Marta Coll and colleagues’ 2010 Mediterranean Sea biodiversity census reported approximately 17,000 species, nearly double the number reported in Carlo Bianchi and Carla Morri’s 2000 census—a difference only partly attributable to the description of new invertebrate species in the interim. Another factor is that the morphological variability of microorganisms is poorly understood compared to that of vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, and algae, creating uncertainty about how to evaluate microorganisms as species. Researchers’ decisions on such matters therefore can be highly consequential. Indeed, the two censuses reported similar counts of vertebrate, plant, and algal species, suggesting that ______blank

A common assumption among art historians is that the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century displaced the painted portrait in the public consciousness. The diminishing popularity of the portrait miniature, which coincided with the rise of photography, seems to support this claim. However, photography’s impact on the portrait miniature may be overstated. Although records from art exhibitions in the Netherlands from 1820 to 1892 show a decrease in the number of both full-sized and miniature portraits submitted, this trend was established before the invention of photography.

Believing that living in an impractical space can heighten awareness and even improve health, conceptual artists Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa designed an apartment building in Japan to be more fanciful than functional. A kitchen counter is chest-high on one side and knee-high on the other; a ceiling has a door to nowhere. The effect is disorienting but invigorating: after four years there, filmmaker Nobu Yamaoka reported significant health benefits.

In her 2021 article “Throwaway History: Towards a Historiography of Ephemera,” scholar Anne Garner discusses John Johnson (1882–1956), a devoted collector of items intended to be discarded, including bus tickets and campaign pamphlets. Johnson recognized that scholarly institutions considered his expansive collection of ephemera to be worthless—indeed, it wasn’t until 1968, after Johnson’s death, that Oxford University’s Bodleian Library acquired the collection, having grasped the items’ potential value to historians and other researchers. Hence, the example of Johnson serves to ______blank

In the United States, firms often seek incentives from municipal governments to expand to those municipalities. A team of political scientists hypothesized that municipalities are much more likely to respond to firms and offer incentives if expansions can be announced in time to benefit local elected officials than if they can’t. The team contacted officials in thousands of municipalities, inquiring about incentives for a firm looking to expand and indicating that the firm would announce its expansion on a date either just before or just after the next election. 

The most recent iteration of the immersive theater experience Sleep No More, which premiered in New York City in 2011, transforms its performance space—a five-story warehouse—into a 1930s-era hotel. Audience members, who wander through the labyrinthine venue at their own pace and follow the actors as they play out simultaneous, interweaving narrative loops, confront the impossibility of experiencing the production in its entirety. The play’s refusal of narrative coherence thus hinges on the sense of spatial fragmentation that the venue’s immense and intricate layout generates.

Utah is home to Pando, a colony of about 47,000 quaking aspen trees that all share a single root system. Pando is one of the largest single organisms by mass on Earth, but ecologists are worried that its growth is declining in part because of grazing by animals. The ecologists say that strong fences could prevent deer from eating young trees and help Pando start thriving again.

Although many transposons, DNA sequences that move within an organism’s genome through shuffling or duplication, have become corrupted and inactive over time, those from the long interspersed nuclear elements (LINE) family appear to remain active in the genomes of some species. In humans, they are functionally important within the hippocampus, a brain structure that supports complex cognitive processes. When the results of molecular analysis of two species of octopus—an animal known for its intelligence—were announced in 2022, the confirmation of a LINE transposon in Octopus vulgaris and Octopus bimaculoides genomes prompted researchers to hypothesize that that transposon family is tied to a species’ capacity for advanced cognition.

The following text is from Jane Austen’s 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility. Elinor lives with her younger sisters and her mother, Mrs. Dashwood.

Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother, and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood which must generally have led to imprudence. She had an excellent heart;—her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn; and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught.

To make sure they got the nutrition they needed while in space, the astronauts of NASA’s Gemini missions were given menus for three meals a day (meals A, B, and C) on a four-day rotating schedule. Looking at the sample of food items from these menus, a student notes that on day 1, the menu included ______blank

Biologists have predicted that birds’ feather structures vary with habitat temperature, but this hadn’t been tested in mountain environments. Ornithologist Sahas Barve studied feathers from 249 songbird species inhabiting different elevations—and thus experiencing different temperatures—in the Himalaya Mountains. He found that feathers of high-elevation species not only have a greater proportion of warming downy sections to flat and smooth sections than do feathers of low-elevation species, but high-elevation species’ feathers also tend to be longer, providing a thicker layer of insulation.

High levels of public uncertainty about which economic policies a country will adopt can make planning difficult for businesses, but measures of such uncertainty have not tended to be very detailed. Recently, however, economist Sandile Hlatshwayo analyzed trends in news reports to derive measures not only for general economic policy uncertainty but also for uncertainty related to specific areas of economic policy, like tax or trade policy. One revelation of her work is that a general measure may not fully reflect uncertainty about specific areas of policy, as in the case of the United Kingdom, where general economic policy uncertainty ______blank

The Jordanelle Dam was built on the Provo River in Utah in 1992. Earth scientist Adriana E. Martinez and colleagues tracked changes to the environment on the banks of the river downstream of the dam, including how much grass and forest cover were present. They concluded that the dam changed the flow of the river in ways that benefited grass plants but didn’t benefit trees.

Geographer Adebayo Oluwole Eludoyin and his colleagues surveyed small-scale farmers in three locations in Ondo State, Nigeria—which has mountainous terrain in the north, an urbanized center, and coastal terrain in the south—to learn more about their practices, like the types of crops they mainly cultivated. In some regions, female farmers were found to be especially prominent in the cultivation of specific types of crops and even constituted the majority of farmers who cultivated those crops; for instance, ______blank

While attending school in New York City in the 1980s, Okwui Enwezor encountered few works by African artists in exhibitions, despite New York’s reputation as one of the best places to view contemporary art from around the world. According to an arts journalist, later in his career as a renowned curator and art historian, Enwezor sought to remedy this deficiency, not by focusing solely on modern African artists, but by showing how their work fits into the larger context of global modern art and art history.

Researchers recently found that disruptions to an enjoyable experience, like a short series of advertisements during a television show, often increase viewers’ reported enjoyment. Suspecting that disruptions to an unpleasant experience would have the opposite effect, the researchers had participants listen to construction noise for 30 minutes and anticipated that those whose listening experience was frequently interrupted with short breaks of silence would thus ______blank

“Loon Point” is a 1912 poem by Amy Lowell. In the poem, which presents a nighttime scene on a body of water, Lowell describes an element of nature as an active participant in the experience, writing, ______blank

Employing high-performance liquid chromatography—a process that uses pressurized water to separate material into its component molecules—astrochemist Yashiro Oba and colleagues analyzed two samples of the Murchison meteorite that landed in Australia as well as soil from the landing zone of the meteorite to determine the concentrations of various organic molecules. By comparing the relative concentrations of types of molecules known as nucleobases in the Murchison meteorite with those in the soil, the team concluded that there is evidence that the nucleobases in the Murchison meteorite formed in space and are not the result of contamination on Earth.

Paleontologists searching for signs of ancient life have found many fossilized specimens of prehistoric human ancestors, including several from the Pleistocene era discovered in a geological formation in the Minatogawa quarry in Japan. However, to study the emergence of the earliest multicellular organisms to appear on Earth, researchers must turn elsewhere, such as to the Ediacaran geological formation at Mistaken Point in Canada. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the 146-hectare reserve contains more than 10,000 fossils that together document a critical moment in evolutionary history.

The following text is adapted from Johanna Spyri’s 1881 novel Heidi (translated by Elisabeth Stork in 1915). Eight-year-old Heidi and her friend’s grandmother are looking at some illustrated books.

Heidi had come and was looking with wondering eyes at the splendid pictures in the large books, that Grandmama was showing her. Suddenly she screamed aloud, for there on the picture she saw a peaceful flock grazing on a green pasture. In the middle a shepherd was standing, leaning on his crook. The setting sun was shedding a golden light over everything. With glowing eyes Heidi devoured the scene.

Many of William Shakespeare’s tragedies address broad themes that still appeal to today’s audiences. For instance, Romeo and Juliet, which is set in the Italy of Shakespeare’s time, tackles the themes of parents versus children and love versus hate, and the play continues to be read and produced widely around the world. But understanding Shakespeare’s so-called history plays can require a knowledge of several centuries of English history. Consequently, ______blank

The following text is adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1849 story “Landor’s Cottage.”

During a pedestrian trip last summer, through one or two of the river counties of New York, I found myself, as the day declined, somewhat embarrassed about the road I was pursuing. The land undulated very remarkably; and my path, for the last hour, had wound about and about so confusedly, in its effort to keep in the valleys, that I no longer knew in what direction lay the sweet village of B——, where I had determined to stop for the night.

Mosasaurs were large marine reptiles that lived in the Late Cretaceous period, approximately 100 million to 66 million years ago. Celina Suarez, Alberto Pérez-Huerta, and T. Lynn Harrell Jr. examined oxygen-18 isotopes in mosasaur tooth enamel in order to calculate likely mosasaur body temperatures and determined that mosasaurs were endothermic—that is, they used internal metabolic processes to maintain a stable body temperature in a variety of ambient temperatures. Suarez, Pérez-Huerta, and Harrell claim that endothermy would have enabled mosasaurs to include relatively cold polar waters in their range.

Accomplished printmaker and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) used her art to explore the Black experience in the United States. In a paper for an art history class, a student claims that Catlett had a particular talent for unifying various artistic traditions and styles in her work.

A student is examining a long, challenging poem that was initially published in a quarterly journal without explanatory notes, then later republished in a stand-alone volume containing only that poem and accompanying explanatory notes written by the poet. The student asserts that the explanatory notes were included in the republication primarily as a marketing device to help sell the stand-alone volume.

In 1934 physicist Eugene Wigner posited the existence of a crystal consisting entirely of electrons in a honeycomb-like structure. The so-called Wigner crystal remained largely conjecture, however, until Feng Wang and colleagues announced in 2021 that they had captured an image of one. The researchers trapped electrons between two semiconductors and then cooled the apparatus, causing the electrons to settle into a crystalline structure. By inserting an ultrathin sheet of graphene above the crystal, the researchers obtained an impression—the first visual confirmation of the Wigner crystal.

O Pioneers! is a 1913 novel by Willa Cather. In the novel, Cather portrays Alexandra Bergson as having a deep emotional connection to her natural surroundings: ______blank

In the early nineteenth century, some Euro-American farmers in the northeastern United States used agricultural techniques developed by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people centuries earlier, but it seems that few of those farmers had actually seen Haudenosaunee farms firsthand. Barring the possibility of several farmers of the same era independently developing techniques that the Haudenosaunee people had already invented, these facts most strongly suggest that ______blank

The following text is adapted from María Cristina Mena’s 1914 short story “The Vine-Leaf.”

It is a saying in the capital of Mexico that Dr. Malsufrido carries more family secrets under his hat than any archbishop.

The doctor’s hat is, appropriately enough, uncommonly capacious, rising very high, and sinking so low that it seems to be supported by his ears and eyebrows, and it has a furry look, as if it had been brushed the wrong way, which is perhaps what happens to it if it is ever brushed at all. When the doctor takes it off, the family secrets do not fly out like a flock of parrots, but remain nicely bottled up beneath a dome of old and highly polished ivory.

Linguist Deborah Tannen has cautioned against framing contentious issues in terms of two highly competitive perspectives, such as pro versus con. According to Tannen, this debate-driven approach can strip issues of their complexity and, when used in front of an audience, can be less informative than the presentation of multiple perspectives in a noncompetitive format. To test Tannen’s hypothesis, students conducted a study in which they showed participants one of three different versions of local news commentary about the same issue. Each version featured a debate between two commentators with opposing views, a panel of three commentators with various views, or a single commentator.

Some businesses believe that when employees are interrupted while doing their work, they experience a decrease in energy and productivity. However, a team led by Harshad Puranik, who studies management, has found that interruptions by colleagues can have a social component that increases employees’ sense of belonging, resulting in greater job satisfaction that benefits employees and employers. Therefore, businesses should recognize that ______blank

In 1534 CE, King Henry VIII of England split with the Catholic Church and declared himself head of the Church of England, in part because Pope Clement VII refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Two years later, Henry VIII introduced a policy titled the Dissolution of the Monasteries that by 1540 had resulted in the closure of all Catholic monasteries in England and the confiscation of their estates. Some historians assert that the enactment of the policy was primarily motivated by perceived financial opportunities.

To understand how expressions of anger in reviews of products affect readers of those reviews, business scholar Dezhi Yin and colleagues measured study participants’ responses to three versions of the same negative review—a control review expressing no anger, a review expressing a high degree of anger, and a review expressing a low degree of anger. Reviewing the data, a student concludes that the mere presence of anger in a review may not negatively affect readers’ perceptions of the review, but a high degree of anger in a review does worsen readers’ perceptions of the review.

The following text is adapted from Countee Cullen’s 1926 poem “Thoughts in a Zoo.” 

They in their cruel traps, and we in ours,  

Survey each other’s rage, and pass the hours  

Commiserating each the other’s woe,  

To mitigate his own pain’s fiery glow.  

Man could but little proffer in exchange  

Save that his cages have a larger range.  

That lion with his lordly, untamed heart  

Has in some man his human counterpart,

Some lofty soul in dreams and visions wrapped,  

But in the stifling flesh securely trapped.

Studying tools unearthed at a cave site on the western coast of Italy, archaeologist Paola Villa and colleagues have determined that prehistoric Neanderthal groups fashioned them from shells of clams that they harvested from the seafloor while wading or diving or that washed up on the beach. Clamshells become thin and eroded as they wash up on the beach, while those on the seafloor are smooth and sturdy, so the research team suspects that Neanderthals prized the tools made with seafloor shells. However, the team also concluded that those tools were likely more challenging to obtain, noting that ______blank

“To You” is an 1856 poem by Walt Whitman. In the poem, Whitman suggests that readers, whom he addresses directly, have not fully understood themselves, writing, ______blank

Research suggests that REM sleep in animals is homeostatically regulated: animals compensate for periods of REM sleep deprivation by increasing subsequent REM sleep. When on land, fur seals get enough REM sleep, but during the weeks they’re in the water, they get almost none. In a study of fur seals’ sleep habits, researchers recorded the REM sleep (as a percentage of baseline) of fur seals once they had returned to land. They concluded that REM sleep may not be homeostatically regulated in fur seals, citing as evidence the fact that the seals in the study ______blank

Urbanization, industrialization, and the warming climate create thermal pollution (excess heat) in the shallow subsurface soil. Susanne A. Benz and colleagues analyzed thousands of sites on three continents under one scenario in which surface temperature remains at the current level and under another in which the surface reaches the maximum plausible temperature. They then categorized each site according to the percentage of local home heating needs that could be met using this excess subsurface heat. The team concluded that if surface temperature approaches the maximum plausible level, the percentage of sites where thermal pollution could feasibly contribute to meeting home heating needs will increase.

Considering a large sample of companies, economics experts Maria Guadalupe, Julie Wulf, and Raghuram Rajan assessed the number of managers and leaders from different departments who reported directly to a chief executive officer (CEO). According to the researchers, the findings suggest that across the years analyzed, there was a growing interest among CEOs in connecting with more departments in their companies.

Roasted green chiles are a popular ingredient in Southwestern cuisine, but the traditional roasting method of burning propane is not environmentally friendly. To see if solar power could provide a better alternative, engineer Kenneth Armijo and his team roasted batches of green chiles using between 38 and 42 heliostats, which are devices that concentrate sunlight. The team was successful in reaching the same roasting temperature used in traditional propane roasting, but they found that propane yielded faster results. While the fastest solar-roasted green chiles took six minutes, batches using propane took only four. Armijo hypothesizes that they can reduce the roasting time for solar-roasted green chiles by using more heliostats. 

In superfluorescence, electrical charges known as dipoles emit light in synchronized bursts so intense that they are visible to the eye. Until recently, this phenomenon has only been observed at extremely cold temperatures because dipoles cannot synchronize at higher temperatures. But in a study, Melike Biliroglu and colleagues observed superfluorescence at room temperature in thin films made of perovskite and other similarly crystalline materials; the researchers propose that the formation of shock-absorbing quasiparticles called polarons in the material protects dipoles from thermal interference.

