PSAT Reading — literary passages: fiction, poetry, drama

The PSAT/NMSQT Reading and Writing section draws its short passages from four subject areas, and literature is one of them: a few sentences of a novel, a handful of lines of a poem, an exchange from a play or a paragraph of memoir, each followed by a single question. Literary excerpts ask for a different kind of attention than informational prose. The answer often turns on a character's manner rather than a stated fact, on a word used in an older or less common sense, or on the way a narrator's comment tilts the meaning of a scene.

This material trains exactly that. Each of the twelve questions quotes its excerpt in full, from American works published before 1931: Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, Willa Cather's O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Jack London's The Call of the Wild, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, two poems by Emily Dickinson and a scene from Susan Glaspell's play Trifles. The questions follow the skills of the Information and Ideas and Craft and Structure domains: the central idea of an excerpt, what a narrator or character reveals, what a word means in its sentence, what a sentence does in the whole, the overall structure and the main purpose. No prior knowledge of the books is needed; every answer can be justified from the words on the screen, and each explanation shows which words decide it and why the other choices fail.

The flashcards collect the reading moves behind the questions: holding both halves of a contrast, reading stage directions, following a poem across its line breaks, telling a sentence's content from its function. The printable written work asks for short explanations of eight further excerpts, from Chopin's sea to Twain's comparison with doctors, and is checked against a reference answer. The oral exam puts the same skills into conversation: the examiner quotes an excerpt, asks one question at a time and asks you to point to the words that support your answer.

Practice material written by Zestly for students preparing for the PSAT/NMSQT; it is not produced or endorsed by the College Board or NMSC.

  • State the central idea of a short literary excerpt without narrowing it to one detail
  • Infer a character's or speaker's attitude from action, dialogue and stage directions
  • Choose the meaning of a word as it is used in its sentence, not its most common sense
  • Describe the function of a sentence and the overall structure of an excerpt
  • Identify the main purpose of a passage of literary nonfiction
  • Support every answer with specific words from the excerpt

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the Information and Ideas and Craft and Structure domains described in the College Board's Assessment Framework for the Digital SAT Suite. Excerpts from American works published before 1931 (public domain in the US): Wharton, Twain, Cather, Chopin, London, Thoreau, Dickinson, Glaspell.

Sample question

The following excerpt is from Edith Wharton's 1911 novel Ethan Frome. The narrator describes the first time he saw the title character in a small New England town. “It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the ‘natives’ were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two.” According to the narrator, what chiefly made the man stand out?

See the answer

A careless, powerful look that he kept in spite of his lameness

The narrator says it was “not so much his great height” that marked him (the local people were all tall) but “the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness.” The idea that he was friendly is contradicted by “bleak and unapproachable,” and the idea that he was the oldest man in town is contradicted by the narrator's surprise that he was only fifty-two.

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