SAT Reading & Writing Practice Set - Uncle Tom's Cabin (Adapted)
When Tom was first sold away from the Kentucky farm, he had told himself that God’s will might yet be
worked out along the river, that a faithful man could carry some small comfort wherever he was sent.
At the St. Clare house in New Orleans, little Eva’s trust and affection had seemed to prove him right: the
child who read the Bible to him in the arbor and spoke so easily of heaven softened the hearts of more
than one grown person, as if simple goodness might undo what chains had done. But Eva’s early death,
and then her father’s sudden stabbing before he could sign the paper to free Tom, broke that hopeful
line of cause and consequence. Miss Ophelia went back North with Eva’s memory; Marie St. Clare kept
her own comfort and let the estate be sold; and Tom, who had gone on believing that kindly masters
and pious feeling might be enough, found himself chained for the journey to Simon Legree’s plantation,
where kindness was counted as weakness and piety as an insult. (Stowe, 1852)
At Legree’s place on the Red River, the house itself seemed built out of neglect and hard usage. The
fields stretched wide, and the gangs that worked them moved under the lash of overseers whose only
care was the number of bales at season’s end. Legree, coarse in dress and speech, had no patience for
the sort of religion that had drawn Eva to Tom; he wanted a man who would drive other slaves, not one
who read the Bible to them by torchlight. When Tom refused to whip a fellow worker at Legree’s
command, the owner’s dislike hardened into something more personal. The slave who would not help
him use fear to rule must instead be made an example of what fear could do. Yet even after the first
brutal beating, as Tom lay scarcely able to move, he still murmured comfort to the others and urged
Cassy and the younger girl Emmeline to hold to such scraps of hope and faith as they could, even if their
hope took the form of planning how to get away. (Stowe, 1852)
Cassy’s story, told in snatches during stolen minutes in the gin-house loft, would have tested the
patience of any creed that tried to find order in suffering. Sold again and again, parted from children she
would never see grown, at last driven to smother a newborn rather than have it torn from her arms and
sent “down river,” she had abandoned the God of sermons who seemed always to be on the master’s
side. To her, Legree’s plantation was not a trial but a verdict: proof that the world belonged to the strong
and the cruel. Tom did not argue the point as a theologian might; he listened, and answered with the
only evidence he had left—that a man could still choose not to help evil, and could, in his small circle,
carry another’s burden for a little while. It was Tom, not any white preacher, who suggested that Cassy
and Emmeline slip into the garret spaces of the great house and make Legree half-believe his own place
haunted, until the chance came to escape altogether. Cassy, who had come to see piety as another
chain, found herself strangely moved by a faith that could urge her to run and yet refuse to hate the man
who had made running necessary. (Stowe, 1852)
When the escape had succeeded and Legree, wild with frustration, demanded to know where his
missing property had gone, Tom’s choice was as stark as any Cassy had faced. He could speak and save
his own body at the cost of theirs, or he could hold his peace and let the blows fall. Legree’s two chief
hands, Sambo and Quimbo, beat him until the bones in his back and ribs seemed to give way, stopping
only when Legree saw that further blows would buy no information. Tom, near death, told the men who
had whipped him that he forgave them and prayed they might yet find a better master than Legree—the
only kind of blessing he could imagine for them on that ground. When George Shelby, the young man
from Kentucky, finally arrived with money in his hand and freedom in his intention, it was too late to
redeem Tom’s life. He knelt by the dying man instead, and in the shadow of the shed where Tom had
been beaten, promised that no man on his father’s place would ever wear chains again. The system that
, had sent Tom from one owner to another still stood; yet Tom’s refusal to betray the fugitives, and the
impression his death left on both the men who beat him and the boy who had come too late to save
him, suggested that even where the law counted human beings as property, another kind of reckoning
was underway. (Stowe, 1852)
(Adapted from the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe)
QUESTIONS 1–8: MAIN IDEA, BIG PICTURE
1. The passage as a whole primarily emphasizes
A. how Eva’s and St. Clare’s deaths lead Tom to lose all interest in faith.
B. how Tom’s steadfast faith and refusal to participate in cruelty shape the choices of Cassy,
Emmeline, Legree’s overseers, and George Shelby.
C. how Legree’s efficient business practices improve conditions on his plantation.
D. how Cassy’s escape plan fails and leads to Tom’s punishment.
2. Across the four paragraphs, Tom is presented primarily as someone who
A. begins as a rebellious figure and slowly comes to accept slavery as inevitable.
B. comforts others but avoids making any difficult decisions himself.
C. holds to a form of Christian faith that refuses both violent revenge and active complicity,
even when that stance costs him his life.
D. tries to win Legree’s favor in order to gain his own freedom.
3. The first paragraph’s account of Tom’s time with Eva and St. Clare mainly serves to
A. suggest that slavery is harmless when masters are kind.
B. show that even “better” versions of slavery rest on unstable goodwill that can be swept away
by death and debt.
C. prove that Tom was happier at Legree’s plantation than in Kentucky.
D. argue that Tom should have run away from St. Clare.
4. Taken together, the second and third paragraphs develop the idea that
A. Legree’s plantation utterly destroys every trace of belief and hope among the enslaved
people.
B. Tom’s faith and Cassy’s bitterness both arise from ignorance of slavery’s realities.
C. Cassy’s rejection of God and Tom’s continued belief collide and then partly converge as they
work together to resist Legree in different ways.
D. Emmeline plays no real part in the events at Legree’s plantation.
5. A central theme of the passage is that
A. slavery becomes morally acceptable if owners are polite.
B. a system that treats humans as property corrupts both “kind” and cruel masters and forces
enslaved people into impossible choices.