O Pioneers! is a 1913 novel by Willa Cather. In the novel, Cather depicts Alexandra Bergson as a person who takes comfort in understanding the world around her: ______blank

Electric companies that use wind turbines rely on weather forecasts to predict the maximum amount of power, in megawatt-hours (MWh), they can generate using wind so that they can determine how much they’ll need to generate from other sources. When winds are stronger than they were forecast to be, however, the predicted maximum amount of electricity wind turbines could generate will be too low. For example, the graph shows that for the West region, the winds were ______blank

The domestic sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) descends from a wild plant native to South America. It also populates the Polynesian Islands, where evidence confirms that Native Hawaiians and other Indigenous peoples were cultivating the plant centuries before seafaring first occurred over the thousands of miles of ocean separating them from South America. To explain how the sweet potato was first introduced in Polynesia, botanist Pablo Muñoz-Rodríguez and colleagues analyzed the DNA of numerous varieties of the plant, concluding that Polynesian varieties diverged from South American ones over 100,000 years ago. Given that Polynesia was peopled only in the last three thousand years, the team concluded that ______blank

Microbes that live in shallow lakes and ponds produce methane, a harmful greenhouse gas. Ecologist Ralf Aben and his team wanted to see how different types of shallow-water plants might affect the amount of methane that escapes into the atmosphere. Aben’s team set up some water tanks with soil and microbes from local ponds. Some tanks had a type of underwater plant that grows in the soil called watermilfoil. Other tanks had either duckweed, a type of plant that floats on the water’s surface, or algae. Aben and his team found that tanks with duckweed and algae released higher levels of methane than tanks with watermilfoil did. This finding suggests that ______blank

Sandra Cisneros’s 1984 novella The House on Mango Street made a lasting impact on US literature. Its depiction of Mexican American culture inspired later authors to examine their own heritage within their fictional works. Also influential was the book’s portrayal of the main character, Esperanza, during a pivotal year of her youth. This insightful depiction of a preteen girl encouraged authors who, like Cisneros herself, are Latina to use fictional works to examine experiences from their own youth.

Scent is tightly interwoven with our daily lives, often evoking significant memories and important social events. This connection is of growing interest to archaeologists who hope to use it to better understand ancient rituals, trade, social hierarchies, and medicine. Although the speed at which odor molecules dissipate makes identifying ancient scents challenging, advancements in biomolecular technologies show promise in unlocking ancient aromas from preserved artifacts. Archaeological studies making use of these advancements may provide new insights into past societies.

Scholars have noted that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writings were likely influenced in part by his marriage to Zelda Fitzgerald, but many don’t recognize Zelda as a writer in her own right. Indeed, Zelda authored several works herself, such as the novel Save Me the Waltz and numerous short stories. Thus, those who primarily view Zelda as an inspiration for F. Scott’s writings ______blank

Neural networks are computer models intended to reflect the organization of human brains and are often used in studies of brain function. According to an analysis of 11,000 such networks, Rylan Schaeffer and colleagues advise caution when drawing conclusions about brains from observations of neural networks. They found that when attempting to mimic grid cells (brain cells used in navigation), while 90% of the networks could accomplish navigation-related tasks, only about 10% of those exhibited any behaviors similar to those of grid cells. But even this approximation of grid-cell activity has less to do with similarity between the neural networks and biological brains than it does with the rules programmed into the networks.

In high concentrations, hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) is typically toxic to many plants. Frederick D. Dooley and colleagues wanted to understand what effects low doses of H₂S might have on plant growth. They treated bean, corn, wheat, and pea seeds with various concentrations (measured in micromoles per liter) of H₂S and tracked the germination of those seeds along with the germination of untreated seeds. Treatment with particular concentrations of H₂S was associated with accelerated germination: for example, ______blank

Rivers rich in sediment appear yellow, while increases in red algae make rivers appear red. To track things like the sediment or algae content of large US rivers, John R. Gardner and colleagues used satellite data to determine the dominant visible wavelengths of light measured for various segments of these rivers. The researchers classified wavelengths of 495 nanometers (nm) and below as red, wavelengths between 495 and 560 nm as blue, and wavelengths of 560 nm and above as yellow. The researchers concluded that for the Missouri River, segments flowing into lakes tend to carry more sediment than those flowing out of lakes.  

In their book Smart Pricing, Jagmohan Raju and Z. John Zhang consider musicians’ use of the nontraditional “pay as you wish” pricing model. This model generally offers listeners the choice to pay more or less than a suggested price for a song or album—or even to pay nothing at all. As the authors note, that’s the option most listeners chose for an album by the band Harvey Danger. Only about 1% opted to pay for the album, resulting in earnings below the band’s expectations. But the authors also discuss musician Jane Siberry, who saw significant earnings from her “pay as you wish” online music store as a result of many listeners choosing to pay more than the store’s suggested prices. Hence, the “pay as you wish” model may ______blank

One theory behind human bipedalism speculates that it originated in a mostly ground-based ancestor that practiced four-legged “knuckle-walking,” like chimpanzees and gorillas do today, and eventually evolved into moving upright on two legs. But recently, researchers observed orangutans, another relative of humans, standing on two legs on tree branches and using their arms for balance while they reached for fruits. These observations may suggest that ______blank

Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories about detective Sherlock Holmes were published between 1887 and 1927. They have inspired countless successful adaptations, including comic strips, movies, and a television series Sherlock Hound, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, who is celebrated for his animated movies. Until 2014, these stories were copyrighted. The right to adapt was only available to those who could afford the copyright fee and gain approval from the strict copyright holders of Doyle’s estate. Some journalists predict that the number of Sherlock Holmes adaptations is likely to increase since the end of copyright means that ______blank

“Mrs. Spring Fragrance” is a 1912 short story by Sui Sin Far. In the story, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, a Chinese immigrant living in Seattle, is traveling in California. In letters to her husband and friend, she demonstrates her concern for what’s happening at her home in Seattle while she is away: ______blank

Plants like potatoes, tomatoes, and soybeans are susceptible to bacterial wilt disease caused by the bacteria Ralstonia solanacearum. A multinational team of scientists led by Zhong Wei studied whether other microbes in the soil might influence the degree to which plants are affected by the disease. The team sampled soil surrounding individual tomato plants over time and compared the results of plants that became diseased with those that remained healthy. They concluded that the presence of certain microbes in the soil might explain the difference between healthy and diseased plants.

The following text is adapted from Edith Nesbit’s 1906 novel The Railway Children.

Mother did not spend all her time in paying dull [visits] to dull ladies, and sitting dully at home waiting for dull ladies to pay [visits] to her. She was almost always there, ready to play with the children, and read to them, and help them to do their home-lessons. Besides this she used to write stories for them while they were at school, and read them aloud after tea, and she always made up funny pieces of poetry for their birthdays and for other great occasions.

Flint artifacts dating to 800,000 to 1,000,000 years ago have been recovered from the Evron Quarry in Israel. Likely created by the hominin Homo erectus, the artifacts have no visual features suggesting that they were exposed to fire, leading some scholars to conclude that these hominins had not acquired control of fire. But Zane Stepka and colleagues recently used a new method to determine whether these artifacts had been exposed to temperatures above 400°C (the typical temperature campfires reach) and concluded that the hominins who inhabited the site may have had control of fire. 

Although it’s clear that Mars once had liquid water on its surface, astronomers have debated whether the evidence of ancient water reflects a prolonged phase of warm, wet conditions—the so-called wet and warm scenario—or a brief period of melting in an otherwise consistently frozen environment. Researchers Benjamin T. Cardenas and Michael P. Lamb recently added to this debate by using data from NASA and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter to map the topography of what is now a large basin in Mars’s northern hemisphere. Cardenas and Lamb concluded that the wet and warm scenario is likely correct.  

The Land of Enchantment is a 1906 travel book by Lilian Whiting. In the book, which describes the experience of traveling through the southwestern United States by train, Whiting reflects on the escape from everyday life that such a journey provides: ______blank 

The table shows data from paleontologist Angélica Torices and colleagues’ 2021 study of two sets of dinosaur tracks preserved in a fossilized lake bed in Spain. The tracks, referred to as La Torre 6A and La Torre 6B, were left by two individual theropods (dinosaurs that walked on two legs). The team’s findings suggest that of the two theropods, the one that left the La Torre 6B tracks had a higher maximum mean speed, ______blank

Paleontologist Lucas E. Fiorelli and colleagues have reported the discovery at a mine in Brazil of several egg clutches, partially preserved single eggs, and egg shells from the Late Cretaceous period. The researchers have concluded that the area was once a nesting and breeding site for titanosaurs, a group of sauropod dinosaurs. The finding is significant given the previous lack of known nesting sites in northern regions of South America, which led many paleontologists to assume that titanosaurs migrated south to lay eggs.

Songbirds learn to respond to and imitate their species’ songs from an early age. With each generation, small differences are introduced that result in distinct variations—called dialects—among geographically isolated populations of the same species. A research study examined whether twelve-day-old Ficedula hypoleuca (pied flycatcher) nestlings prefer local dialects over the unfamiliar dialects of nonlocal F. hypoleuca populations: the more begging calls the nestlings made in response to a song, the stronger their preference. The researchers found that nestlings produced more begging calls in response to their own dialect than to nonlocal dialects. Since song preference plays a role in songbird mate selection, the finding suggests that ______blank

In the 1980s, many musicians and journalists in the English-speaking world began to draw attention to music from around the globe—such as mbaqanga from South Africa and quan họ from Vietnam—that can’t be easily categorized according to British or North American popular music genres, typically referring to such music as “world music.” While some scholars have welcomed this development for bringing diverse musical forms to prominence in countries where they’d previously been overlooked, musicologist Su Zheng claims that the concept of world music homogenizes highly distinct traditions by reducing them all to a single category.

One challenge when researching whether holding elected office changes a person’s behavior is the problem of ensuring that the experiment has an appropriate control group. To reveal the effect of holding office, researchers must compare people who hold elected office with people who do not hold office but who are otherwise similar to the office-holders. Since researchers are unable to control which politicians win elections, they therefore ______blank

Philadelphia’s Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra, founded by Jeri Lynne Johnson, performs classical music, from well-known compositions by Beethoven to contemporary works by Jessie Montgomery. For the orchestra’s iConduct! program, Johnson invites community members to learn some basic elements of conducting and then experience conducting the Black Pearl orchestra themselves.

One aspect of in-person shopping that online shopping can’t replicate is the opportunity to touch a product before buying it. Does this difference matter? In an experiment, researchers asked one group of participants to touch a mug and a toy, while another group was prohibited from touching the two items. The participants were then asked how much money they’d pay for the items. People who got to touch the items were willing to pay much more money for them than were people who weren’t allowed to touch the items. This finding suggests that ______blank

Sense and Sensibility is an 1811 novel by Jane Austen. In the novel, Austen describes Marianne Dashwood’s ability to persuade others of the rightness of her artistic judgments, as is evident when Marianne visits with John Willoughby, a potential suitor: ______blank

The Navajo Nation has the largest land area of any tribal nation in the United States: over 27,000 square miles in the Southwest. Because this area is so huge and its communities are located at various elevations, the people of the Navajo Nation can experience different climate conditions depending on where they live. For example, in July, ______blank

German theater practitioner Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) believed that theater should elicit an intellectual rather than an emotional response from audiences, provoking them to consider social and political realities that extend beyond the characters and events depicted onstage. Brecht’s influence can be seen in English playwright Caryl Churchill’s 1979 play Cloud 9: although the play sometimes invites empathetic reactions, it primarily works to engage audiences in an interrogation of patriarchy and colonialism, which it does by placing audiences at a distance, thereby encouraging them to ______blank

Several scholars have argued that conditions in England in the late ninth through early eleventh centuries—namely, burgeoning literacy amid running conflicts between England’s Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and Danish invaders—were especially conducive to the production of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, and they have dated the poem’s composition accordingly. It is not inconceivable that Beowulf emerged from such a context, but privileging contextual fit over the linguistic evidence of an eighth- or even seventh-century composition requires a level of justification that thus far has not been presented.

The following text is adapted from Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray is taking his first look at a portrait that Hallward has painted of him.

Dorian passed listlessly in front of his picture and turned towards it. When he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time. He stood there motionless and in wonder, dimly conscious that Hallward was speaking to him, but not catching the meaning of his words. The sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. He had never felt it before.

Rows in table may not add up to 100 due to rounding.

Over the past two hundred years, the percentage of the population employed in the agricultural sector has declined in both France and the United States, while employment in the service sector (which includes jobs in retail, consulting, real estate, etc.) has risen. However, this transition happened at very different rates in the two countries. This can be seen most clearly by comparing the employment by sector in both countries in ______blank

For centuries, the widespread acknowledgment of the involvement of the cerebellum—a dense brain structure in vertebrates—in coordinating motor control in humans has hindered recognition of other possible functions of the structure. Neuroscience research from the last two decades now suggests that the cerebellum regulates emotion and social behavior, and recent research by Ilaria Carta and colleagues has identified a pathway connecting the cerebellum to a center for motivation and reward processing known as the ventral tegmental area (VTA).

A student is researching monthly hours of sunshine in different cities in Alaska. When comparing trends in Anchorage and Fairbanks, the student concludes that the two cities show a similar pattern in the monthly hours of sunshine from April to September.

Archaeologist Petra Vaiglova, anthropologist Xinyi Liu, and their colleagues investigated the domestication of farm animals in China during the Bronze Age (approximately 2000 to 1000 BCE). By analyzing the chemical composition of the bones of sheep, goats, and cattle from this era, the team determined that wild plants made up the bulk of sheep’s and goats’ diets, while the cattle’s diet consisted largely of millet, a crop cultivated by humans. The team concluded that cattle were likely raised closer to human settlements, whereas sheep and goats were allowed to roam farther away.

Archaeologists and historians used to believe that the Maya civilization during its Classic period (roughly 250–900) lacked agricultural marketplaces. One reason for this belief was that these scholars misunderstood the ecology of the regions the Maya inhabited. Marketplaces typically emerge because different individuals or groups want to trade resources they control for resources they don’t control. Scholars seriously underestimated the ecological diversity of the Maya landscape and thus assumed that ______blank

In West Africa, jalis have traditionally been keepers of information about family histories and records of important events. They have often served as teachers and advisers, too. New technologies may have changed some aspects of the role today, but jalis continue to be valued for knowing and protecting their peoples’ stories.

In 2014, Amelia Quon and her team at NASA set out to build a helicopter capable of flying on Mars. Because Mars’s atmosphere is only one percent as dense as Earth’s, the air of Mars would not provide enough resistance to the rotating blades of a standard helicopter for the aircraft to stay aloft. For five years, Quon’s team tested designs in a lab that mimicked Mars’s atmospheric conditions. The craft the team ultimately designed can fly on Mars because its blades are longer and rotate faster than those of a helicopter of the same size built for Earth.

As a monthly newsletter formed in 1969 by a group of Asian American students at the University of California, Los Angeles, Gidra helped raise awareness about social and political issues concerning the Asian American community on campus and at large. The newsletter had an expansive reach for a publication of its kind: around 4,000 copies were published each month. A student writing a history paper, however, hypothesizes that Gidra’s influence cannot be measured by the number of newsletters published monthly alone.

Copper had been mined in the US for thousands of years, but large-scale commercial mining of copper took off starting in the late 1800s. This was due to several factors. Technological advancements in the mining industry led to improvements in the production of copper. This helped the country keep up with the growing number of people wanting to buy copper starting in the 1890s. At the same time, the growth of the railroad system made the transportation of copper in large batches much easier. Several states saw rapid growth in the production of this resource, for example: ______blank

Modern dog breeds are largely the result of 160 years of owners crossbreeding certain dogs in order to select for particular physical appearances. Owners often say that some breeds are also more likely than others to have particular personality traits—basset hounds are affectionate; boxers are easy to train—but Kathleen Morrill and colleagues found through a combination of owner surveys and DNA sequencing of 2,000 dogs that while physical traits are predictably heritable among purebred dogs, behavior varies widely among dogs of the same breed.

In a study of the mechanisms underlying associative memory—or the ability to learn and remember connections between inherently unrelated things—neuroscientists Kei Igarashi, Jasmine Chavez, and others presented mice with memory tests. The team discovered that fan cells, a type of cell found in the medial temporal lobe of the brain, are necessary for the acquisition of new associative memories. They also found that fan cell activity requires dopamine, a chemical the brain produces in response to pleasure and rewards. Consequently, receiving a reward should likely help to ______blank

Although military veterans make up a small proportion of the total population of the United States, they occupy a significantly higher proportion of the jobs in the civilian government. One possible explanation for this disproportionate representation is that military service familiarizes people with certain organizational structures that are also reflected in the civilian government bureaucracy, and this familiarity thus ______blank

Scientists studying Mars long thought the history of its crust was relatively simple. One reason for this is that geologic and climate data collected by a spacecraft showed that the crust was largely composed of basalt, likely as a result of intense volcanic activity that brought about a magma ocean, which then cooled to form the planet’s surface. A study led by Valerie Payré focused on additional information—further analysis of data collected by the spacecraft and infrared wavelengths detected from Mars’s surface—that revealed the presence of surprisingly high concentrations of silica in certain regions on Mars. Since a planetary surface that formed in a mostly basaltic environment would be unlikely to contain large amounts of silica, Payré concluded that ______blank

For many years, the only existing fossil evidence of mixopterid eurypterids—an extinct family of large aquatic arthropods known as sea scorpions and related to modern arachnids and horseshoe crabs—came from four species living on the paleocontinent of Laurussia. In a discovery that expands our understanding of the geographical distribution of mixopterids, paleontologist Bo Wang and others have identified fossilized remains of a new mixopterid species, Terropterus xiushanensis, that lived over 400 million years ago on the paleocontinent of Gondwana.

