SAT Reading & Writing Practice Set - Moby-Dick (Adapted)
By the time Ishmael found himself on the deck of the Pequod, rolling out of Nantucket harbor on a
Christmas morning, he had already begun to suspect that whaling voyages drew not only oil but
meanings out of the world. The ship itself, with its scarred timbers and mixed crew—Quakers and
islanders, Africans and New Englanders—seemed a floating patchwork of faiths and hungers. Yet all
those differences were narrowed, little by little, into a single line of force by Captain Ahab’s entrance.
When the lame figure first emerged from his cabin and stamped the ivory leg that took the place of the
one Moby Dick had bitten off, the sound ran through the planks like a challenge. Ahab’s promise of a
gold doubloon nailed to the mast for the man who first sighted the “white whale” turned what should
have been a commercial voyage into a kind of crusade. Starbuck, the sober first mate, muttered that it
was blasphemous to hunt one creature for revenge when they were hired to fill their barrels; but even
he could not wholly resist the harsh magnetism of the man who spoke of Moby Dick as if the whale
carried in its hump all the wrongs of the universe that had ever stung him. (Melville, 1851)
As the months of chasing ordinary whales went on, the Pequod’s deck became a place where Ahab’s
obsession and the crew’s more practical fears interwove like the lines in a tangled harpoon tub. On calm
days, Ishmael wandered among the try-works and the whale-oil casks, listening to Pip’s mad talk of the
sea’s vast, indifferent face and watching Fedallah, the shadowy harpooneer Ahab had secretly shipped,
stand like a dark prophecy at the rail. The sight of that silent figure beside the captain, and the murmur
of Fedallah’s predictions that no rope made by mortal hands would hang Ahab until certain “hearses”
had crossed his path, made the ordinary dangers of the fishery seem almost simple by comparison.
Starbuck argued, once and again, that they were forsaking profit and duty for a madman’s quest; Stubb
and Flask grumbled more cheerfully, treating Ahab’s passion as another kind of weather they must sail
under. Only Queequeg, with his coffin ordered and decorated when he thought himself dying of fever,
seemed to stand at an angle to the whole business, as if he and Ishmael both understood that the tale
of one man’s rage would, in the end, be told by another who had watched it from a little distance.
(Melville, 1851)
When at last the white hump broke the ocean’s skin and Moby Dick’s flukes lashed the boats into
splinters, the chase that followed grew more like the working-out of a dark design than like any ordinary
hunt. On the first day, the whale stove in the bow of Ahab’s boat and vanished in a churn of foam; on the
second, the new harpoon line coiled around Fedallah and dragged him down, so that his drowned body,
lashed to the whale’s back, fulfilled part of his own prophecy by making Moby Dick the “hearse not
made by human hands.” On the third day, with the sea whitening under the whale’s wake and sharks
slicing between ship and boats, Starbuck begged Ahab to turn back and think of his wife and child,
reminding him that they had oil enough to return honourably to Nantucket. Ahab, hearing but not
yielding, answered that all visible objects were but “pasteboard masks,” and that behind the white wall
of the whale’s forehead he struck at some inscrutable malignity that had maimed him and mocked him
throughout creation. When he flung his last harpoon, the line caught around his own neck and chest,
and Moby Dick’s plunge into the depths turned his weapon into a rope and the whale into the second
hearse of “American wood” that Fedallah had foretold, as the Pequod, rammed and torn, began to sink
beneath them. (Melville, 1851)
In the wreck’s spinning wake, there was little place for reasoned judgment or orderly flight. The ship’s
boats were smashed, the men hurled into the vortex; Ahab’s final cry and the crack of timbers were
swallowed in the same swirl. Ishmael, thrown clear and left clinging to emptiness, rose and fell among
, the fragments until Queequeg’s coffin—recarved as a life-buoy when the harpooner recovered from his
illness—bobbed up from the sliding trough where the Pequod had gone down. For a day and a night he
drifted on that strange ark, while the sea, which had seemed to reflect Ahab’s fury in its storms, lay once
more with an unreadable face under the stars. It was the Rachel, the ship still searching for a lost son
whom the Pequod had failed to help recover, that finally saw the buoy and took Ishmael aboard. Later,
setting down the whole story as if to ballast his survival with meaning, Ishmael remembered both the
prophecies that had curled like smoke around Ahab’s path and the simpler facts of wood, rope, and
water that had given those prophecies their teeth. The whale itself swam off unwritten by any hand but
his scars; what remained to be pursued, in Ishmael’s pages, was not Moby Dick’s body but the question
of how far one man’s private rage may drag others into its wake before the sea closes over them all.
