SAT Reading & Writing Practice Set - Ethan Frome (Adapted)
Long before the smash of the sled against the elm, Ethan Frome had learned how a winter could fix a
man in place. He had come back from a brief term at a technical school to nurse his sick parents and
keep up the bare farm at Starkfield; by the time they were in their graves, he had married Zeena, his
cousin, more out of loneliness and gratitude for her help than out of any clear hope for joy. Zeena’s
quickness in noticing symptoms had turned, over the years, into a catalogue of illnesses of her own,
and the house that might once have been a refuge became a place padded with bottles, drafts, and
complaints. When Mattie Silver, a poor relation with no training beyond her willingness to work, came
to live with them as a kind of hired cousin, Ethan felt, for the first time in years, that the kitchen lamp lit
more than a circle of chores. Mattie’s laugh, her clumsy grace on the sledding hill, and her eagerness to
make the worn furniture look cheerful awakened in him not only desire but a painful sense of what his
life had lacked. The sight of Mattie’s red scarf against the snow and her pleasure in small outings to the
church sociable seemed, to Ethan, like pieces of another world dropped into Starkfield’s drifted roads,
and he walked beside her with the double feeling that he must protect her and that he could not bear to
see her go. (Wharton, 1911)
Zeena’s decision that Mattie must indeed go came on an evening when the doctor in Bettsbridge had
pronounced that she needed a hired girl “who knows what’s what,” and that Mattie was not strong
enough to be of use. Ethan, who had secretly imagined escaping to the West with Mattie by borrowing
money on the lumber he had promised to sell, found himself blocked at every turn: his request for an
advance from the Hales died on his lips when he saw his own hardship reflected in their kindness, and
his calculations collapsed under the weight of unpaid accounts and a mortgage that would not move.
Zeena returned from Bettsbridge with new medicines and a grim firmness, announcing that a woman
named Mrs. Hale could recommend a girl and that Mattie must leave on the morrow’s train. The small
supper that followed, with Zeena counting out pills and Mattie bending over her sewing, had for Ethan
the unreality of a scene already fading into memory even as he lived it. When he went up to bed that
night, the thought that this was his last evening under the same roof with Mattie pressed on him with a
physical ache, yet the only act of rebellion he could manage was to lie awake and whisper her name
into the darkness. (Wharton, 1911)
The next day’s drive to the station became, under Mattie’s suggestion, a delay rather than a farewell.
Instead of going straight to the train, they turned toward the sledding hill where the village boys had
been making “coast” all winter. They took one run together for the pleasure of the speed, and when the
sled reached the bottom Mattie, sitting before Ethan with her hair blown back, turned and asked in a
low voice whether he would take her down again, this time steering straight for the great elm at the foot
of the slope. If they could not live together, she said, they could at least die together, and the thought of
going back alone to Zeena’s kitchen seemed to Ethan more like a death than the one she proposed. He
hesitated, seeing for an instant not the tree but Zeena’s face, watchful at the window, yet the sense of a
narrow, closing path pushed him on. They seated themselves again, changed places so that Ethan took
the front, and launched the sled. The snow hissed under the runners; the dark trunk rose before them;
and then there was a sound like the crack of a branch in intense frost. When sight and sound came
back, there was no peace of the grave, only a mangled stillness in which the hill, the elm, and the sky
kept their places while Ethan and Mattie lay broken at the bottom. (Wharton, 1911)
Years later, when the unnamed engineer who narrates the tale followed Ethan through the storm to the
farmhouse, he found that the wish to “never be parted” had been granted in a form neither lover had
, imagined. In the low, smoke-darkened kitchen, the tall, stooping man whose limp the village had
explained a hundred ways sat between two querulous women. The sharp-voiced figure bustling about
the stove was Zeena, whose “sickness” had hardened into a kind of managing health; the huddled
shape in the rocker, with a whining, complaining tone that echoed Zeena’s, was Mattie, her spine injured
beyond repair by the sled’s glancing blow. Mrs. Hale, the neighbour who later tried to explain it all to the
engineer, said that it was a pity Mattie hadn’t died; if she had, Ethan might have made a new start
somewhere instead of dragging two invalid women through Starkfield winters that had already done
their work on him. To the engineer, looking from the worn furniture to the faces bent like weather-beaten
fences, it seemed that the Frome farmhouse had become a kind of living grave, where duty, desire, and
accident had frozen together into a life as fixed and colourless as the snow-filled landscape outside.