Archaeologists have held that the Casarabe culture, which emerged in the southwestern Amazon basin in the first millennium CE, was characterized by a sparse, widely distributed population and little intervention in the surrounding wilderness. Recently, however, archaeologist Heiko Prümers and colleagues conducted a study of the region using remote-sensing technology that enabled them to create three-dimensional images of the jungle-covered landscape from above, and the researchers concluded that the Casarabe people developed a form of urbanism in the Amazon basin.

“Mr. Cornelius Johnson, Office-Seeker” is a 1900 short story by Paul Laurence Dunbar. In the story, the narrator describes Mr. Cornelius Johnson’s appearance as conveying his exaggerated sense of his importance: ______blank

Archaeologists have been debating the origin of a rare form of lead found in Shang dynasty (1766–1046 BCE) bronze artifacts since its presence was discovered in China in the 1990s. Different researchers have proposed theories on which regions of the world would have had the raw materials containing the specific lead in these artifacts, but no conclusive evidence has been presented. What is intriguing is that bronze artifacts from China dated after the Shang dynasty do not contain this form of lead, suggesting that ______blank

Nan Gao and her team conducted multiple surveys to determine participants’ levels of comfort in a room where the temperature was regulated by a commercial climate control system. Participants filled out surveys several times a day to indicate their level of comfort on a scale from −3negative 3 (very cold) to +3positive 3 (very hot), with 0 indicating neutral (neither warm nor cool), and to indicate how they would prefer the temperature to be adjusted. The table shows three participants’ responses in one of the surveys. According to the table, all three participants wanted the room to be cooler, ______blank 

Algae living within the tissues of corals play a critical role in keeping corals, and the marine ecosystems they are part of, thriving. Some coral species appear brown in color when healthy due to the algae colonies living in their tissues. In the event of an environmental stressor, the algae can die or be expelled, causing the corals to appear white. To recover the algae, the bleached corals then begin to produce bright colors, which block intense sunlight, encouraging the light-sensitive algae to recolonize the corals.

To investigate the effect of lizard predation on spider populations, a student in a biology class placed spiders in two enclosures, one with lizards and one without, and tracked the number of spiders in the enclosures for 30 days. The student concluded that the reduction in the spider population count in the enclosure with lizards by day 30 was entirely attributable to the presence of the lizards.

Herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs could grow more than 100 feet long and weigh up to 80 tons, and some researchers have attributed the evolution of sauropods to such massive sizes to increased plant production resulting from high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the Mesozoic era. However, there is no evidence of significant spikes in carbon dioxide levels coinciding with relevant periods in sauropod evolution, such as when the first large sauropods appeared, when several sauropod lineages underwent further evolution toward gigantism, or when sauropods reached their maximum known sizes, suggesting that ______blank

In a research paper, a student criticizes some historians of modern African politics, claiming that they have evaluated Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, primarily as a symbol rather than in terms of his actions.

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is projected to maintain operation until at least 2030, but it has already revolutionized high-resolution imaging of solar-system bodies in visible and ultraviolet (UV) light wavelengths, notwithstanding that only about 6% of the bodies imaged by the HST are within the solar system. NASA researcher Cindy L. Young and colleagues assert that a new space telescope dedicated exclusively to solar-system observations would permit an extensive survey of minor solar-system bodies and long-term UV observation to discern how solar-system bodies change over time. Young and colleagues’ recommendation therefore implies that the HST ______blank

Having written the impassioned call to arms “Letter to the Spanish Americans” in 1791, Peruvian intellectual Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán is often considered a forerunner for the independence movements in Latin America. But Viscardo’s role in history would have remained insignificant were it not for Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda, who was handed the unpublished letter after Viscardo’s death. Miranda not only helped circulate the letter, but his edits and footnotes to the text position Miranda as a central figure in the text’s creation.

Geoglyphs are large-scale designs of lines or shapes created in a natural landscape. The Nazca Lines were created in the Nazca Desert in Peru by several Indigenous civilizations over a period of many centuries. Peruvian archaeologist Johny Isla specializes in these geoglyphs. At a German exhibit about the Nazca Lines, he saw an old photograph of a large geoglyph of a whalelike figure and was surprised that he didn’t recognize it. Isla returned to Peru and used a drone to search a wide area, looking for the figure from the air. This approach suggests that Isla thought that if he hadn’t already seen it, the whalelike geoglyph ______blank

To dye wool, Navajo (Diné) weaver Lillie Taylor uses plants and vegetables from Arizona, where she lives. For example, she achieved the deep reds and browns featured in her 2003 rug In the Path of the Four Seasons by using Arizona dock roots, drying and grinding them before mixing the powder with water to create a dye bath. To intensify the appearance of certain colors, Taylor also sometimes mixes in clay obtained from nearby soil.

Some Astyanax mexicanus, a river-dwelling fish found in northeast Mexico, have colonized caves in the region. Although there is little genetic difference between river and cave A. mexicanus and all members of the species can emit the same sounds, biologist Carole Hyacinthe and colleagues found that the context and significance of those sounds vary by location—e.g., the click that river-dwelling A. mexicanus use to signal aggression is used by cave dwellers when foraging—and the acoustic properties of cave fish sounds show some cave-specific variations as well. Hyacinthe and colleagues note that differences in sonic communication could accumulate to the point of inhibiting interbreeding among fish from different locations, suggesting that ______blank

Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt have argued that experiencing awe—a sensation of reverence and wonder typically brought on by perceiving something grand or powerful—can enable us to feel more connected to others and thereby inspire us to act more altruistically. Keltner, along with Paul K. Piff, Pia Dietze, and colleagues, claims to have found evidence for this effect in a recent study where participants were asked to either gaze up at exceptionally tall trees in a nearby grove (reported to be a universally awe-inspiring experience) or stare at the exterior of a nearby, nondescript building. After one minute, an experimenter deliberately spilled a box of pens nearby.

Many plants lose their leaf color when exposed to kanamycin, an antibiotic produced by some soil microorganisms. Spelman College biologist Mentewab Ayalew and her colleagues hypothesized that plants’ response to kanamycin exposure involves altering their uptake of metals, such as iron and zinc. The researchers grew two groups of seedlings of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, half of which were exposed to kanamycin and half of which were a control group without exposure to kanamycin, and measured the plants’ metal content five days after germination.

Many insects are iridescent, or have colors that appear to shimmer and change when seen from different angles. Scientists have assumed that this feature helps to attract mates but could also attract predators. But biologist Karin Kjernsmo and a team had the idea that the shifting appearance of colors might actually make it harder for other animals to see iridescent insects. To test this idea, the team put beetle forewings on leaves along a forest path and then asked human participants to look for them. Some of the wings were naturally iridescent. Others were painted with a nonchanging color from the iridescent spectrum, such as purple or blue.

Many governments that regularly transfer money to individuals—to provide supplemental incomes for senior citizens, for example—have long done so electronically, but other countries typically have distributed physical money and have only recently developed electronic transfer infrastructure. Researchers studied the introduction of an electronic transfer system in one such location and found that recipients of electronic transfers consumed a different array of foods than recipients of physical transfers of the same amount did. One potential explanation for this result is that individuals conceive of and allocate funds in physical money differently than they conceive of and allocate funds in electronic form. 

Icebergs generally appear to be mostly white or blue, depending on how the ice reflects sunlight. Ice with air bubbles trapped in it looks white because much of the light reflects off the bubbles. Ice without air bubbles usually looks blue because the light travels deep into the ice and only a little of it is reflected. However, some icebergs in the sea around Antarctica appear to be green. One team of scientists hypothesized that this phenomenon is the result of yellow-tinted dissolved organic carbon in Antarctic waters mixing with blue ice to produce the color green.

Many scientists have believed that giraffes are solitary creatures, preferring to spend their time alone instead of with others. But observations of giraffes and their behavior in recent years has suggested that these animals may be more social than we once thought. For example, scientists Zoe Muller and Stephen Harris claim that giraffes may even help each other care for one another’s newborns.

To monitor changes to glaciers in Switzerland, the government periodically measures them for features like total area of ice and mean ice thickness, which are then reported in the Swiss Glacier Inventory. These measurements can be used to compare the glaciers. For example, the Gorner glacier had ______blank

Boldly mixing elements of poetry, fiction, drama, philosophy, and manifesto, Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi creates cross-genre literature that explores themes such as immigration and independence. Her works have inspired responses from individuals across different fields and in a wide range of formats, from musical compositions and a comic book to architecture and furniture design. In an essay, a student asserts that the production of these diverse creations by others is reflective of Braschi’s own approach to crafting literature.

By the early 1900s, the Singer Corporation, a US sewing machine manufacturer founded in 1851, began to see rapidly increasing sales abroad, particularly in Russia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. These markets were responsible for the bulk of Singer’s overseas sales, but demand for the company’s machines in other countries also grew significantly in the early twentieth century. For instance, sales of their sewing machines in ______blank

Barchester Towers is an 1857 novel by Anthony Trollope. In the novel, Trollope’s portrayal of Dr. Proudie underscores the character’s exaggerated sense of his own abilities: ______blank

An archaeological team led by Piotr Bieliński and Sultan al-Bakri found remnants of a 4,000-year-old Bronze Age board game at a site in Oman. Little is left of the game except a stone board, which is carved with a grid and has places to hold game pieces. Some scholars claim that the game was largely played by traders.

A sociology student is reading an essay on the median age of first marriage in Western countries throughout the twentieth century. The author of the essay cites factors common to these countries that the author believes caused an increase in the median age of first marriage, such as new technologies that shortened the time needed for domestic chores, making two-person households less necessary and living alone more viable. The student asserts that beyond these factors there must be additional ones specific to particular Western countries that influenced the increase of age at first marriage.

Dutch painters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often showed tables filled with large wheels of cheese or carved shards of butter. Some art historians, noting that dairy products were a major component of the Dutch diet, interpret these depictions as reflections of everyday Dutch eating habits. However, a group of researchers recently reviewed hundreds of food-related paintings and found that lemons—which could only be acquired in the Netherlands at great cost, since they had to be imported from warmer climates—feature in Dutch paintings of the period more than three times as frequently as dairy products do, thereby casting doubt on the idea that ______blank

In the “language nest” model of education, Indigenous children learn the language of their people by using it as the medium of instruction and socialization at pre-K or elementary levels. In their 2016 study of a school in an Anishinaabe community in Ontario, Canada, scholars Lindsay Morcom and Stephanie Roy (who are Anishinaabe themselves) found that the model not only imparted fluency in the Anishinaabe language but also enhanced students’ pride in Anishinaabe culture overall. Given these positive effects, Morcom and Roy predict that the model increases the probability that as adults, former students of the school will transmit the language to younger generations in their community.

“Often Rebuked, Yet Always Back Returning” is an 1846 poem by Emily Brontë. The poem conveys the speaker’s determination to experience the countryside around her: ______blank

When digging for clams, their primary food, sea otters damage the roots of eelgrass plants growing on the seafloor. Near Vancouver Island in Canada, the otter population is large and well established, yet the eelgrass meadows are healthier than those found elsewhere off Canada’s coast. To explain this, conservation scientist Erin Foster and colleagues compared the Vancouver Island meadows to meadows where otters are absent or were reintroduced only recently. Finding that the Vancouver Island meadows have a more diverse gene pool than the others do, Foster hypothesized that damage to eelgrass roots increases the plant’s rate of sexual reproduction; this, in turn, boosts genetic diversity, which benefits the meadow’s health overall.

Colonized by Spain in the 1600s, New Mexico is home to a dialect of Spanish that differs significantly from dialects spoken in Spain’s other former colonies in the Americas. Most notably, the New Mexican dialect retains older features of the language that other dialects lost in later centuries. But why would it have done so? New Mexico was so distant from population centers in Spain’s other colonies that it attracted few colonists after its initial colonization. Geographical isolation in turn would have limited the exposure of New Mexican colonists to changes occurring to Spanish grammar and vocabulary elsewhere in the empire. Thus, the present-day uniqueness of the New Mexican dialect suggests the extent to which ______blank

Off-off-Broadway theaters emerged in the late 1950s as a rebellion against mainstream Broadway theaters in New York, freeing artists to create productions that were more experimental than typical Broadway shows. One such artist was playwright María Irene Fornés. Working with off-off Broadway theaters enabled Fornés not only to direct her own plays but also to direct them exactly as she intended them to be staged, regardless of how strange the results might have seemed to audiences accustomed to Broadway shows. In this way, Fornés ______blank

After a volcanic eruption spilled lava into North Pacific Ocean waters, a dramatic increase of diatoms (a kind of phytoplankton) near the surface occurred. Scientists assumed the diatoms were thriving on nutrients such as phosphate from the lava, but analysis showed these nutrients weren’t present near the surface in forms diatoms can consume. However, there was an abundance of usable nitrate, a nutrient usually found in much deeper water and almost never found in lava. Microbial oceanographer Sonya Dyhrman and colleagues believe that as the lava plunged nearly 300 meters below the surface it dislodged pockets of this nutrient, releasing it to float upward, given that ______blank

North American gray wolves usually have mixed gray and white fur, but some members of the species have a version of a gene, or gene variant, that gives them a mostly black coat instead. Sarah Cubaynes and her team studied twelve populations of North American gray wolves. They found that the black-furred wolves are more common in areas where outbreaks of distemper virus happen regularly. The team also discovered that the black-furred wolves are more likely to be immune to distemper than the gray-furred wolves are. Taken together, these findings suggest that ______blank

If some artifacts recovered from excavations of the settlement of Kuulo Kataa, in modern Ghana, date from the thirteenth century CE, that may lend credence to claims that the settlement was founded before or around that time. There is other evidence, however, strongly supporting a fourteenth century CE founding date for Kuulo Kataa. If both the artifact dates and the fourteenth century CE founding date are correct, that would imply that ______blank

Mycorrhizal fungi in soil benefits many plants, substantially increasing the mass of some. A student conducted an experiment to illustrate this effect. The student chose three plant species for the experiment, including two that are mycorrhizal hosts (species known to benefit from mycorrhizal fungi) and one nonmycorrhizal species (a species that doesn’t benefit from and may even be harmed by mycorrhizal fungi). The student then grew several plants from each species both in soil containing mycorrhizal fungi and in soil that had been treated to kill mycorrhizal and other fungi. After several weeks, the student measured the plants’ average mass and was surprised to discover that ______blank

Indigenous cultures possess unique knowledge of the medicinal uses of plants. According to a 2021 study, 73 percent of the medicinal uses of plants native to North America are reflected in the vocabulary of a single Indigenous language. However, as more and more Indigenous people exclusively speak a globally dominant language, such as English, their ancestral languages fade from daily use. These facts lend added importance to tribal nations’ efforts to preserve their languages. By ensuring the continued use of Cherokee, Ojibwe, and the hundreds of other Indigenous languages in what is now the United States, tribal nations are also ______blank

When the Vinland Map, a map of the world purported to date to the mid-1400s, surfaced in 1957, some scholars believed it demonstrated that European knowledge of the eastern coast of present-day North America predated Christopher Columbus’s 1492 arrival. In 2021, a team including conservators Marie-France Lemay and Paula Zyats and materials scientist Anikó Bezur performed an extensive analysis of the map and the ink used. They found that the ink contains titanium dioxide, a compound that was first introduced in ink manufacturing in the early 1900s. Therefore, the team concluded that ______blank

Bicycles were first mass-produced in the late nineteenth century throughout Europe and North America, allowing individuals remarkable freedom to travel longer distances quickly and comfortably. This freedom, coupled with the affordability of the vehicle, made the bicycle immensely popular. Individuals were able to live farther from their workplaces, easily visit neighboring towns, and participate in new leisure and sport activities. Bicycling quickly became a popular social endeavor, with enthusiasts forming local cycling clubs to enjoy these newfound activities with others. 

It’s common for jazz musicians and fans to refer to certain songs as having “swing,” indicating that the songs provoke a strong feeling, like the impulse to tap one’s foot or dance. The exact acoustic properties that give a song swing, however, have long been thought to be undefinable. To investigate swing, a team led by physicist Corentin Nelias delayed the downbeats and synchronized the offbeats in jazz piano solos and asked jazz musicians to compare the intensity of swing in each modified piece with the intensity of swing in the original piece. They found that participants were more than seven times likelier to characterize the modified songs as having swing than to characterize the original versions as having swing, suggesting that ______blank

The Indus River valley civilization flourished in South Asia from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE. Many examples of the civilization’s writing system exist, but researchers haven’t yet deciphered it or identified which ancient language it represents. Nevertheless, archaeologists have found historical artifacts, such as clay figures and jewelry, that provide information about the civilization’s customs and how its communities were organized. The archaeologists’ findings therefore suggest that ______blank

To investigate the history of plate subduction—when one of Earth’s tectonic plates slides beneath another—Sarah M. Aarons and colleagues compared ancient rocks from the Acasta Gneiss Complex in Canada to modern rocks. Using isotope analysis, the researchers found that Acasta rocks dating to about 4.02 billion years ago (bya) most strongly resemble modern rocks formed in a plume setting (an area in which hot rocks from Earth’s mantle flow upward into the crust). By contrast, they found that Acasta rocks dating to about 3.75 bya and 3.6 bya have an isotope composition that is similar to that of modern rocks formed in a subduction setting. Aarons’s team therefore concluded that ______blank

Several studies of sediment (e.g., dirt, pieces of rock, etc.) in streams have shown an inverse correlation between sediment grain size and downstream distance from the primary sediment source, suggesting that stream length has a sorting effect on sediment. In a study of sediment sampled at more than a dozen sites in Alpine streams, however, geologists Camille Litty and Fritz Schlunegger found that cross-site variations in grain size were not associated with differences in downstream distance, though they did not conclude that downstream distance is irrelevant to grain size. Rather, they concluded that sediment influx in these streams may have been sufficiently spatially diffuse to prevent the typical sorting effect from being observed.