C. suffering always makes people more religious.
D. physical violence alone can overthrow injustice.
When Tom was first sold away from the Kentucky farm, he had told himself that God’s will might yet be
worked out along the river, that a faithful man could carry some small comfort wherever he was sent.
At the St. Clare house in New Orleans, little Eva’s trust and affection had seemed to prove him right: the
child who read the Bible to him in the arbor and spoke so easily of heaven softened the hearts of more
than one grown person, as if simple goodness might undo what chains had done. But Eva’s early death,
and then her father’s sudden stabbing before he could sign the paper to free Tom, broke that hopeful
line of cause and consequence. Miss Ophelia went back North with Eva’s memory; Marie St. Clare kept
her own comfort and let the estate be sold; and Tom, who had gone on believing that kindly masters
and pious feeling might be enough, found himself chained for the journey to Simon Legree’s plantation,
where kindness was counted as weakness and piety as an insult. (Stowe, 1852)
At Legree’s place on the Red River, the house itself seemed built out of neglect and hard usage. The
fields stretched wide, and the gangs that worked them moved under the lash of overseers whose only
care was the number of bales at season’s end. Legree, coarse in dress and speech, had no patience for
the sort of religion that had drawn Eva to Tom; he wanted a man who would drive other slaves, not one
who read the Bible to them by torchlight. When Tom refused to whip a fellow worker at Legree’s
command, the owner’s dislike hardened into something more personal. The slave who would not help
him use fear to rule must instead be made an example of what fear could do. Yet even after the first
brutal beating, as Tom lay scarcely able to move, he still murmured comfort to the others and urged
Cassy and the younger girl Emmeline to hold to such scraps of hope and faith as they could, even if their
hope took the form of planning how to get away. (Stowe, 1852)
Cassy’s story, told in snatches during stolen minutes in the gin-house loft, would have tested the
patience of any creed that tried to find order in suffering. Sold again and again, parted from children she
would never see grown, at last driven to smother a newborn rather than have it torn from her arms and
sent “down river,” she had abandoned the God of sermons who seemed always to be on the master’s
side. To her, Legree’s plantation was not a trial but a verdict: proof that the world belonged to the strong
and the cruel. Tom did not argue the point as a theologian might; he listened, and answered with the
only evidence he had left—that a man could still choose not to help evil, and could, in his small circle,
carry another’s burden for a little while. It was Tom, not any white preacher, who suggested that Cassy
and Emmeline slip into the garret spaces of the great house and make Legree half-believe his own place
haunted, until the chance came to escape altogether. Cassy, who had come to see piety as another
chain, found herself strangely moved by a faith that could urge her to run and yet refuse to hate the man
who had made running necessary. (Stowe, 1852)
When the escape had succeeded and Legree, wild with frustration, demanded to know where his
missing property had gone, Tom’s choice was as stark as any Cassy had faced. He could speak and save
his own body at the cost of theirs, or he could hold his peace and let the blows fall. Legree’s two chief
hands, Sambo and Quimbo, beat him until the bones in his back and ribs seemed to give way, stopping
only when Legree saw that further blows would buy no information. Tom, near death, told the men who
had whipped him that he forgave them and prayed they might yet find a better master than Legree—the
only kind of blessing he could imagine for them on that ground. When George Shelby, the young man
from Kentucky, finally arrived with money in his hand and freedom in his intention, it was too late to
redeem Tom’s life. He knelt by the dying man instead, and in the shadow of the shed where Tom had
been beaten, promised that no man on his father’s place would ever wear chains again. The system that
, had sent Tom from one owner to another still stood; yet Tom’s refusal to betray the fugitives, and the
impression his death left on both the men who beat him and the boy who had come too late to save
him, suggested that even where the law counted human beings as property, another kind of reckoning
was underway. (Stowe, 1852)
(Adapted from the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe)
QUESTIONS 1–8: MAIN IDEA, BIG PICTURE
1. The passage as a whole primarily emphasizes
A. how Eva’s and St. Clare’s deaths lead Tom to lose all interest in faith.
B. how Tom’s steadfast faith and refusal to participate in cruelty shape the choices of Cassy,
Emmeline, Legree’s overseers, and George Shelby.
C. how Legree’s efficient business practices improve conditions on his plantation.
D. how Cassy’s escape plan fails and leads to Tom’s punishment.
2. Across the four paragraphs, Tom is presented primarily as someone who
A. begins as a rebellious figure and slowly comes to accept slavery as inevitable.
B. comforts others but avoids making any difficult decisions himself.
C. holds to a form of Christian faith that refuses both violent revenge and active complicity,
even when that stance costs him his life.
D. tries to win Legree’s favor in order to gain his own freedom.
3. The first paragraph’s account of Tom’s time with Eva and St. Clare mainly serves to
A. suggest that slavery is harmless when masters are kind.
B. show that even “better” versions of slavery rest on unstable goodwill that can be swept away
by death and debt.
C. prove that Tom was happier at Legree’s plantation than in Kentucky.
D. argue that Tom should have run away from St. Clare.
4. Taken together, the second and third paragraphs develop the idea that
A. Legree’s plantation utterly destroys every trace of belief and hope among the enslaved
people.
B. Tom’s faith and Cassy’s bitterness both arise from ignorance of slavery’s realities.
C. Cassy’s rejection of God and Tom’s continued belief collide and then partly converge as they
work together to resist Legree in different ways.
D. Emmeline plays no real part in the events at Legree’s plantation.
5. A central theme of the passage is that
A. slavery becomes morally acceptable if owners are polite.
B. a system that treats humans as property corrupts both “kind” and cruel masters and forces
enslaved people into impossible choices.
C. suffering always makes people more religious.
D. physical violence alone can overthrow injustice.
