The high stakes version is rearranged and harder to understand. The gentle portrait painted by Tolstoy is smudged, blurry, and has the additional pointlessness of horses being whipped for no apparent reason. It also substitutes the word sugar for silver to describe how the snow glitters. Question 3 asks why the author used the word sugar. Well, he didn't. The test writers did, presumably so that they could add a misleading answer choice about food (?).
I hesitate to defend anything about multiple-choice standardised testing, but both the versions you posted use the word sugar (the non-test one has "lay in billows and glittered white as sugar", para 3) and the differences in the phrase look like translation differences to me... The horses are "lashed" with "knouts" in one version and beaten with whips in the other, but would the horses know the difference? If I knew what a knout was, perhaps I'd know...