The share of the world’s population living in cities has increased dramatically since 1970, but this change has not been uniform. France and Japan, for example, were already heavily urbanized in 1970, with 70% or more of the population living in cities. The main contributors to the world’s urbanization since 1970 have been countries like Algeria, whose population went from ______blank

Artist Justin Favela explained that he wanted to reclaim the importance of the piñata as a symbol in Latinx culture. To do so, he created numerous sculptures from strips of tissue paper, which is similar to the material used to create piñatas. In 2017, Favela created an impressive life-size piñata-like sculpture of the Gypsy Rose lowrider car, which was displayed at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, California. The Gypsy Rose lowrider was famously driven by Jesse Valadez, an early president of the Los Angeles Imperials Car Club.

Matthew D. Rocklage and team examined whether consumer ratings of movies can predict box office success. The team considered both numeric star ratings and written reviews in their research. To analyze the written reviews, the team measured the emotionality—the degree to which a written review expresses an emotional reaction—of user reviews on a movie rating website, assigning each review an emotionality score. After reviewing this research, a student argues that the emotionality of movie reviews is unrelated to a movie’s success at the box office.

The painter María Izquierdo played an important role in the development of twentieth-century Mexican art, but her work has never been well-known in the United States except among art historians. One reason for Izquierdo’s relative obscurity is the enormous popularity of some of her peers. In particular, the painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera have so captivated the interest of US audiences that Izquierdo and other Mexican artists from the period often get overlooked, despite the high quality of their work.

“Valia” is a 1907 short story by Leonid Andreyev. In the story, the author emphasizes that the setting where the character Valia is reading is nearly silent: ______blank

Ratified by more than 90 countries, the Nagoya Protocol is an international agreement ensuring that Indigenous communities are compensated when their agricultural resources and knowledge of wild plants and animals are utilized by agricultural corporations. However, the protocol has shortcomings. For example, it allows corporations to insist that their agreements with communities to conduct research on the commercial uses of the communities’ resources and knowledge remain confidential. Therefore, some Indigenous advocates express concern that the protocol may have the unintended effect of ______blank

Political scientists who favor the traditional view of voter behavior claim that voting in an election does not change a voter’s attitude toward the candidates in that election. Focusing on each US presidential election from 1976 to 1996, Ebonya Washington and Sendhil Mullainathan tested this claim by distinguishing between subjects who had just become old enough to vote (around half of whom actually voted) and otherwise similar subjects who were slightly too young to vote (and thus none of whom voted). Washington and Mullainathan compared the attitudes of the groups of subjects toward the winning candidate two years after each election.

Researchers hypothesized that a decline in the population of dusky sharks near the mid-Atlantic coast of North America led to a decline in the population of eastern oysters in the region. Dusky sharks do not typically consume eastern oysters but do consume cownose rays, which are the main predators of the oysters.

Huge international exhibitions known as world’s fairs have been held since 1851, but the United States hasn’t hosted one since 1984. Architecture expert Mina Chow argues that this is because some people think the events are too expensive and not popular enough. For example, the 1984 World’s Fair cost $350 million and had only ______blank

King Lear is a circa 1606 play by William Shakespeare. In the play, the character of King Lear attempts to test his three daughters’ devotion to him. He later expresses regret for his actions, as is evident when he ______blank

In the twentieth century, ethnographers made a concerted effort to collect Mexican American folklore, but they did not always agree about that folklore’s origins. Scholars such as Aurelio Espinosa claimed that Mexican American folklore derived largely from the folklore of Spain, which ruled Mexico and what is now the southwestern United States from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Scholars such as Américo Paredes, by contrast, argued that while some Spanish influence is undeniable, Mexican American folklore is mainly the product of the ongoing interactions of various cultures in Mexico and the United States.

“On Virtue” is a 1766 poem by Phillis Wheatley. Wheatley addresses the poem directly to the quality of virtue, imploring it to assist her in reaching a future goal: ______blank

In a paper about p-i-n planar perovskite solar cells (one of several perovskite cell architectures designed to collect and store solar power), Lyndsey McMillon-Brown et al. describe a method for fabricating the cell’s electronic transport layer (ETL) using a spray coating. Conventional ETL fabrication is accomplished using a solution of nanoparticles. The process can result in a loss of up to 80% of the solution, increasing the cost of manufacturing at scale—an issue that may be obviated by spray coating fabrication, which the researchers describe as “highly reproducible, concise, and practical.”

Disco remains one of the most ridiculed popular music genres of the late twentieth century. But as scholars have argued, the genre is far less superficial than many people believe. Take the case of disco icon Donna Summer: she may have been associated with popular songs about love and heartbreak (subjects hardly unique to disco, by the way), but like many Black women singers before her, much of her music also reflects concerns about community and identity. These concerns are present in many of the genre’s greatest songs, and they generally don’t require much digging to reveal.

Perovskite solar cells convert light into electricity more efficiently than earlier kinds of solar cells, and manufacturing advances have recently made them commercially attractive. One limitation of the cells, however, has to do with their electron transport layer (ETL), through which absorbed electrons must pass. Often the ETL is applied through a process called spin coating, but such ETLs are fairly inefficient at converting input power to output power. André Taylor and colleagues tested a novel spray coating method for applying the ETL. The team produced ETLs of various thicknesses and concluded that spray coating holds promise for improving the power conversion efficiency of ETLs in perovskite solar cells.

Laura Mulvey has theorized that in narrative film, shots issuing from a protagonist’s point of view compel viewers to identify with the character. Such identification is heightened by “invisible editing,” or editing so inconspicuous that it renders cuts between shots almost unnoticeable. Conversely, Mulvey proposes that conspicuous editing or an absence of point-of-view shots would induce a more critical stance toward a protagonist. Consider, for example, the attic scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, a conspicuously edited sequence of tens of shots, few of which correspond to the protagonist’s point of view. According to Mulvey’s logic, this scene should affect viewers by ______blank

Earth’s atmosphere is bombarded by cosmic dust originating from several sources: short-period comets (SPCs), particles from the asteroid belt (ASTs), Halley-type comets (HTCs), and Oort cloud comets (OCCs). Some of the dust’s material vaporizes in the atmosphere in a process called ablation, and the faster the particles move, the higher the rate of ablation. Astrophysicist Juan Diego Carrillo-Sánchez led a team that calculated average ablation rates for elements in the dust (such as iron and potassium) and showed that material in slower-moving SPC or AST dust has a lower rate than the same material in faster-moving HTC or OCC dust. For example, whereas the average ablation rate for iron from AST dust is 28%, the average rate for ______blank 

Choctaw/Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson turns punching bags used by boxers into art by decorating them with beadwork and elements of Native dressmaking. These elements include leather fringe and jingles, the metal cones that cover the dresses worn in the jingle dance, a women’s dance of the Ojibwe people. Thus, Gibson combines an object commonly associated with masculinity (a punching bag) with art forms traditionally practiced by women in most Native communities (beadwork and dressmaking). In this way, he rejects the division of male and female gender roles.

A student is presenting average monthly rainfall totals in various Puerto Rican cities for a science class. During the presentation, the student notes that in September ______blank

Some whale species practice lunge feeding, in which they lunge toward prey with their mouths open at wide angles, collect the prey and the surrounding water, and then filter out the water through baleen plates in their mouths. Although the volume of water engulfed increases with whales’ body length, the surface area of whales’ baleen plates, which influences the rate at which water can be filtered, does not increase with body length to the same degree, which helps explain why ______blank

Native to Latin America, the cane toad was introduced to Australia in the 1930s. In recent decades, tadpoles in the Australian population have been shown to consume eggs of their own species. A 2022 study showed that when presented with cane toad eggs as well as eggs of native Australian amphibians, cane toad tadpoles disproportionately consumed eggs of their own species. This behavior results from their attraction to bufadienolide, a chemical produced by the eggs of cane toads but not by the eggs of native amphibians. However, using data from this study, a student wishes to argue that the presence of bufadienolide doesn’t entirely explain the cane toad tadpoles’ preference for certain eggs over others.

Like Earth, some dwarf planets in the solar system have exactly one moon. Two examples of such dwarf planets are ______blank

In vertical inheritance, parents pass genes to their offspring, but in horizontal transfer (HT), one species, often bacteria, passes genetic material to an unrelated species. In a 2022 study, herpetologist Atsushi Kurabayashi and his team investigated HT in multicellular organisms—namely, snakes and frogs in Madagascar. The team detected BovB—a gene transmitted vertically in snakes—in many frog species. The apparent direction of gene transfer seems counterintuitive because frogs usually don’t survive encounters with snakes and so wouldn’t be able to transmit the newly acquired gene to offspring, but the team concluded that BovB is indeed transmitted from snakes to frogs, either directly or indirectly, via HT.

The increased integration of digital technologies throughout the process of book creation in the late 20th and early 21st centuries lowered the costs of book production, but those decreased costs have been most significant in the manufacturing and distribution process, which occurs after the authoring, editing, and design of the book are complete. This suggests that in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, ______blank

Biologist Valentina Gómez-Bahamón and her team have investigated two subspecies of the fork-tailed flycatcher bird that live in the same region in Colombia, but one subspecies migrates south for part of the year, and the other doesn’t. The researchers found that, due to slight differences in feather shape, the feathers of migratory forked-tailed flycatcher males make a sound during flight that is higher pitched than that made by the feathers of nonmigratory males. The researchers hypothesize that fork-tailed flycatcher females are attracted to the specific sound made by the males of their own subspecies, and that over time the females’ preference will drive further genetic and anatomical divergence between the subspecies.

Xin Wang and colleagues have discovered the earliest known example of a flower bud in a 164-million-year-old plant fossil in China. The researchers have named the new species Florigerminis jurassica. They believe that the discovery pushes the emergence of flowering plants, or angiosperms, back to the Jurassic period, which occurred between 145 million and 201 million years ago.

NASA’s Aspera mission, led by Carlos Vargas, will investigate the circumgalactic medium (CGM), the huge swaths of low-density gas that fill and surround galaxies. Specifically, the team will focus on portions of the gas that exist in a “warm-hot” phase: these portions haven’t previously been observable but are thought to fuel new star formation and hold most of the mass that makes up a galaxy. Using a telescope capable of revealing these parts of the CGM, the Aspera mission should help answer long-standing questions about how galaxies emerge, change, and even interact.

“When Dawn Comes to the City” is a 1922 poem by Claude McKay, who immigrated to the United States from the island nation of Jamaica as an adult. The poem conveys McKay’s contrasting feelings about New York City—his adopted home in the US—and his home country: ______blank

To investigate the influence of certain estrogen-responsive neurons on energy expenditure, biologist Stephanie Correa et al. treated female and male mice with either saline solution or clozapine-N4-oxide (CNO), which activates the neurons. Monitoring the activity levels of the mice by measuring how frequently the animals broke infrared beams crossing their enclosures, Correa et al. found that the mice in their study showed sex-specific differences in response to neuron activation: ______blank

“John of God, the Water-Carrier” is a 1913 short story by María Cristina Mena. In the story, the narrator presents John as being a hard worker who is fully dedicated to his job as water carrier, or aguador: ______blank

A researcher conducted an experiment inspired by studies suggesting that people may benefit from feeling frightened in certain circumstances, such as when watching scary movies or visiting haunted attractions. The researcher recruited several participants and had them walk through a local haunted house attraction. Immediately after exiting the attraction, each participant completed a survey about their experience. Based on the survey responses, the researcher claims that feeling frightened in controlled situations can boost a person’s mood and confidence.

Many animals, including humans, must sleep, and sleep is known to have a role in everything from healing injuries to encoding information in long-term memory. But some scientists claim that, from an evolutionary standpoint, deep sleep for hours at a time leaves an animal so vulnerable that the known benefits of sleeping seem insufficient to explain why it became so widespread in the animal kingdom. These scientists therefore imply that ______blank

The Haitian Declaration of Independence was issued in 1804, bringing to an end the revolution against colonial France that began in 1791. Written in French, which was not the first language of most Haitians but which was used throughout Europe as the language of international diplomacy, the declaration notes that Haiti will not bring rebellion to other Caribbean nations, promises to respect the sovereignty of its neighbors—widely understood as a reassurance to the United States—and sets up Haiti as an example for future struggles against colonizers (an implicit reference to the many colonies then found in the Americas). So even though the declaration is explicitly addressed to the Haitian people, it’s reasonable to conclude that ______blank

“Odalie” is an 1899 short story by Alice Dunbar-Nelson. In the story, a young woman named Odalie attends the annual Mardi Gras carnival in New Orleans, where she lives with her guardian Tante Louise. Dunbar-Nelson portrays Odalie as eager to escape the monotony of her everyday life: ______blank

Many intellectual histories of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s rely heavily on essays and other explicitly ideological works as primary sources, a tendency that can overrepresent the perspectives of a small number of thinkers, most of whom were male. Historian Ashley D. Farmer has shown that expanding the array of primary sources to encompass more types of print material—including political cartoons, advertisements, and artwork—leads to a much better understanding of the movement and the crucial and diverse roles that Black women played in shaping it. 

E-books became an increasingly popular means of reading in the United States in the 2000s and 2010s, though that popularity was concentrated in titles that, like those in most fiction genres, are meant to be read straight through from beginning to end. For books in nonfiction genres that do not tell stories and require the reader to flip back and forth through a volume, e-books were significantly less commercially successful. This can be seen by comparing ______blank

Researchers Suchithra Rajendran and Maximilian Popfinger modeled varying levels of passenger redistribution from short-haul flights (flights of 50 to 210 minutes, from takeoff to landing) to high-speed rail trips. Planes travel faster than trains, but air travel typically requires 3 hours of lead time for security, baggage handling, and boarding that rail travel doesn’t, so short-haul routes take similar amounts of time by air and by rail. However, the model suggests that as rail passenger volumes approach current capacity limits, long lead times emerge. Therefore, for rail to remain a viable alternative to short-haul flights, ______blank

In many of his sculptures, artist Richard Hunt uses broad forms rather than extreme accuracy to hint at specific people or ideas. In his first major work, Arachne (1956), Hunt constructed the mythical character Arachne, a weaver who was changed into a spider, by welding bits of steel together into something that, although vaguely human, is strange and machine-like. And his large bronze sculpture The Light of Truth (2021) commemorates activist and journalist Ida B. Wells using mainly flowing, curved pieces of metal that create stylized flame.

Euphorbia esula (leafy spurge) is a Eurasian plant that has become invasive in North America, where it displaces native vegetation and sickens cattle. E. esula can be controlled with chemical herbicides, but that approach can also kill harmless plants nearby. Recent research on introducing engineered DNA into plant species to inhibit their reproduction may offer a path toward exclusively targeting E. esula, consequently ______blank

In 2022, researchers rediscovered ancient indigenous glyphs, or drawings, on the walls of a cave in Alabama. The cave’s ceiling was only a few feet high, affording no position from which the glyphs, being as wide as ten feet, could be viewed or photographed in their entirety. However, the researchers used a technique called photogrammetry to assemble numerous photos of the walls into a 3D model. They then worked with representatives of tribes originally from the region, including the Chickasaw Nation, to understand the significance of the animal and humanoid figures adorning the cave.

The following text is adapted from William Shakespeare’s 1609 poem “Sonnet 27.” The poem is addressed to a close friend as if he were physically present.

“The Poet Walt Whitman” is an 1887 essay by José Martí, a Cuban author and political activist, originally written in Spanish. In the essay, Martí explores the value of literature, arguing that a society’s spiritual well-being depends on the character of its literary culture: ______blank

The following text is adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel Treasure Island. Bill is a sailor staying at the Admiral Benbow, an inn run by the narrator’s parents.

Every day when [Bill] came back from his stroll he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the road. At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he was desirous to avoid them. When a seaman did [stay] at the Admiral Benbow (as now and then some did) he would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such was present.

In 2019, 20 previously unknown moons were confirmed to be orbiting Saturn. Three of the moons have prograde orbits (orbiting in the direction the planet spins), and the other 17 have retrograde orbits (orbiting in the opposite direction of the planet’s spin). All but one of the 20 moons are thought to be remnants of bodies that orbited Saturn until they broke apart in collisions. Although the one exceptional moon orbits in the same direction as the planet’s spin, its orbit is highly eccentric compared to the rest, which may suggest that it has a different origin than the other 19 moons.