(Melville, 1851)
(Adapted from the novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville)
QUESTIONS 1–8: MAIN IDEA, BIG PICTURE
1. The passage as a whole primarily emphasizes
A. how Ishmael becomes the captain of the Pequod.
B. how Ahab’s obsessive quest to strike through Moby Dick’s “pasteboard mask” turns a
commercial whaling voyage into a fatal crusade, leaving Ishmael as the lone survivor to weigh
prophecy against circumstance.
C. how the crew successfully kills Moby Dick and profits from the oil.
D. how Fedallah saves the ship from destruction.
2. Across the four paragraphs, Captain Ahab is presented chiefly as a character who
A. calmly balances profit and risk.
B. allows his desire for revenge on Moby Dick to override duty, reason, and the safety of his
crew, recasting the whale as the embodiment of some cosmic wrong.
C. fears confronting the whale.
D. is easily dissuaded by Starbuck’s warnings.
3. The first paragraph’s account of Ahab’s entrance and the doubloon mainly serves to
A. show that the crew dislikes whaling.
B. establish how Ahab’s presence and promised reward narrow the ship’s diverse purposes
into a single, obsessive aim, despite Starbuck’s early misgivings.
C. prove that Ishmael is afraid of the ocean.
D. suggest that the voyage will be short.
4. Taken together, the second and third paragraphs primarily highlight
A. how ordinary whaling work continues unaffected by Ahab’s plans.
B. the way months of routine whaling gradually give way to a three-day chase in which
prophecy, symbolism, and physical danger converge around the final confrontation with Moby
Dick.
C. that Fedallah is the true captain of the ship.
D. that the crew never realizes they are in danger.
By the time Ishmael found himself on the deck of the Pequod, rolling out of Nantucket harbor on a
Christmas morning, he had already begun to suspect that whaling voyages drew not only oil but
meanings out of the world. The ship itself, with its scarred timbers and mixed crew—Quakers and
islanders, Africans and New Englanders—seemed a floating patchwork of faiths and hungers. Yet all
those differences were narrowed, little by little, into a single line of force by Captain Ahab’s entrance.
When the lame figure first emerged from his cabin and stamped the ivory leg that took the place of the
one Moby Dick had bitten off, the sound ran through the planks like a challenge. Ahab’s promise of a
gold doubloon nailed to the mast for the man who first sighted the “white whale” turned what should
have been a commercial voyage into a kind of crusade. Starbuck, the sober first mate, muttered that it
was blasphemous to hunt one creature for revenge when they were hired to fill their barrels; but even
he could not wholly resist the harsh magnetism of the man who spoke of Moby Dick as if the whale
carried in its hump all the wrongs of the universe that had ever stung him. (Melville, 1851)
As the months of chasing ordinary whales went on, the Pequod’s deck became a place where Ahab’s
obsession and the crew’s more practical fears interwove like the lines in a tangled harpoon tub. On calm
days, Ishmael wandered among the try-works and the whale-oil casks, listening to Pip’s mad talk of the
sea’s vast, indifferent face and watching Fedallah, the shadowy harpooneer Ahab had secretly shipped,
stand like a dark prophecy at the rail. The sight of that silent figure beside the captain, and the murmur
of Fedallah’s predictions that no rope made by mortal hands would hang Ahab until certain “hearses”
had crossed his path, made the ordinary dangers of the fishery seem almost simple by comparison.
Starbuck argued, once and again, that they were forsaking profit and duty for a madman’s quest; Stubb
and Flask grumbled more cheerfully, treating Ahab’s passion as another kind of weather they must sail
under. Only Queequeg, with his coffin ordered and decorated when he thought himself dying of fever,
seemed to stand at an angle to the whole business, as if he and Ishmael both understood that the tale
of one man’s rage would, in the end, be told by another who had watched it from a little distance.