(Wharton, 1911)
(Adapted from the novel Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton)
QUESTIONS 1–8: MAIN IDEA, BIG PICTURE
1. The passage as a whole primarily emphasizes
A. how Ethan’s clever financial planning frees him from Starkfield.
B. how Ethan’s sense of duty, poverty, and isolation traps him between Zeena and Mattie,
leading to a desperate act that leaves all three bound together in a bleak parody of the escape
he imagined.
C. how the engineer narrator reforms Starkfield society.
D. how Zeena’s illness is miraculously cured before the accident.
2. Across the four paragraphs, Ethan is presented chiefly as a character who
A. easily chooses his own happiness over obligations.
B. dreams of change but repeatedly finds himself unable to act against the weight of
responsibility and circumstance, until his one reckless choice only deepens his entrapment.
C. cares more about money than about people.
D. remains indifferent to Mattie’s fate.
3. The first paragraph’s description of Ethan’s life before Mattie’s arrival mainly serves to
A. show that he is already happily married to Zeena.
B. establish his pattern of self-sacrifice and emotional starvation, so that Mattie’s presence
appears as both a source of joy and a reminder of what he has missed.
C. prove that he dislikes Starkfield winters.
D. suggest that his parents urged him to leave the farm.
4. Taken together, the second and third paragraphs primarily highlight
A. how Zeena and Mattie work together to persuade Ethan to move West.
B. the collapsing of Ethan’s practical plans for escape and the transformation of a farewell
drive into a suicide attempt that turns their wish to be together into lifelong injury.
C. that Ethan intends to sue Zeena for divorce.
D. that Mattie wishes to marry the village doctor.
Long before the smash of the sled against the elm, Ethan Frome had learned how a winter could fix a
man in place. He had come back from a brief term at a technical school to nurse his sick parents and
keep up the bare farm at Starkfield; by the time they were in their graves, he had married Zeena, his
cousin, more out of loneliness and gratitude for her help than out of any clear hope for joy. Zeena’s
quickness in noticing symptoms had turned, over the years, into a catalogue of illnesses of her own,
and the house that might once have been a refuge became a place padded with bottles, drafts, and
complaints. When Mattie Silver, a poor relation with no training beyond her willingness to work, came
to live with them as a kind of hired cousin, Ethan felt, for the first time in years, that the kitchen lamp lit
more than a circle of chores. Mattie’s laugh, her clumsy grace on the sledding hill, and her eagerness to
make the worn furniture look cheerful awakened in him not only desire but a painful sense of what his
life had lacked. The sight of Mattie’s red scarf against the snow and her pleasure in small outings to the
church sociable seemed, to Ethan, like pieces of another world dropped into Starkfield’s drifted roads,
and he walked beside her with the double feeling that he must protect her and that he could not bear to
see her go. (Wharton, 1911)
Zeena’s decision that Mattie must indeed go came on an evening when the doctor in Bettsbridge had
pronounced that she needed a hired girl “who knows what’s what,” and that Mattie was not strong
enough to be of use. Ethan, who had secretly imagined escaping to the West with Mattie by borrowing
money on the lumber he had promised to sell, found himself blocked at every turn: his request for an
advance from the Hales died on his lips when he saw his own hardship reflected in their kindness, and
his calculations collapsed under the weight of unpaid accounts and a mortgage that would not move.