The Post Office is a 1912 play by Rabindranath Tagore, originally written in Bengali. The character Amal is a young boy who imagines that the people he sees passing the window of his home are carefree even when engaged in work or chores, as is evident when he says to the daughter of a flower seller, ______blank

The following text is adapted from Guy de Maupassant’s nineteenth-century short story “The Trip of Le Horla” (translated by Albert M. C. McMaster, A. E. Henderson, Mme. Quesada, et al.). The narrator is part of a group traveling in a hot-air balloon at night.

The earth no longer seems to exist, it is buried in milky vapors that resemble a sea. We are now alone in space with the moon, which looks like another balloon travelling opposite us; and our balloon, which shines in the air, appears like another, larger moon, a world wandering in the sky amid the stars, through infinity. We no longer speak, think nor live; we float along through space in delicious inertia. The air which is bearing us up has made of us all beings which resemble itself, silent, joyous, irresponsible beings, peculiarly alert, although motionless.

“Hot Jupiters” are gas planets that have a mass of at least 0.25 Jupiters (meaning that their mass is at least 25% of that of Jupiter) and an orbital period of less than 10 days (meaning that they complete one orbit around their star in less than 10 days), while “warm Jupiters” are gas planets that meet the same mass criterion but have orbital periods of more than 10 days. In 2021, Michigan State University astronomer Joseph Rodriguez and colleagues announced the discovery of five new gas exoplanets and asserted that four are hot Jupiters and one is a warm Jupiter.

Aerial robots vary considerably in their holding force; the Ultra-Fast Robot Hand, for example, has a holding force of 56 newtons, more than twice that of the Permanent Magnet Hand and more than four times that of the Yale Model T. Since an aerial robot must lift its own weight along with its cargo, engineer Jiawei Meng and colleagues used a ratio of each robot’s holding force to the robot’s weight to calculate payload capacity, with higher ratios corresponding to greater capacity, concluding that the Ultra-Fast Robot Hand has a higher payload capacity than the Yale Model T.

Jan Gimsa, Robert Sleigh, and Ulrike Gimsa have hypothesized that the sail-like structure running down the back of the dinosaur Spinosaurus aegyptiacus improved the animal’s success in underwater pursuits of prey species capable of making quick, evasive movements. To evaluate their hypothesis, a second team of researchers constructed two battery-powered mechanical models of S. aegyptiacus, one with a sail and one without, and subjected the models to a series of identical tests in a water-filled tank.

The following text is from Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 novel Funny Boy. The seven-year-old narrator lives with his family in Sri Lanka. Radha Aunty is the narrator’s aunt.

Radha Aunty, who was the youngest in my father’s family, had left for America four years ago when I was three, and I could not remember what she looked like. I went into the corridor to look at the family photographs that were hung there. But all the pictures were old ones, taken when Radha Aunty was a baby or young girl. Try as I might, I couldn’t get an idea of what she looked like now. My imagination, however, was quick to fill in this void.

©1994 by Shyam Selvadurai. 

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s 1893 painting The Banjo Lesson, which depicts an elderly man teaching a boy to play the banjo, is regarded as a landmark in the history of works by Black artists in the United States. Scholars should be cautious when ascribing political or ideological values to the painting, however: beliefs and assumptions that are commonly held now may have been unfamiliar to Tanner and his contemporaries, and vice versa. Scholars who forget this fact when discussing The Banjo Lesson therefore ______blank

“The Young Girl” is a 1920 short story by Katherine Mansfield. In the story, the narrator takes an unnamed seventeen-year-old girl and her younger brother out for a meal. In describing the teenager, Mansfield frequently contrasts the character’s pleasant appearance with her unpleasant attitude, as when Mansfield writes of the teenager, ______blank

A student is writing a paper about One Night in Miami..., a 2020 film directed by Regina King and written by Kemp Powers. Powers adapted the film’s screenplay from his 2013 play, which he wrote after learning about a 1964 meeting that took place in Miami, Florida, between four prominent figures of the Civil Rights movement: Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke. The student claims that although Powers was inspired by this meeting, the film is best understood not as a precise retelling of historical events but rather as a largely imagined but informed representation of them.

In many cultures, a handshake can create trust between people. Engineer João Avelino and his team are designing a robot to shake hands with a human in order to improve human-robot interactions. The robot hand adjusts its movements and pressure to better imitate the feel of a human hand. The researchers want the robot’s handshake to feel realistic because ______blank

All other things being equal, the larger a wind turbine’s rotor diameter (the diameter of the imaginary circle swept by the turbine’s rotating blades), the greater amount of energy the turbine can generate. In a research paper on wind power, a student claims that in the United States, the amount of energy generated per newly installed turbine increased substantially between 2011 and 2021.

In a study of the cognitive abilities of white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus imitator), researchers neglected to control for the physical difficulty of the tasks they used to evaluate the monkeys. The cognitive abilities of monkeys given problems requiring little dexterity, such as sliding a panel to retrieve food, were judged by the same criteria as were those of monkeys given physically demanding problems, such as unscrewing a bottle and inserting a straw. The results of the study, therefore, ______blank

Economists Kerwin Kofi Charles and Melvin Stephens Jr. investigated a variety of factors that influence voter turnout in the United States. Using survey data that revealed whether respondents voted in national elections and how knowledgeable respondents are about politics, Charles and Stephens claim that the likelihood of voting is driven in part by potential voters’ confidence in their assessments of candidates—essentially, the more informed voters are about politics, the more confident they are at evaluating whether candidates share their views, and thus the more likely they are to vote.

The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a band of clouds that encircles Earth in the tropics and is a major rainfall source, shifts position in response to temperature variations across Earth’s hemispheres. Data from Huagapo Cave in Peru suggest the ITCZ shifted south during the Little Ice Age (circa 1300–1850), but a shift as far into South America as Huagapo should have led to dry conditions in Central America, which is inconsistent with climate models. To resolve the issue, geologist Yemane Asmerom and colleagues collected data from Yok Balum Cave in Central America and compared them with the Huagapo data. They concluded that during the Little Ice Age, the ITCZ may have expanded northward and southward rather than simply shifted.

The largest tyrannosaurids—the family of carnivorous dinosaurs that includes Tarbosaurus, Albertosaurus, and, most famously, Tyrannosaurus rex—are thought to have had the strongest bites of any land animals in Earth’s history. Determining the bite force of extinct animals can be difficult, however, and paleontologists Paul Barrett and Emily Rayfield have suggested that an estimate of dinosaur bite force may be significantly influenced by the methodology used in generating that estimate.

“To You” is an 1856 poem by Walt Whitman. In the poem, Whitman suggests that he deeply understands the reader, whom he addresses directly, writing, ______blank

A team of biologists led by Jae-Hoon Jung, Antonio D. Barbosa, and Stephanie Hutin investigated the mechanism that allows Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress) plants to accelerate flowering at high temperatures. They replaced the protein ELF3 in the plants with a similar protein found in another species (stiff brome) that, unlike A. thaliana, displays no acceleration in flowering with increased temperature. A comparison of unmodified A. thaliana plants with the altered plants showed no difference in flowering at 22° Celsius, but at 27° Celsius, the unmodified plants exhibited accelerated flowering while the altered ones did not, which suggests that ______blank

A heliograph is a semaphore device used for sending optical communications—usually in the form of Morse code—by reflecting flashes of sunlight off a mirror. Heliographs were used for rapid communication across expansive distances for military, surveying, and forestry purposes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they were largely effective only during the daytime, and the range of the device depended on factors such as the opacity of the air and line of sight. Therefore, heliographs were eventually replaced by technology that ______blank

The recovery of a 1,000-year-old Chinese shipwreck in the Java Sea near present-day Indonesia has yielded a treasure trove of artifacts, including thousands of small ceramic bowls. Using a portable X-ray fluorescence analyzer tool, Lisa Niziolek and her team were able to detect the chemical composition of these bowls without damaging them. By comparing the chemical signatures of the bowls with those of the materials still at old Chinese kiln sites, Niziolek and her team can pinpoint which Chinese kilns likely produced the ceramic bowls.

Electra is a circa 420–410 BCE play by Sophocles, translated in 1870 by R.C. Jebb. Electra, who is in mourning for her dead father and her long-absent brother, is aware of the intensity of her grief but believes it to be justified: ______blank

Martin Dančák, Wewin Tjiasmanto, and colleagues have identified a new carnivorous plant species (Nepenthes pudica) in Indonesia. Like other carnivorous plants, N. pudica has pitfall traps, or pitchers, that capture prey, but unlike others, the pitchers of N. pudica are located underground. The researchers unearthed the new species on fairly dry ridges with surfaces that host few other plants and animals. Therefore, the researchers hypothesize that the N. pudica species likely ______blank

Investigative journalists research and report about fraud, corruption, public hazards, and more. The graph shows the number of investigative articles published in the Albuquerque Journal newspaper from 2010 to 2019. According to an analyst, although the number of investigative articles published in this newspaper has varied significantly over the period shown, the number overall has fallen since 2010.

By running computer simulations of the development of our solar system, André Izidoro, Rajdeep Dasgupta, and colleagues concluded that the Sun may have been surrounded by three giant dust rings before the planets started to form. The researchers suggest that the materials in the innermost ring became the four planets closest to the Sun, the materials in the middle ring produced the rest of the planets, and the materials in the outermost ring created the asteroids and other small bodies in the region beyond Neptune. In one simulation, the researchers delayed the initial formation of the middle ring, causing oversized super-Earths to begin developing from the innermost ring. The researchers therefore hypothesize that ______blank

Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Héctor Tobar has built a multifaceted career as both a journalist and an author of short stories and novels. In an essay about Tobar’s work, a student claims that Tobar blends his areas of expertise by applying journalism techniques to his creation of works of fiction.

The following text is adapted from Christina Rossetti’s 1881 poem “Monna Innominata 2.”

I wish I could remember that first day,

 First hour, first moment of your meeting me,

 If bright or dim the season, it might be

Summer or Winter for [all] I can say;

So unrecorded did it slip away,

 So blind was I to see and to foresee,

 So dull to mark the budding of my tree

That would not blossom yet for many a May.

In the mountains of Brazil, Barbacenia tomentosa and Barbacenia macrantha—two plants in the Velloziaceae family—establish themselves on soilless, nutrient-poor patches of quartzite rock. Plant ecologists Anna Abrahão and Patricia de Britto Costa used microscopic analysis to determine that the roots of B. tomentosa and B. macrantha, which grow directly into the quartzite, have clusters of fine hairs near the root tip; further analysis indicated that these hairs secrete both malic and citric acids. The researchers hypothesize that the plants depend on dissolving underlying rock with these acids, as the process not only creates channels for continued growth but also releases phosphates that provide the vital nutrient phosphorus.

A museum curator is writing a biographical statement about Trinidadian-born Chinese dancer, choreographer, and teacher Dai Ailian for a new exhibit on Chinese dance. The curator claims that some of the pieces Dai created shortly after arriving in mainland China in 1941, such as the solo dance Yao Drum, reflect a desire to represent the dances of local communities Dai visited during her travels through China.

“The Rock and the Sea” is an 1893 poem by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In the poem, a rock is portrayed as intending to confront and restrain the sea: ______blank

Rows in table may not add up to 100 due to rounding.

Georgia Tech roboticists De’Aira Bryant and Ayanna Howard, along with ethicist Jason Borenstein, were interested in people’s perceptions of robots’ competence. They recruited participants and asked them how likely they think it is that a robot could do the work required in various occupations. Participants’ evaluations varied widely depending on which occupation was being considered; for example, ______blank

The following text is from Ezra Pound’s 1909 poem “Hymn III,” based on the work of Marcantonio Flaminio.

As a fragile and lovely flower unfolds its gleaming
 foliage on the breast of the fostering earth, if
 the dew and the rain draw it forth;
So doth my tender mind flourish, if it be fed with the
 sweet dew of the fostering spirit,
Lacking this, it beginneth straightway to languish,
 even as a floweret born upon dry earth, if the
 dew and the rain tend it not.

Ancestral Puebloans, the civilization from which present-day Pueblo tribes descended, emerged as early as 1500 B.C.E. in an area of what is now the southwestern United States and dispersed suddenly in the late 1200s C.E., abandoning established villages with systems for farming crops and turkeys. Recent analysis comparing turkey remains at Mesa Verde, one such village in southern Colorado, to samples from modern turkey populations in the Rio Grande Valley of north central New Mexico determined that the latter birds descended in part from turkeys cultivated at Mesa Verde, with shared genetic markers appearing only after 1280. Thus, researchers concluded that ______blank

The following text is from Maggie Pogue Johnson’s 1910 poem “Poet of Our Race.” In this poem, the speaker is addressing Paul Laurence Dunbar, a Black author.

Thou, with stroke of mighty pen,
 Hast told of joy and mirth,
And read the hearts and souls of men
 As cradled from their birth.

The language of the flowers,
 Thou hast read them all,
And e’en the little brook
 Responded to thy call.

Birds of many species ingest foods containing carotenoids, pigmented molecules that are converted into feather coloration. Coloration tends to be especially saturated in male birds’ feathers, and because carotenoids also confer health benefits, the deeply saturated colors generally serve to communicate what is known as an honest signal of a bird’s overall fitness to potential mates. However, ornithologist Allison J. Shultz and others have found that males in several species of the tanager genus Ramphocelus use microstructures in their feathers to manipulate light, creating the appearance of deeper saturation without the birds necessarily having to maintain a carotenoid-rich diet. These findings suggest that ______blank

Ecologist Veronika Bókony and colleagues investigated within-species competition among common toads (Bufo bufo), a species that secretes various unpleasant-tasting toxins called bufadienolides in response to threats. The researchers tested B. bufo tadpoles’ responses to different levels of competition by creating ponds with different tadpole population densities but a fixed amount of food. Based on analysis of the tadpoles after three weeks, the researchers concluded that increased competition drove bufadienolide production at the expense of growth.

Swahili is estimated to be the first language of up to 15 million people worldwide. It’s also an officially recognized language in Tanzania, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which means these countries use Swahili in government documents and proceedings. But even in countries where almost everyone speaks Swahili, for many it isn’t their first language but is instead their second, third, or even fourth language.

Hip-hop pedagogy is a form of teaching that’s gaining popularity across school subjects. It involves incorporating hip-hop and rap music into lessons as well as using hip-hop elements when teaching other subject matters. For example, Quan Neloms’s students look for college-level vocabulary and historical events in rap songs. Researchers claim that in addition to developing students’ social justice awareness, hip-hop pedagogy encourages student success by raising students’ interest and engagement.

Among social animals that care for their young, such as chickens, macaque monkeys, and humans, newborns appear to show an innate attraction to faces and face-like stimuli. Elisabetta Versace and her colleagues used an image of three black dots arranged in the shape of eyes and a nose or mouth to test whether this trait also occurs in Testudo tortoises, which live alone and do not engage in parental care. They found that tortoise hatchlings showed a significant preference for the image, suggesting that ______blank

For a school project, a forestry student needs to recommend a maple tree that is native to North America and won’t grow more than 60 feet in height. Based on the characteristics of five common maple trees, she has decided to select a ______blank

Aerogels are highly porous foams consisting mainly of tiny air pockets within a solidified gel. These lightweight materials are often applied to spacecraft and other equipment required to withstand extreme conditions, as they provide excellent insulation despite typically being brittle and eventually fracturing due to degradation from repeated exposure to high heat. Now, Xiangfeng Duan of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues have developed an aerogel with uniquely flexible properties. Unlike earlier aerogels, Duan’s team’s material contracts rather than expands when heated and fully recovers after compressing to just 5% of its original volume, suggesting that ______blank

In the South Pacific, New Caledonian crows use two different kinds of stick tools. One tool is complex. The crows shape a stick from a rare plant into a hook. The other tool is basic. The crows find a stick without a hook on the ground. The hooked tool is harder to get but is much better than the basic tool at removing prey from holes. When studying New Caledonian crows, ecologist Barbara Klump found that they hold the hooked tools in their claws when not using them, or they carefully put them in a safe place. The crows don’t do the same with the basic tools. This suggests to Klump that the ______blank

To test the effects of a nitrogen fertilizer on cantaloupe production, researchers grew cantaloupe plants and harvested their fruit over three years. In each year, half the plants were grown using a nitrogen fertilizer, and the other half were grown using a control fertilizer that contained no nitrogen. The researchers concluded that the nitrogen fertilizer increases cantaloupe yield.

An Ideal Husband is an 1895 play by Oscar Wilde. In the play, which is a satire, Wilde suggests that a character named Lady Gertrude Chiltern is perceived as both extremely virtuous and unforgiving, as is evident when another character says ______blank

NASA’s Cassini probe has detected an unusual wobble in the rotation of Mimas, Saturn’s smallest moon. Using a computer model to study Mimas’s gravitational interactions with Saturn and tidal forces, geophysicist Alyssa Rhoden and colleagues have proposed that this wobble could be due to a liquid ocean moving beneath the moon’s icy surface. The researchers believe other moons should be examined to see if they too might have oceans hidden beneath their surfaces.

