d have to look to the East and watch it come at you. Also, a little South, right? Because it’s in Mexico and you’re in Alaska. As the day goes on, and the rock goes 'round the Earth, you’d have to go from looking South-East to just South, then South-West until you couldn’t see it anymore, right? With me so far? Where would people in Australia have to look to watch the rock? North, right? Because it’s in Mexico. They’d start the day looking North-east, then around noon, they’d be looking directly North, then they’d end their exciting rock-watching day by looking North-West.
So you sit there, watching this rock zip by you every day until you notice something. Hey…that rock’s not on the Tropic of Cancer anymore. Its orbit is a little farther south! After 3 months or so of watching this rock, you notice that it’s actually more or less on the Equator now. But each day, it’s still zipping east-to west, still taking 24 hours to go around the Earth.
In December, you get a little jealous. You barely get to see the rock anymore. It’s so far away. You get jealous of those Australians on the Tropic of Capricorn because they get to see the rock up close and personal. I mean, they’re right next to the rock’s daily track! They barely have to look to the North at all!
But it’s cool, because around Christmas time, you notice that the rock’s path starts to creep northward again. At Easter, it’s on the Equator and in June, a full one year after you started Rock-watch, it’s back on the Tropic of Cancer.
That’s exactly what the sun does. Except instead of a rock, it’s a star. And instead of being on the ground, it’s really high up in the sky. But the key thing to remember here is that the height is irrelevant! It’s still got the same ground path as our proverbial rock.
It helps explain why the days are shorter in winter, and why the sun is lower in the sky. It’s easy to see why the time zones work the way they do, too…if the rock is in Cuba, people in New York have been watching it for quite some time while people in LA are just now getting a glimpse of it. It also explains why New Yorkers can’t see an ocean sunset and why LAers can’t see an ocean sunrise.
Does that help at all?
Actually, I think Munch’s diagram did it for me. Thanks, Munch! 
Other people have already pretty much addressed the issue that the sample questions often seem a bit silly (and vary significantly in difficultly level), but as someone who has done ACT tutoring for several years now, I would recommend against reading the questions before the passage. One reason for that is simply that (counter-intuitive as it may seem), it generally takes longer: whether you look at a question, search the passage for the answer, look at another question, search the passage for an answer, etc., or try to read all the questions and then look at the passage for answers (in which case you’ll have likely forgotten a couple of the questions or their pertinent information), it’s almost always faster to just skim the passage, have a basic grasp of what information they’re trying to convey, and then you’ll be able to quickly and efficiently refer back for information as needed. The other reason not to focus on the answers first is that the science test is, as others have said, primarily a reading comprehension test: they want to know whether you can interpret a chart/ graph/ table correctly, understand the setup for and analysis of an experiment, and see if you can distinguish between competing scientific theories/ hypotheses. So rather than focus on what’s true in the real world, it is very often important to know what was presented in this specific passage.
Well I put a lot of work into that post, so when you tell your grandchildren this story, be sure to say “…and that was how Chessic Sense’s post made it all clear.”
I’ll print out your post, laminate it, and put it in my Hope Chest, Chessic Sense.
Yup. Now - what if you were south of the equator?
It did seem rather involved for a mouthwash…
North!
Why? 
Um…I don’t know. I just assumed everything would be facing the opposite if you were in another hemisphere…
Not so. If I’m on one side of a road and you’re on the other, we’re facing opposite directions. But if we hear a fire truck, we’ll both look in the same direction. Sure, one of us will look left and the other will look right, but it’s still East (or West).
That’s what you’ve got to understand. The sun is always between the two Tropics. Where it is, exactly, is dependent on the day of the year. And whether it’s east or west is dependent on the time of day. Got it?
Munch is just trying to drive home the point that the Sun is just on a really, really tall flag pole. At this time of year, the base of the pole is in Ecuador. Come December, it’ll be in Argentina and Australia.
And, more importantly, not position in a vertical sense (if we picture the Earth to be positioned such that North is basically up-ish and South is basically down-ish), but really the orientation of the observer - as in the angle they are standing due to the Earth’s curvature.
You could be in the South and orient your body (i.e. lean) as if you were standing in the North and the sun would appear to move exactly as if you were in the North.
You mean other than facing the entirely wrong direction?
While I agree that’s it’s an easy question, I have no doubt that there are plenty of people attending college who would struggle with it. And many of them will probably earn degrees. It’s not like you have to be particularly bright to go to college. I don’t even mean that as an insult or criticism really, just an observation. Many people on this board would consider a person of IQ 100 (eg. the ‘average person’) to be quite slow-witted.
And just to be a contrarian, if I were designing this question for the ACT, I would have the data in the charts give an answer contrary to the “real world” one, to basically force it to be a real analysis question, rather than just a “what do you know about astrophysics?” question.
They didn’t, but the OP’s son is running some risk by answering these type of questions based on just reading the answers rather than the whole question.
They do do that, and that’s exactly what tripped me up. My lowest score was in the science section. Not that I didn’t try reading the stuff first, but, since it was the only part of the test of which I had never seen anything like it before, I got nervous, and assumed I was misinterpreting the data.
But, since I got a 32 overall, and didn’t have much money, I didn’t bother taking it again.
If anyone wants some pictorial help, have a look at a site like this one: Day and Night World Map. From month to month you’ll be able to see the movement of the sun between the two Tropic lines (NT and ST marked on the map).