Zeena returned from Bettsbridge with new medicines and a grim firmness, announcing that a woman
named Mrs. Hale could recommend a girl and that Mattie must leave on the morrow’s train. The small
supper that followed, with Zeena counting out pills and Mattie bending over her sewing, had for Ethan
the unreality of a scene already fading into memory even as he lived it. When he went up to bed that
night, the thought that this was his last evening under the same roof with Mattie pressed on him with a
physical ache, yet the only act of rebellion he could manage was to lie awake and whisper her name
into the darkness. (Wharton, 1911)
The next day’s drive to the station became, under Mattie’s suggestion, a delay rather than a farewell.
Instead of going straight to the train, they turned toward the sledding hill where the village boys had
been making “coast” all winter. They took one run together for the pleasure of the speed, and when the
sled reached the bottom Mattie, sitting before Ethan with her hair blown back, turned and asked in a
low voice whether he would take her down again, this time steering straight for the great elm at the foot
of the slope. If they could not live together, she said, they could at least die together, and the thought of
going back alone to Zeena’s kitchen seemed to Ethan more like a death than the one she proposed. He
hesitated, seeing for an instant not the tree but Zeena’s face, watchful at the window, yet the sense of a
narrow, closing path pushed him on. They seated themselves again, changed places so that Ethan took
the front, and launched the sled. The snow hissed under the runners; the dark trunk rose before them;
and then there was a sound like the crack of a branch in intense frost. When sight and sound came
back, there was no peace of the grave, only a mangled stillness in which the hill, the elm, and the sky
kept their places while Ethan and Mattie lay broken at the bottom. (Wharton, 1911)
Years later, when the unnamed engineer who narrates the tale followed Ethan through the storm to the
farmhouse, he found that the wish to “never be parted” had been granted in a form neither lover had
, imagined. In the low, smoke-darkened kitchen, the tall, stooping man whose limp the village had
explained a hundred ways sat between two querulous women. The sharp-voiced figure bustling about
the stove was Zeena, whose “sickness” had hardened into a kind of managing health; the huddled
shape in the rocker, with a whining, complaining tone that echoed Zeena’s, was Mattie, her spine injured
beyond repair by the sled’s glancing blow. Mrs. Hale, the neighbour who later tried to explain it all to the
engineer, said that it was a pity Mattie hadn’t died; if she had, Ethan might have made a new start
somewhere instead of dragging two invalid women through Starkfield winters that had already done
their work on him. To the engineer, looking from the worn furniture to the faces bent like weather-beaten
fences, it seemed that the Frome farmhouse had become a kind of living grave, where duty, desire, and
accident had frozen together into a life as fixed and colourless as the snow-filled landscape outside.
(Wharton, 1911)
(Adapted from the novel Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton)
QUESTIONS 1–8: MAIN IDEA, BIG PICTURE
1. The passage as a whole primarily emphasizes
A. how Ethan’s clever financial planning frees him from Starkfield.
B. how Ethan’s sense of duty, poverty, and isolation traps him between Zeena and Mattie,
leading to a desperate act that leaves all three bound together in a bleak parody of the escape
he imagined.
C. how the engineer narrator reforms Starkfield society.
D. how Zeena’s illness is miraculously cured before the accident.
2. Across the four paragraphs, Ethan is presented chiefly as a character who
A. easily chooses his own happiness over obligations.
B. dreams of change but repeatedly finds himself unable to act against the weight of
responsibility and circumstance, until his one reckless choice only deepens his entrapment.
C. cares more about money than about people.
D. remains indifferent to Mattie’s fate.
3. The first paragraph’s description of Ethan’s life before Mattie’s arrival mainly serves to
A. show that he is already happily married to Zeena.
B. establish his pattern of self-sacrifice and emotional starvation, so that Mattie’s presence
appears as both a source of joy and a reminder of what he has missed.
C. prove that he dislikes Starkfield winters.
D. suggest that his parents urged him to leave the farm.
4. Taken together, the second and third paragraphs primarily highlight
A. how Zeena and Mattie work together to persuade Ethan to move West.
B. the collapsing of Ethan’s practical plans for escape and the transformation of a farewell
drive into a suicide attempt that turns their wish to be together into lifelong injury.
C. that Ethan intends to sue Zeena for divorce.
D. that Mattie wishes to marry the village doctor.