Mangroves are trees or bushes that grow on the coastlines of seas and rivers. Areas with mangroves are great places for young fish since they help keep these fish fed and protected while they grow. To study the importance of mangroves to young fish, researchers Mohamed A.Abu El-Regal and Nesreen K. Ibrahim collected and identified young fish from three different mangrove sites in the Egyptian Red Sea. They collected fish in the winter, spring, and autumn of 2010, collecting a total of 269 fish from 21 different species. For some species, more fish were collected in the winter than the other two seasons, for instance: ______blank

American fashion designer Patrick Kelly was known for his love of colorful buttons. Many of his signature dresses feature bold assortments of buttons throughout the garment. In a paper, a fashion design student claims that Kelly’s use of buttons as decoration was inspired by his childhood observations of the styles and actions of the women in his family.

The following text is adapted from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel The Secret Garden. Mary, a young girl, recently found an overgrown hidden garden.

Mary was an odd, determined little person, and now she had something interesting to be determined about, she was very much absorbed, indeed. She worked and dug and pulled up weeds steadily, only becoming more pleased with her work every hour instead of tiring of it. It seemed to her like a fascinating sort of play.

In addition to her technical skill and daring feats, American stunt pilot Bessie Coleman was also known for dazzling the crowds that came to watch her air shows in the 1920s with her exuberant personality. During her career, she was careful and purposeful about how she crafted her public persona. An aviation researcher has claimed that Coleman intentionally defied social norms of the time by how she chose to present herself to the public.

When magma moves underneath a volcano, it causes the surface of the volcano to change. This is known as deformation. Researchers recently calculated the amount of deformation occurring each month for five volcanoes in Latin America. Although Sierra Negra experienced a lot of deformation, its deformation rate was still lower than that of ______blank

Art collectives, like the United States- and Vietnam-based collective The Propeller Group or Cuba’s Los Carpinteros, are groups of artists who agree to work together: perhaps for stylistic reasons, or to advance certain shared political ideals, or to help mitigate the costs of supplies and studio space. Regardless of the reasons, art collectives usually involve some collaboration among the artists. Based on a recent series of interviews with various art collectives, an arts journalist claims that this can be difficult for artists who are often used to having sole control over their work.

In documents called judicial opinions, judges explain the reasoning behind their legal rulings, and in those explanations they sometimes cite and discuss historical and contemporary philosophers. Legal scholar and philosopher Anita L. Allen argues that while judges are naturally inclined to mention philosophers whose views align with their own positions, the strongest judicial opinions consider and rebut potential objections; discussing philosophers whose views conflict with judges’ views could therefore ______blank

Shimmering is a collective defense behavior that researchers have observed in giant honeybee colonies. When shimmering, different groups of bees flip their bodies up and down in what looks like waves. This defense is initiated when hornets hover near a colony, serving to deter the hornets from approaching the bees. Researchers hypothesize that this behavior is a specialized defense response to hornets, as it is not observed when other, larger predators approach the colony. 

Georgia Douglas Johnson wrote many plays in the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, professional theater companies rarely put on plays by Black women, so few of Johnson’s plays made it to the stage. Only a small number of her plays were published in her lifetime. But that doesn’t mean that Johnson never learned what other people thought of her plays. Johnson hosted weekly get-togethers for fellow Black writers and artists in her Washington, D.C., home. Attendees would read and discuss one another’s work, including Johnson’s own. These gatherings could therefore serve as ______blank

Some researchers studying Indigenous actors and filmmakers in the United States have turned their attention to the early days of cinema, particularly the 1910s and 1920s, when people like James Young Deer, Dark Cloud, Edwin Carewe, and Lillian St. Cyr (known professionally as Red Wing) were involved in one way or another with numerous films. In fact, so many films and associated records for this era have been lost that counts of those four figures’ output should be taken as bare minimums rather than totals; it’s entirely possible, for example, that ______blank

Many mosquito repellents contain natural components that work by activating multiple odor receptors on mosquitoes’ antennae. As the insects develop resistance, new repellents are needed. Ke Dong and her team found that EBF, a molecular component of a chrysanthemum-flower extract, can repel mosquitoes by activating just one odor receptor—and this receptor, Or31, is present in all mosquito species known to carry diseases. Therefore, the researchers suggest that in developing new repellents, it would be most useful to ______blank

Born in 1891 to a Quechua-speaking family in the Andes Mountains of Peru, Martín Chambi is today considered to be one of the most renowned figures of Latin American photography. In a paper for an art history class, a student claims that Chambi’s photographs have considerable ethnographic value—in his work, Chambi was able to capture diverse elements of Peruvian society, representing his subjects with both dignity and authenticity.

Researcher Xiaolu Jia and colleagues monitored individuals’ velocity and the surrounding crowd density as a group of study participants walked through a space and navigated around an obstacle. Participants rated how congested it seemed before the obstacle, after the obstacle, and overall, and the researchers correlated those ratings with velocity and density. (Correlations range from −1negative 1 to 1, with greater distance from 0 indicating greater strength). The researchers concluded that the correlations with velocity are stronger than those with density.

Organic farming is a method of growing food that tries to reduce environmental harm by using natural forms of pest control and avoiding fertilizers made with synthetic materials. Organic farms are still a small fraction of the total farms in the United States, but they have been becoming more popular. According to the US Department of Agriculture, in 2016 California had between 2,600 and 2,800 organic farms and ______blank

Digital paywalls restrict access to online content to those with a paid subscription. In an investigation of the effect of paywalls on newspaper company revenues for print and digital subscriptions and advertising, Doug J. Chung and colleagues compared actual outcomes (with a paywall) to control estimates (without a paywall). The researchers concluded that introducing a paywall is generally more beneficial for larger newspapers, which have high circulation and tend to offer a substantial amount of unique online content.

When hibernating, Alaska marmots and Arctic ground squirrels enter a state called torpor, which minimizes the energy their bodies need to function. Often a hibernating animal will temporarily come out of torpor (called an arousal episode) and its metabolic rate will rise, burning more of the precious energy the animal needs to survive the winter. Alaska marmots hibernate in groups and therefore burn less energy keeping warm during these episodes than they would if they were alone. A researcher hypothesized that because Arctic ground squirrels hibernate alone, they would likely exhibit longer bouts of torpor and shorter arousal episodes than Alaska marmots.

Oluwaseyi Moejoh cofounded U-recycle Initiative Africa when she was only a teenager. Moejoh and her team founded the organization to teach young people how their actions affect the environment and why recycling is important. For example, the organization put on an exhibit of art made using recycled materials. 

Wildlife researcher Dana L. Karelus and her colleagues tracked the movements of female and male adult mountain lions over three seasons: the cold-dry season, the hot-dry season, and the monsoon season. They found that the least amount of travel per day occurred in ______blank

A student performs an experiment testing her hypothesis that a slightly acidic soil environment is more beneficial for the growth of the plant Brassica rapa parachinensis (a vegetable commonly known as choy sum) than a neutral soil environment. She plants sixteen seeds of choy sum in a mixture of equal amounts of coffee grounds (which are highly acidic) and potting soil and another sixteen seeds in potting soil without coffee grounds as the control for the experiment. The two groups of seeds were exposed to the same growing conditions and monitored for three weeks.

In a survey of public perceptions of energy use, researcher Shahzeen Attari and her team asked respondents to name the most effective action ordinary people can take to conserve energy. The team categorized each action as either an efficiency or a curtailment and found that respondents tended to name curtailments more often than they did efficiencies. For example, 19.6% of respondents stated that the most effective way to conserve energy is to turn off the lights, while only ______blank

The ice melted on a Norwegian mountain during a particularly warm summer in 2019, revealing a 1,700-year-old sandal to a mountaineer looking for artifacts. The sandal would normally have degraded quickly, but it was instead well preserved for centuries by the surrounding ice. According to archaeologist Espen Finstad and his team, the sandal, like those worn by imperial Romans, wouldn’t have offered any protection from the cold in the mountains, so some kind of insulation, like fabric or animal skin, would have needed to be worn on the feet with the sandal.

Alice Guy-Blaché directed hundreds of films between 1896 and 1920. She wanted audiences to feel like they were watching real people on screen. She would encourage actors in her films to behave naturally. Guy-Blaché even hung a large sign reading “Be Natural” in the studio where she made her films. At the time, films lacked sound, so actors needed to rely solely on their bodies and facial expressions to convey emotions. As a result, actors tended to highly exaggerate their actions and expressions. The style of acting in Guy-Blaché’s films was therefore ______blank

Volunteering, or giving time for a community service for free, is a valuable form of civic engagement because helping in a community is also good for society as a whole. In a survey of youths in the United States, most young people said that they believe volunteering is a way to help people on an individual level. Meanwhile, only 6% of the youths said that they think volunteering is a way to help fix problems in society overall. These replies suggest that ______blank

Tides can deposit large quantities of dead vegetation within a salt marsh, smothering healthy plants and leaving a salt panne—a depression devoid of plants that tends to trap standing water—in the marsh’s interior. Ecologist Kathryn Beheshti and colleagues found that burrowing crabs living within these pannes improve drainage by loosening the soil, leading the pannes to shrink as marsh plants move back in. At salt marsh edges, however, crab-induced soil loosening can promote marsh loss by accelerating erosion, suggesting that the burrowing action of crabs ______blank    

A city’s Parks and Recreation department is interested in providing residents with more opportunities for bicycling in their neighborhoods. They’re considering adding more bike paths and conducted a survey to understand where demand for more bike paths is highest. The survey indicated the highest level of demand, with 88 percent of the residents interested in adding more bike paths, is in the city’s ______blank

Alicia Montesinos-Navarro, Isabelle Storer, and Rocío Perez-Barrales recently examined several plots within a diverse plant community in southeast Spain. The researchers calculated that if individual plants were randomly distributed on this particular landscape, only about 15% would be with other plants in patches of vegetation. They counted the number of juvenile plants of five species growing in patches of vegetation and the number growing alone on bare ground and compared those numbers to what would be expected if the plants were randomly distributed. Based on these results, they claim that plants of these species that grow in close proximity to other plants gain an advantage at an early developmental stage.

To create the poems in her 2017 collection One Last Word, poet Nikki Grimes used a writing method called the golden shovel. This method often involves choosing a line from an existing poem and then using each word from that line as the last word of each line in a new poem. Grimes wanted the poems in One Last Word to honor important Black poets of the past, so she chose lines by poets such as Langston Hughes and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Writing in this way can be challenging and might seem as though it would produce awkward poems. However, reviewers praised One Last Word as a beautiful and powerful tribute to the poets who inspired it. This reaction suggests that ______blank

Although most songbirds build open, cupped nests, some species build domed nests with roofs that provide much more protection. Many ecologists have assumed that domed nests would provide protection from weather conditions and thus would allow species that build them to have larger geographic ranges than species that build open nests do. To evaluate this assumption, a research team led by evolutionary biologist Iliana Medina analyzed data for over 3,000 species of songbirds.

The Milky Way galaxy is composed of millions of stars in a relatively flat structure containing a thin disk and a thick disk. Based on computer simulations and analysis of data on the brightness, position, and chemical composition of about 250,000 stars in the thick disk (collected from two telescopes, one in China and one orbiting in space), astrophysicists Maosheng Xiang and Hans-Walter Rix claim that the thick disk of the Milky Way formed in two distinct phases rather than a single one.

Astronomers investigated the Arabia Terra region of Mars because it appears to contain irregularly shaped craters that may have been caused by massive volcanic explosions. In their investigations of Arabia Terra, the researchers found remnants of ash deposits in an amount and thickness that would result from a massive volcanic eruption. However, erosion and past resurfacing events could have modified the surface of the planet. Therefore, ______blank

In a study of new technology adoption, Davit Marikyan et al. examined negative disconfirmation (which occurs when experiences fall short of one’s expectations) to determine whether it could lead to positive outcomes for users. The team focused on established users of  “smart home” technology, which presents inherent utilization challenges but tends to attract users with high expectations, often leading to feelings of dissonance. The researchers found that many users employed cognitive mechanisms to mitigate those feelings, ultimately reversing their initial sense of disappointment.

The ancient Sumerian civilization formed around 4000 BCE between two large rivers in an area that is now Iraq and Syria. The extremely hot and sunny weather in that area helped crops grow very quickly, but it also made it hard to keep the crops from drying up and dying. So, the Sumerians used water from the rivers in their farming. That method worked so well that they often could harvest even more crops than they needed in a season. As a result, the Sumerians ______blank

Compiled in the late 1500s largely through the efforts of Indigenous scribes, Cantares Mexicanos is the most important collection of poetry in Classical Nahuatl, the principal language of the Aztec Empire. The poems portray Aztec society before the occupation of the empire by the army of Spain, and marginal notes in Cantares Mexicanos indicate that much of the collection’s content predates the initial invasion. Nonetheless, some of the poems contain inarguable references to beliefs and customs common in Spain during this era. Thus, some scholars have concluded that ______blank

Some residents in a neighborhood in Atlanta recently founded a community garden inside a local park. The residents agreed to volunteer to take care of the garden together. Students at a local high school surveyed some of the volunteers as part of a project to understand the impact of the new garden. The students concluded that the new garden benefited the community overall by fostering connections and relationships between the volunteers and other residents of the neighborhood who weren’t volunteering at the garden. 

Gabrielle Adams and colleagues reviewed suggestions for improving a university that had been submitted to the university’s president. They coded each suggestion as additive (the idea suggested adding something new to the university), subtractive (the idea suggested removing something from the university), neither additive nor subtractive, or invalid (the idea was not comprehensible). The data illustrated people’s tendency to overlook the possibility of removing things to achieve improvements: ______blank

“Gestures” in painting are typically thought of as bold, expressive brushstrokes. In the 1970s, American painter Jack Whitten built a 12-foot (3.7-meter) tool he named the “developer” to apply paint to an entire canvas in one motion, resulting in his series of “slab” paintings from that decade.  Whitten described this process as making an entire painting in “one gesture,” signaling a clear departure from the prevalence of gestures in his work from the 1960s. Some art historians claim this shift represents “removing gesture” from the process. Therefore, regardless of whether using the developer constitutes a gesture, both Whitten and these art historians likely agree that ______blank

Guilds—local associations of artisans and merchants in the same industry—were widespread in France from the medieval period until the late eighteenth century. But guilds were much more numerous relative to the population in some cities than in others: for example, ______blank

A group of researchers working in Europe, Asia, and Oceania conducted a study to determine how quickly different Eurasian languages are typically spoken (in syllables per second) and how much information they can effectively convey (in bits per second). They found that, although languages vary widely in the speed at which they are spoken, the amount of information languages can effectively convey tends to vary much less. Thus, they claim that two languages with very different spoken rates can nonetheless convey the same amount of information in a given amount of time. 

In 1967 the US Congress created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which in turn created National Public Radio (NPR). NPR began producing and distributing high-quality news and cultural programming to affiliate stations across the United States in 1971. In a research paper, a student claims that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR were inspired by the British Broadcasting System (BBC), which had been established in the 1920s.

Researchers wanted to study how consumers’ reactions to an ad may be affected by other ads. The researchers began by showing study participants an ad for a product, with some seeing a less detailed ad and others seeing a more detailed one. Then, all participants viewed the same second ad for a store and shared their opinion of the store based on this second ad. Participants who had first seen an ad less detailed than the second ad had a higher opinion of the store than the participants who had first seen a more detailed ad. The researchers concluded that reactions to an ad may be affected by ______blank

The following text is adapted from Jack London’s 1903 novel The Call of the Wild. Buck is a sled dog living with John Thornton in Yukon, Canada.

Thornton alone held [Buck]. The rest of mankind was as nothing. Chance travellers might praise or pet him; but he was cold under it all, and from a too demonstrative man he would get up and walk away. When Thornton’s partners, Hans and Pete, arrived on the long-expected raft, Buck refused to notice them till he learned they were close to Thornton; after that he tolerated them in a passive sort of way, accepting favors from them as though he favored them by accepting.

To protect themselves when being attacked, hagfish—jawless marine animals that resemble eels—will release large quantities of slimy, mucus-like threads. Because these threads are unusually strong and elastic, scientist Atsuko Negishi and her colleagues have been trying to recreate them in a lab as an eco-friendly alternative to petroleum-based fibers that are often used in fabrics. The researchers want to reproduce the threads in the lab because farming hagfish for their slime would be expensive and potentially harmful to the hagfish.

Optical tweezers are specialized scientific tools—particularly useful in biology and medicine—that use high-powered beams of light to trap and manipulate minuscule particles for study. Use of the tool has led to several scientific and medical breakthroughs over the last few decades, but the particles are often under prolonged exposure to the intense heat of the light beams. To overcome the risk of overheating, and thereby damage, researchers sometimes attach nano-sized glass beads to particles, allowing the light to focus on the beads instead of the particles.

