Narrator's Initial Reaction
From "The Letter on the Kitchen Table"
When my mother left the letter on the kitchen table, she had not bothered to seal it. The envelope sat propped against the salt shaker, my name written in her looping, deliberate hand, the flap loose as an open hand offering nothing in particular.
I did not read it for three days. I told myself I was being patient, but the truth was that I already knew what it said, or thought I did, and I was not ready to be told. The letter waited. The salt shaker waited. The morning light moved across the kitchen and back without comment.
On the third evening I sat down with a glass of water and opened it. The handwriting was hers, but the voice was younger than the woman I had known. She had been my age when she wrote it, I realized — twenty-four, the year before I was born. She had kept the letter for thirty years and then, in her last week, had set it on the table for me as if it were a saucer of milk for a stray cat.
Question
Answer choices
- The narrator had been told to wait three days.
- The narrator was waiting for permission to open it.
- The narrator could not read the mother's handwriting.
- The narrator believed the letter's contents would be painful to confirm.
D Correct answer: D) The narrator believed the letter's contents would be painful to confirm.
The narrator says, "I told myself I was being patient, but the truth was that I already knew what it said, or thought I did, and I was not ready to be told." The reluctance is emotional avoidance, not a practical obstacle.
On the ACT, reading questions reward returning to the passage and verifying. The wrong answers are written to sound plausible from memory, but they distort one specific phrase from the passage. Re-reading the relevant lines is what catches the distortion.
Predicting an answer in your own words before looking at the choices, then matching the prediction to the closest option, is the single most reliable technique on ACT Reading. Choosing from the choices first lets the test's wrong-answer writers anchor your judgment.
The underlying rule
On "best explained by" questions, look for the answer that the passage directly supports. Permission, instructions, and practical obstacles all sound reasonable but are not what the passage actually says.
Why each wrong answer is wrong
- A) The narrator had been told to wait three days.: This option distorts a specific phrase from the passage or applies a true statement that does not actually answer the question being asked.
- B) The narrator was waiting for permission to open it.: This option distorts a specific phrase from the passage or applies a true statement that does not actually answer the question being asked.
- C) The narrator could not read the mother's handwriting.: This option distorts a specific phrase from the passage or applies a true statement that does not actually answer the question being asked.
Study tip
When a question asks "why," locate the passage's own explanation rather than guessing at plausible motives. The answer is almost always stated, not implied.
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