(Melville, 1851)
When at last the white hump broke the ocean’s skin and Moby Dick’s flukes lashed the boats into
splinters, the chase that followed grew more like the working-out of a dark design than like any ordinary
hunt. On the first day, the whale stove in the bow of Ahab’s boat and vanished in a churn of foam; on the
second, the new harpoon line coiled around Fedallah and dragged him down, so that his drowned body,
lashed to the whale’s back, fulfilled part of his own prophecy by making Moby Dick the “hearse not
made by human hands.” On the third day, with the sea whitening under the whale’s wake and sharks
slicing between ship and boats, Starbuck begged Ahab to turn back and think of his wife and child,
reminding him that they had oil enough to return honourably to Nantucket. Ahab, hearing but not
yielding, answered that all visible objects were but “pasteboard masks,” and that behind the white wall
of the whale’s forehead he struck at some inscrutable malignity that had maimed him and mocked him
throughout creation. When he flung his last harpoon, the line caught around his own neck and chest,
and Moby Dick’s plunge into the depths turned his weapon into a rope and the whale into the second
hearse of “American wood” that Fedallah had foretold, as the Pequod, rammed and torn, began to sink
beneath them. (Melville, 1851)
In the wreck’s spinning wake, there was little place for reasoned judgment or orderly flight. The ship’s
boats were smashed, the men hurled into the vortex; Ahab’s final cry and the crack of timbers were
swallowed in the same swirl. Ishmael, thrown clear and left clinging to emptiness, rose and fell among
, the fragments until Queequeg’s coffin—recarved as a life-buoy when the harpooner recovered from his
illness—bobbed up from the sliding trough where the Pequod had gone down. For a day and a night he
drifted on that strange ark, while the sea, which had seemed to reflect Ahab’s fury in its storms, lay once
more with an unreadable face under the stars. It was the Rachel, the ship still searching for a lost son
whom the Pequod had failed to help recover, that finally saw the buoy and took Ishmael aboard. Later,
setting down the whole story as if to ballast his survival with meaning, Ishmael remembered both the
prophecies that had curled like smoke around Ahab’s path and the simpler facts of wood, rope, and
water that had given those prophecies their teeth. The whale itself swam off unwritten by any hand but
his scars; what remained to be pursued, in Ishmael’s pages, was not Moby Dick’s body but the question
of how far one man’s private rage may drag others into its wake before the sea closes over them all.
(Melville, 1851)
(Adapted from the novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville)
QUESTIONS 1–8: MAIN IDEA, BIG PICTURE
1. The passage as a whole primarily emphasizes
A. how Ishmael becomes the captain of the Pequod.
B. how Ahab’s obsessive quest to strike through Moby Dick’s “pasteboard mask” turns a
commercial whaling voyage into a fatal crusade, leaving Ishmael as the lone survivor to weigh
prophecy against circumstance.
C. how the crew successfully kills Moby Dick and profits from the oil.
D. how Fedallah saves the ship from destruction.
2. Across the four paragraphs, Captain Ahab is presented chiefly as a character who
A. calmly balances profit and risk.
B. allows his desire for revenge on Moby Dick to override duty, reason, and the safety of his
crew, recasting the whale as the embodiment of some cosmic wrong.
C. fears confronting the whale.
D. is easily dissuaded by Starbuck’s warnings.
3. The first paragraph’s account of Ahab’s entrance and the doubloon mainly serves to
A. show that the crew dislikes whaling.
B. establish how Ahab’s presence and promised reward narrow the ship’s diverse purposes
into a single, obsessive aim, despite Starbuck’s early misgivings.
C. prove that Ishmael is afraid of the ocean.
D. suggest that the voyage will be short.
4. Taken together, the second and third paragraphs primarily highlight
A. how ordinary whaling work continues unaffected by Ahab’s plans.
B. the way months of routine whaling gradually give way to a three-day chase in which
prophecy, symbolism, and physical danger converge around the final confrontation with Moby
Dick.
C. that Fedallah is the true captain of the ship.
D. that the crew never realizes they are in danger.