As the name suggests, dramaturges originated in theater, where they continue to serve a variety of functions: conducting historical research for directors, compiling character biographies for actors, and perhaps most importantly, helping writers of plays and musicals to hone the works’ stories and characters. Performance scholar Susan Manning observes that many choreographers, like playwrights and musical theater writers, are concerned with storytelling and characterization. In fact, some choreographers describe the dances they create as expressions of narrative through movement; it is therefore unsurprising that ______blank

A member of the Otomi, an Indigenous people in Central Mexico, Octavio Medellín immigrated to the United States as a child, and his sculpture bears the impress of traditions on both sides of the border: US-based modernist sculpture, Mexican modernist painting, Otomi art, and the ancient sculpture of other Mexican Indigenous peoples, including the Maya. In his 1950 masterpiece History of Mexico, Medellín fuses these influences into a style so idiosyncratic that it resists efforts to view his work through the lens of nationality or cultural identity. Artists, he insisted, should strive for individual expression, even as they draw inspiration from their heritage and the communities where they live and work.

Culinary anthropologist Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor may be known for her decades of work in national public television and radio, but her book Vibration Cooking: or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl is likely her most influential project. The 1970 book, whose title refers to Smart-Grosvenor’s roots in the Low Country of South Carolina, was unusual for its time. It combined memoir, recipes, travel writing, and social commentary and challenged notions about conventions of food and cooking. Long admired by many, the book and its author have shaped contemporary approaches to writing about cuisine.

Microplastics are pieces of plastic that are smaller than a grain of rice. These small plastics can be found in large quantities in ocean waters. Ecologist Jessica Reichert and her team are studying the role reef-building corals have in capturing microplastics from ocean waters. Through research, her team has found that these corals may be storing up to 20 million kilograms of microplastics each year in their skeletons and tissues.  

Several artworks found among the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii depict a female figure fishing with a cupid nearby. Some scholars have asserted that the figure is the goddess Venus, since she is known to have been linked with cupids in Roman culture, but University of Leicester archaeologist Carla Brain suggests that cupids may have also been associated with fishing generally. The fact that a cupid is shown near the female figure, therefore, ______blank

Psychologists wanted to test how young children think about rewards and fairness. In an experiment, two teachers handed out rewards while children (ages four to six) watched. The teachers gave out the same number of rewards, but one of them counted the rewards out loud. The children were then asked who was fairer. 73% chose the teacher who counted. The psychologists think that counting showed the children that the teacher wanted to be fair. The children may have believed that the teacher who did not count did not care about fairness.

During the Bourbon Restoration in France (1814–1830), the right to vote required in part that a person paid at least 300 francs in direct taxes to the government. The four most common taxes (the quatre vieilles) were levied on real estate (both land and buildings); the doors and windows in taxpayer homes; the rental values of homes; and the businesses of artisans and merchants. (Foreign investments were either exempt from taxation or taxed lightly.) Although relatively few people paid the tax on real estate, it was the main means of voter qualification and accounted for over two-thirds of government receipts during this period, suggesting that during the Bourbon Restoration ______blank

The following text is adapted from Lewis Carroll’s 1889 satirical novel Sylvie and Bruno. A crowd has gathered outside a room belonging to the Warden, an official who reports to the Lord Chancellor.

Ana Castillo’s 1986 novel The Mixquiahuala Letters is a story told entirely through expressive letters from the narrator to her friend—letters that Castillo suggests could be read in several different orders. As they began reading it in class, some students remarked that they found the novel’s letter format daunting and its treatment of gender relations old-fashioned. The professor, however, pointed out that the novel is written in modern-sounding language and addresses issues that still matter today, suggesting that The Mixquiahuala Letters ______blank

In Caddo, a language from what is now the US Southeast, vocabulary pertaining to corn cultivation resembles equivalent vocabulary in the Totozoquean language family in Mexico. This resemblance is perhaps attributable to cultural contact: such words could have entered Caddo through the intermediary of the neighboring but unrelated Chitimacha language, concurrent with the dissemination of corn itself from Mexico into the Southeast after 700 CE. That the vocabulary pertaining to domestic crops accompanies them as they diffuse into new regions is an established phenomenon globally. Crops may also be decoupled from vocabulary altogether: corn cultivation became ubiquitous among the Southeastern tribes, yet ______blank

Scrapbooks of saved fabric pieces were commonly kept by women in the nineteenth-century United States, but few are as meticulously detailed as Hannah Ditzler Alspaugh’s work. Alongside each piece of fabric, Alspaugh recorded intimate memories, such as dressmaking with her sister. Additionally, she listed the prices and how she used the fabric. Historians note that by representing fifty years of changing textures, patterns, and dress styles, the scrapbook is a record of nineteenth-century textiles and dressmaking as well as Alspaugh’s life.

Economist Steve H. Hanke has shown that divided US Congresses—which occur when one party holds the majority in the House of Representatives and another holds the majority in the Senate—tend to accompany reductions in total federal outlays (spending) relative to gross domestic product (GDP), which Hanke interprets to reflect decreases in government size. Hanke calculated the percentage point change in total outlays (encompassing nondefense and defense outlays) for consecutive US Congresses. Hanke has pointed to his calculations as evidence that a divided Congress may be a “necessary but not sufficient condition” for a decrease in government size to occur.

Hedda Gabler is an 1890 play by Henrik Ibsen. As a woman in the Victorian era, Hedda, the play’s central character, is unable to freely determine her own future. Instead, she seeks to influence another person’s fate, as is evident when she says to another character, ______blank

In the 1970s, a roughly 60,000-year-old piece of hyena bone marked with nine notches was discovered at a site in western France once inhabited by Neanderthals. Although many believe that only modern humans developed systems for notating numbers, one archaeologist asserts that this artifact may be a sign that Neanderthals also recorded numerical information. The notches on the bone are unevenly spaced but approximately parallel, and microscopic analysis reveals that they were made with a single stone tool; according to the archaeologist, this suggests that the notches were all made at one time by one individual as a means of counting something.

To assess the impact of invasive species on ecosystems in Africa, Benis N. Egoh and colleagues reviewed government reports from those nations about how invasive species are undermining ecosystem services (aspects of the ecosystem on which residents depend). The services were sorted into three categories: provisioning (material resources from the ecosystem), regulating (natural processes such as cleaning the air or water), and cultural (nonmaterial benefits of ecosystems). Egoh and her team assert that countries in each region reported effects on provisioning services and that provisioning services represent the majority of the reported services.

Biologist Natacha Bodenhausen and colleagues analyzed the naturally occurring bacterial communities associated with leaves and roots of wild Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant. The researchers found many of the same bacterial genera in both the plants’ leaves and roots. To explain this, the researchers pointed to the general proximity of A. thaliana leaves to the ground and noted that rain splashing off soil could bring soil-based bacteria into contact with the leaves. Alternatively, the researchers noted that wind, which may be a source of bacteria in the aboveground portion of plants, could also bring bacteria to the soil and roots. Either explanation suggests that ______blank

The Souls of Black Folk is a 1903 book by W.E.B. Du Bois. In the book, Du Bois suggests that upon hearing Black folk songs, he felt an intuitive and sometimes unexpected sense of cultural recognition: ______blank

Two kinds of clamshell tools used by Neanderthals were dug up in a cave on the western coast of Italy. Archaeologist Paola Villa and her colleagues studied the tools and determined that Neanderthals either collected clams that had washed onto the beach or harvested clams from the seafloor and then sharpened the shells to make tools. The highest number of tools made from clamshells that were collected from the beach was found at a depth of ______blank

Given that stars and planets initially form from the same gas and dust in space, some astronomers have posited that host stars (such as the Sun) and their planets (such as those in our solar system) are composed of the same materials, with the planets containing equal or smaller quantities of the materials that make up the host star. This idea is also supported by evidence that rocky planets in our solar system are composed of some of the same materials as the Sun.

Some animal-behavior studies involve observing wild animals in their natural habitat, and some involve capturing wild animals and observing them in a laboratory. Each approach has advantages over the other. In wild studies, researchers can more easily presume that the animals are behaving normally, and in lab studies, researchers can more easily control factors that might affect the results. But if, for example, the results from a wild study and a lab study of Western scrub-jays (Aphelocoma californica) contradict each other, one or both of the studies must have failed to account for some factor that was relevant to the birds’ behavior.

“Ghosts of the Old Year” is an early 1900s poem by James Weldon Johnson. In the poem, the speaker describes experiencing an ongoing cycle of anticipation followed by regretful reflection: ______blank

The novelist Toni Morrison was the first Black woman to work as an editor at the publishing company Random House, from 1967 to 1983. A scholar asserts that one of Morrison’s likely aims during her time as an editor was to strengthen the presence of Black writers on the list of Random House’s published authors.

Mosses can struggle in harsh desert conditions because these plants require enough sunlight for photosynthesis but not so much that they risk drying out. Researchers Jenna Ekwealor and Kirsten M. Fisher found several species of Syntrichia caninervis, a type of desert moss, growing under quartz crystals in California’s Mojave Desert. To evaluate whether these semitransparent rocks benefited the moss, the researchers compared the shoot tissue, a measure of plant growth, of S. caninervis when growing on the soil surface versus when the moss was growing under the quartz rocks. They found that the shoot tissue was 62% longer for moss growing under the quartz as compared to moss on the soil surface, suggesting that ______blank

Black beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) are a nutritionally dense food, but they are difficult to digest in part because of their high levels of soluble fiber and compounds like raffinose. They also contain antinutrients like tannins and trypsin inhibitors, which interfere with the body’s ability to extract nutrients from foods. In a research article, Marisela Granito and Glenda Álvarez from Simón Bolívar University in Venezuela claim that inducing fermentation of black beans using lactic acid bacteria improves the digestibility of the beans and makes them more nutritious.

Researchers recently conducted an experiment to understand how we use rankings to make decisions. They created a fictitious travel website describing five museums in London. Then, they invited two groups of participants, who had never visited the museums, to review the site and select the museum they would be most likely to visit. Meanwhile, the researchers tracked the amount of time each participant spent reading about each museum. For one group, the website ranked each museum, titling the page “The Top 5 Museums in London.” For the other group, the museums and their descriptions were not ranked. The researchers concluded that when reviewing ranked lists, we tend to focus on the top-ranked option. 

The following text is adapted from Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition.

Mrs. Ochiltree was a woman of strong individuality, whose comments upon her acquaintance[s], present or absent, were marked by a frankness at times no less than startling. This characteristic caused her to be more or less avoided. Mrs. Ochiltree was aware of this sentiment on the part of her acquaintance[s], and rather exulted in it.

To make her art more widely available, graphic artist Elizabeth Catlett turned to linocuts. In linocut printing, an artist carves an image into a sheet of linoleum to create a stamp that is used to mass-produce prints. In the linocut series The Black Woman (1946–1947), Catlett depicts the everyday experiences of Black women alongside the achievements of well-known Black women. This pairing invites the viewer to draw connections among the women. The linocut process enabled Catlett’s work to reach a wide audience and supported her aim to unite Black women through her art.

Scientists have long believed that giraffes are mostly silent and communicate only visually with one another. But biologist Angela Stöger and her team analyzed hundreds of hours of recordings of giraffes in three European zoos and found that giraffes make a very low-pitched humming sound. The researchers claim that the giraffes use these sounds to communicate when it’s not possible for them to signal one another visually.

Cats can judge unseen people’s positions in space by the sound of their voices and thus react with surprise when the same person calls to them from two different locations in a short span of time. Saho Takagi and colleagues reached this conclusion by measuring cats’ levels of surprise based on their ear and head movements while the cats heard recordings of their owners’ voices from two speakers spaced far apart. Cats exhibited a low level of surprise when owners’ voices were played twice from the same speaker, but they showed a high level of surprise when the voice was played once each from the two different speakers.

The following text is from Edith Nesbit’s 1902 novel Five Children and It. Five young siblings have just moved with their parents from London to a house in the countryside that they call the White House.

It was not really a pretty house at all; it was quite ordinary, and mother thought it was rather inconvenient, and was quite annoyed at there being no shelves, to speak of, and hardly a cupboard in the place. Father used to say that the ironwork on the roof and coping was like an architect’s nightmare. But the house was deep in the country, with no other house in sight, and the children had been in London for two years, without so much as once going to the seaside even for a day by an excursion train, and so the White House seemed to them a sort of Fairy Palace set down in an Earthly Paradise.

Many archaeologists will tell you that categorizing excavated fragments of pottery by style, period, and what objects they belong to relies not only on standard criteria, but also on instinct developed over years of practice. In a recent study, however, researchers trained a deep-learning computer model on thousands of images of pottery fragments and found that it could categorize them as accurately as a team of expert archaeologists. Some archaeologists have expressed concern that they might be replaced by such computer models, but the researchers claim that outcome is highly unlikely.

To better understand the burrowing habits of Alpheus bellulus (the tiger pistol shrimp), some studies have used resin casting to obtain precise measurements of the shrimps’ burrows. Resin casting involves completely filling an empty burrow with a liquid plastic that hardens to create a three-dimensional model; however, recovering the model inevitably requires destroying the burrow. In their 2022 study, Miyu Umehara and colleagues discovered that an x-ray computed tomography (CT) scanner can accurately record a burrow’s measurements both at a moment in time and throughout the entire burrow-building process, something that’s impossible with resin casting because ______blank

Violins made by Antonio Stradivari and other craftspeople in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Cremona, Italy, produce a sound that is considered superior to that of modern stringed instruments. Some experts have claimed that the type of wood used to create Cremonese violins is responsible for their prized sound, but modern and Cremonese violins are made of the same kinds of wood: maple and spruce. New analysis, however, has revealed unique indications that the wood in the older violins was chemically treated by the makers, leading researchers to suggest that ______blank

Artist Marilyn Dingle’s intricate, coiled baskets are ______blank sweetgrass and palmetto palm. Following a Gullah technique that originated in West Africa, Dingle skillfully winds a thin palm frond around a bunch of sweetgrass with the help of a “sewing bone” to create the basket’s signature look that no factory can reproduce.

The following text is adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1837 story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.” The main character, a physician, is experimenting with rehydrating a dried flower.

At first [the rose] lay lightly on the surface of the fluid, appearing to imbibe none of its moisture. Soon, however, a singular change began to be visible. The crushed and dried petals stirred and assumed a deepening tinge of crimson, as if the flower were reviving from a deathlike slumber.

Rejecting the premise that the literary magazine Ebony and Topaz (1927) should present a unified vision of Black American identity, editor Charles S. Johnson fostered his contributors’ diverse perspectives by promoting their authorial autonomy. Johnson’s self-effacement diverged from the editorial stances of W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, whose decisions for their publications were more ______blank.

“How lifelike are they?” Many computer animators prioritize this question as they strive to create ever more realistic environments and lighting. Generally, while characters in computer-animated films appear highly exaggerated, environments and lighting are carefully engineered to mimic reality. But some animators, such as Pixar’s Sanjay Patel, are focused on a different question. Rather than asking first whether the environments and lighting they’re creating are convincingly lifelike, Patel and others are asking whether these elements reflect their films’ unique stories.

The field of study called affective neuroscience seeks instinctive, physiological causes for feelings such as pleasure or displeasure. Because these sensations are linked to a chemical component (for example, the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain when one receives or expects a reward), they can be said to have a partly physiological basis. These processes have been described in mammals, but Jingnan Huang and his colleagues have recently observed that some behaviors of honeybees (such as foraging) are also motivated by a dopamine-based signaling process.

Some economic historians ______blank that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century households in the United States experienced an economy of scale when it came to food purchases—they assumed that large households spent less on food per person than did small households. Economist Trevon Logan showed, however, that a close look at the available data disproves this supposition.

The following text is from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. The narrator is being driven in a carriage through a remote region at night.

The baying of the wolves sounded nearer and nearer, as though they were closing round on us from every side. I grew dreadfully afraid, and the horses shared my fear. The driver, however, was not in the least disturbed; he kept turning his head to left and right, but I could not see anything through the darkness.

Economist Marco Castillo and colleagues showed that nuisance costs—the time and effort people must spend to make donations—reduce charitable giving. Charities can mitigate this effect by compensating donors for nuisance costs, but those costs, though variable, are largely ______blank donation size, so charities that compensate donors will likely favor attracting a few large donors over many small donors.

The following text is from Srimati Svarna Kumari Devi’s 1894 novel The Fatal Garland (translated by A. Christina Albers in 1910). Shakti is walking near a riverbank that she visited frequently during her childhood.

She crossed the woods she knew so well. The trees seemed to extend their branches like welcoming arms. They greeted her as an old friend. Soon she reached the river-side.

During a 2014 archaeological dig in Spain, Vicente Lull and his team uncovered the skeleton of a woman from El Algar, an Early Bronze Age society, buried with valuable objects signaling a high position of power. This finding may persuade researchers who have argued that Bronze Age societies were ruled by men to ______blank that women may have also held leadership roles.

Early in the Great Migration of 1910–1970, which involved the mass migration of Black people from the southern to the northern United States, political activist and Chicago Defender writer Fannie Barrier Williams was instrumental in helping other Black women establish themselves in the North. Many women hoped for better employment opportunities in the North because, in the South, they faced much competition for domestic employment and men tended to get agricultural work. To aid with this transition, Barrier Williams helped secure job placement in the North for many women before they even began their journey.

Text 1

In 1916, H. Dugdale Sykes disputed claims that The Two Noble Kinsmen was coauthored by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Sykes felt Fletcher’s contributions to the play were obvious—Fletcher had a distinct style in his other plays, so much so that lines with that style were considered sufficient evidence of Fletcher’s authorship. But for the lines not deemed to be by Fletcher, Sykes felt that their depiction of women indicated that their author was not Shakespeare but Philip Massinger.

Text 2

Scholars have accepted The Two Noble Kinsmen as coauthored by Shakespeare since the 1970s: it appears in all major one-volume editions of Shakespeare’s complete works. Though scholars disagree about who wrote what exactly, it is generally held that on the basis of style, Shakespeare wrote all of the first act and most of the last, while John Fletcher authored most of the three middle acts.

Dance choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar aims to give people the opportunity to be ______blank her creative process. For example, live performances of her dance HairStories, which debuted in 2001, featured videos of people across the United States talking about their hair and audience members sharing pictures of their interesting hairstyles.

The following text is adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 short story “Drowne’s Wooden Image.” Drowne, a young man, is carving a wooden figure to decorate the front of a ship.

Day by day, the work assumed greater precision, and settled its irregular and misty outline into distincter grace and beauty. The general design was now obvious to the common eye.

Studying late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artifacts from an agricultural and domestic site in Texas, archaeologist Ayana O. Flewellen found that Black women employed as farm workers utilized hook-and-eye closures to fasten their clothes at the waist, giving themselves a silhouette similar to the one that was popular in contemporary fashion and typically achieved through more restrictive garments such as corsets. Flewellen argues that this sartorial practice shows that these women balanced hegemonic ideals of femininity with the requirements of their physically demanding occupation.

Astronomers are confident that the star Betelgeuse will eventually consume all the helium in its core and explode in a supernova. They are much less confident, however, about when this will happen, since that depends on internal characteristics of Betelgeuse that are largely unknown. Astrophysicist Sarafina El-Badry Nance and colleagues recently investigated whether acoustic waves in the star could be used to determine internal stellar states but concluded that this method could not sufficiently reveal Betelgeuse’s internal characteristics to allow its evolutionary state to be firmly fixed.

Archeological excavation of Market Street Chinatown, a nineteenth-century Chinese American community in San Jose, California, provided the first evidence that Asian food products were imported to the United States in the 1800s: bones from a freshwater fish species native to Southeast Asia. Jinshanzhuang—Hong Kong–based import/export firms—likely coordinated the fish’s transport from Chinese-operated fisheries in Vietnam and Malaysia to North American markets. This route reveals the (often overlooked) multinational dimensions of the trade networks linking Chinese diaspora communities.

Former astronaut Ellen Ochoa says that although she doesn’t have a definite idea of when it might happen, she ______blank that humans will someday need to be able to live in other environments than those found on Earth. This conjecture informs her interest in future research missions to the moon.

Text 1

Public policy researcher Anthony Fowler studied the history of elections in Australia, a country that requires citizens to vote. Fowler argues that requiring citizens to vote leads to a significant increase in voters who would otherwise not have the time or motivation to vote. Thus, election results in countries that require citizens to vote better reflect the preferences of the country as a whole. 

Text 2

Governments in democratic countries function better when more people vote. However, forcing people to vote may have negative consequences. Shane P. Singh and Jason Roy studied what happens when a country requires its citizens to vote. They found that when people feel forced to vote, they tend to spend less time looking for information about their choices when voting. As a result, votes from these voters may not reflect their actual preferences.

A musician and member of the Quechua of Peru, Renata Flores Rivera was eager to promote the Quechua language in her music, but she was ______blank speaking it. She met this challenge by asking her grandmother, a native speaker of Quechua, to help her pronounce words in her song lyrics and also by taking classes in the language.

Seminole/Muscogee director Sterlin Harjo ______blank television’s tendency to situate Native characters in the distant past: this rejection is evident in his series Reservation Dogs, which revolves around teenagers who dress in contemporary styles and whose dialogue is laced with current slang.

The following text is from Yann Martel’s 2001 novel Life of Pi. The narrator’s family owned a zoo when he was a child. 

It was a huge zoo, spread over numberless acres, big enough to require a train to explore it, though it seemed to get smaller as I grew older, train included. 

©2001 by Yann Martel

According to botanists, a viburnum plant experiencing insect damage may develop erineum—a discolored, felty growth—on its leaf blades. A ______blank viburnum plant, on the other hand, will have leaves with smooth surfaces and uniformly green coloration.

Research conducted by planetary scientist Katarina Miljkovic suggests that the Moon’s surface may not accurately ______blank early impact events. When the Moon was still forming, its surface was softer, and asteroid or meteoroid impacts would have left less of an impression; thus, evidence of early impacts may no longer be present.

Charles “Teenie” Harris was a photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1975. During his career he took over 70,000 photographs documenting everyday life in Pittsburgh’s Black communities. The Carnegie Museum of Art maintains thousands of his photographs, carefully ______blank them so that audiences can continue to view them well into the future. 

The following text is adapted from George Eliot’s 1871–72 novel Middlemarch.

[Mr. Brooke] had travelled in his younger years, and was held in this part of the country to have contracted a too rambling habit of mind. Mr. Brooke’s conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather.

Although science fiction was dominated mostly by white male authors when Octavia Butler, a Black woman, began writing, she did not view the genre as ______blank: Butler broke into the field with the publication of several short stories and her 1976 novel Patternmaster, and she later became the first science fiction writer to win a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

Text 1

Growth in the use of novel nanohybrids—materials created from the conjugation of multiple distinct nanomaterials, such as iron oxide and gold nanomaterials conjugated for use in magnetic imaging—has outpaced studies of nanohybrids’ environmental risks. Unfortunately, risk evaluations based on nanohybrids’ constituents are not reliable: conjugation may alter constituents’ physiochemical properties such that innocuous nanomaterials form a nanohybrid that is anything but.

Text 2

The potential for enhanced toxicity of nanohybrids relative to the toxicity of constituent nanomaterials has drawn deserved attention, but the effects of nanomaterial conjugation vary by case. For instance, it was recently shown that a nanohybrid of silicon dioxide and zinc oxide preserved the desired optical transparency of zinc oxide nanoparticles while mitigating the nanoparticles’ potential to damage DNA.

Using NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Mercedes López-Morales and colleagues measured the wavelengths of light traveling through the atmosphere of WASP-39b, an exoplanet, or planet outside our solar system. Different molecules absorb different wavelengths of light, and the wavelength measurements showed the presence of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in WASP-39b’s atmosphere. This finding not only offers the first decisive evidence of CO₂ in the atmosphere of an exoplanet but also illustrates the potential for future scientific breakthroughs held by the JWST.

Researchers have found a nearly 164,000-year-old molar from a member of the archaic human species known as Denisovans in a cave in Laos, suggesting that Denisovans lived in a wider range of environments than indicated by earlier evidence. Before the discovery, Denisovans were thought to have lived only at high altitudes in relatively cold climates in what are now Russia and China, but the discovery of the tooth in Laos suggests that they may have lived at low altitudes in relatively warm climates in Southeast Asia as well.

According to historian Vicki L. Ruiz, Mexican American women made crucial contributions to the labor movement during World War II. At the time, food processing companies entered into contracts to supply United States armed forces with canned goods. Increased production quotas conferred greater bargaining power on the companies’ employees, many of whom were Mexican American women: employees insisted on more favorable benefits, and employers, who were anxious to fulfill the contracts, complied. Thus, labor activism became a platform for Mexican American women to assert their agency.

The following text is from Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre. Jane, the narrator, works as a governess at Thornfield Hall.

I went on with my day’s business tranquilly; but ever and anon vague suggestions kept wandering across my brain of reasons why I should quit Thornfield; and I kept involuntarily framing advertisements and pondering conjectures about new situations: these thoughts I did not think to check; they might germinate and bear fruit if they could.

In the 1970s, video cameras became increasingly affordable for ordinary consumers and gave Ulysses Jenkins and other artists capabilities that were previously unavailable except to television broadcasters. Jenkins recognized and took full advantage of this ______blank access to powerful technology to create groundbreaking works of video art, such as Mass of Images (1978).

Text 1

Africa’s Sahara region—once a lush ecosystem—began to dry out about 8,000 years ago. A change in Earth’s orbit that affected climate has been posited as a cause of desertification, but archaeologist David Wright also attributes the shift to Neolithic peoples. He cites their adoption of pastoralism as a factor in the region drying out: the pastoralists’ livestock depleted vegetation, prompting the events that created the Sahara Desert.

Text 2

Research by Chris Brierley et al. challenges the idea that Neolithic peoples contributed to the Sahara’s desertification. Using a climate-vegetation model, the team concluded that the end of the region’s humid period occurred 500 years earlier than previously assumed. The timing suggests that Neolithic peoples didn’t exacerbate aridity in the region but, in fact, may have helped delay environmental changes with practices (e.g., selective grazing) that preserved vegetation.

Yawn contagion occurs when one individual yawns in response to another’s yawn. Studies of this behavior in primates have focused on populations in captivity, but biologist Elisabetta Palagi and her colleagues have shown that it can occur in wild primate populations as well. In their study, which focused on a wild population of gelada monkeys (Theropithecus gelada) in Ethiopia, the researchers further reported that yawn contagion most commonly occurred in males and across different social groups instead of within a single social group.

Text 1

Soy sauce, made from fermented soybeans, is noted for its umami flavor. Umami—one of the five basic tastes along with sweet, bitter, salty, and sour—was formally classified when its taste receptors were discovered in the 2000s. In 2007, to define the pure umami flavor scientists Rie Ishii and Michael O’Mahony used broths made from shiitake mushrooms and kombu seaweed, and two panels of Japanese and US judges closely agreed on a description of the taste.

Text 2

A 2022 experiment by Manon Jünger et al. led to a greater understanding of soy sauce’s flavor profile. The team initially presented a mixture of compounds with low molecular weights to taste testers who found it was not as salty or bitter as real soy sauce. Further analysis of soy sauce identified proteins, including dipeptides, that enhanced umami flavor and also contributed to saltiness. The team then made a mix of 50 chemical compounds that re-created soy sauce’s flavor.

A brief book review cannot fully convey the ______blank of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Books of Jacob, with its enormous cast of characters, its complicated, wandering plot, and its page numbers that count backward (beginning at 965 and ending at 1).

The following text is adapted from Herman Melville’s 1857 novel The Confidence-Man. Humphry Davy was a prominent British chemist and inventor.

Years ago, a grave American savant, being in London, observed at an evening party there, a certain coxcombical fellow, as he thought, an absurd ribbon in his lapel, and full of smart [banter], whisking about to the admiration of as many as were disposed to admire. Great was the savant’s disdain; but, chancing ere long to find himself in a corner with the jackanapes, got into conversation with him, when he was somewhat ill-prepared for the good sense of the jackanapes, but was altogether thrown aback, upon subsequently being [informed that he was] no less a personage than Sir Humphry Davy.

Text 1

Dance choreographer Alvin Ailey’s deep admiration for jazz music can most clearly be felt in the rhythms and beats his works were set to. Ailey collaborated with some of the greatest jazz legends, like Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, and perhaps his favorite, Duke Ellington. With his choice of music, Ailey helped bring jazz to life for his audiences.

Text 2

Jazz is present throughout Ailey’s work, but it’s most visible in Ailey’s approach to choreography. Ailey often incorporated improvisation, a signature characteristic of jazz music, in his work. When managing his dance company, Ailey rarely forced his dancers to an exact set of specific moves. Instead, he encouraged his dancers to let their own skills and experiences shape their performances, as jazz musicians do.

Text 1

Microbes are tiny organisms in the soil, water, and air all around us. They thrive even in very harsh conditions. That’s why Noah Fierer and colleagues were surprised when soil samples they collected from an extremely cold, dry area in Antarctica didn’t seem to contain any life. The finding doesn’t prove that there are no microbes in that area, but the team says it does suggest that the environment severely restricts microbes’ survival.

Text 2

Microbes are found in virtually every environment on Earth. So it’s unlikely they would be completely absent from Fierer’s team’s study site, no matter how extreme the environment is. There were probably so few organisms in the samples that current technology couldn’t detect them. But since a spoonful of typical soil elsewhere might contain billions of microbes, the presence of so few in the Antarctic soil samples would show how challenging the conditions are.

The following text is from Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand.

The trees in their spring beauty sent through her restive mind a sharp thrill of pleasure. Seductive, charming, and beckoning as cities were, they had not this easy unhuman loveliness.

Text 1

Historians studying pre-Inca Peru have looked to ceramic vessels to understand daily life among the Moche people. These mold-made sculptures present plants, animals, and human faces in precise ways—vessels representing human faces are so detailed that scholars have interpreted facial markings to represent scars and other skin irregularities. Some historians have even used these objects to identify potential skin diseases that may have afflicted people at the time.

Text 2

Art historian and archaeologist Lisa Trever has argued that the interpretation of Moche “portrait” vessels as hyper-realistic portrayals of identifiable people may inadvertently disregard the creativity of the objects’ creators. Moche ceramic vessels, Trever argues, are artworks in which sculptors could free their imagination, using realistic objects and people around them as inspiration to explore more abstract concepts.

Biologist Jane Edgeloe and colleagues have located what is believed to be the largest individual plant in the world in the Shark Bay area of Australia. The plant is a type of seagrass called Posidonia australis, and it ______blank approximately 200 square kilometers.

In the early 1800s, the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah created the first script, or writing system, for an Indigenous language in the United States. Because it represented the sounds of spoken Cherokee so accurately, his script was easy to learn and thus quickly achieved ______blank use: by 1830, over 90 percent of the Cherokee people could read and write it.

Text 1

Italian painters in the 1500s rarely depicted themselves in their work. Even more rare were self-portrait paintings that portrayed the artist as a painter. At the time, painting was not yet respected as a profession, so painters mostly chose to emphasize other qualities in their self-portraits, like their intellect or social status. In the city of Bologna, the first artist to depict themself painting was a man named Annibale Carracci. A painting of his from around 1585 shows Carracci in front of an easel holding a palette. 

Text 2

In their self-portraits, Bolognese artists typically avoided referring to the act of painting until the mid-1600s. However, Lavinia Fontana’s 1577 painting, Self-Portrait at the Keyboard, stands out as the earliest example of such a work by an artist from Bologna. Although the artist is depicted playing music, in the background, one can spot a painting easel by a window.

In 1929 the Atlantic Monthly published several articles based on newly discovered letters allegedly exchanged between President Abraham Lincoln and a woman named Ann Rutledge. Historians were unable to ______blank the authenticity of the letters, however, and quickly dismissed them as a hoax.

Historians Tiya Miles and Roy E. Finkenbine have both documented the assistance Indigenous peoples gave to Black freedom seekers leaving the South before the US Civil War. Much of the historical evidence of this help comes from Indigenous oral traditions and from autobiographies written by the freedom seekers. One such narrative is Jermain Loguen’s autobiography, which tells about how Neshnabé (Potawatomi) villagers offered him food, lodging, and directions during his 1835 journey from Tennessee to Canada.

Following the principles of community-based participatory research, tribal nations and research institutions are equal partners in health studies conducted on reservations. A collaboration between the Crow Tribe and Montana State University ­­­­______blank this model: tribal citizens worked alongside scientists to design the methodology and continue to assist in data collection.

The process of mechanically recycling plastics is often considered ______blank because of the environmental impact and the loss of material quality that often occurs. But chemist Takunda Chazovachii has helped develop a cleaner process of chemical recycling that converts superabsorbent polymers from diapers into a desirable reusable adhesive.

Bioluminescent beetles called fireflies may seem to create flashes of light randomly, but each species of firefly actually has its own special series of repeated flashes and pauses. These unique ______blank allow fireflies of the same species to find each other.

Text 1

Astronomer Mark Holland and colleagues examined four white dwarfs—small, dense remnants of past stars—in order to determine the composition of exoplanets that used to orbit those stars. Studying wavelengths of light in the white dwarf atmospheres, the team reported that traces of elements such as lithium and sodium support the presence of exoplanets with continental crusts similar to Earth’s.

Text 2

Past studies of white dwarf atmospheres have concluded that certain exoplanets had continental crusts. Geologist Keith Putirka and astronomer Siyi Xu argue that those studies unduly emphasize atmospheric traces of lithium and other individual elements as signifiers of the types of rock found on Earth. The studies don’t adequately account for different minerals made up of various ratios of those elements, and the possibility of rock types not found on Earth that contain those minerals.

According to Potawatomi ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Indigenous method of harvesting Hierochloe odorata, or sweetgrass, by snapping the plant off at the root actually ______blank wild populations: it may seem counterintuitive, she says, but this method of removal allows new sweetgrass plants to repopulate the space, with an overall increase in number and vigor.

The following text is from Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale. Mr. Verloc is navigating the London streets on his way to a meeting.

Before reaching Knightsbridge, Mr. Verloc took a turn to the left out of the busy main thoroughfare, uproarious with the traffic of swaying omnibuses and trotting vans, in the almost silent, swift flow of hansoms [horse-drawn carriages]. Under his hat, worn with a slight backward tilt, his hair had been carefully brushed into respectful sleekness; for his business was with an Embassy. And Mr. Verloc, steady like a rock—a soft kind of rock—marched now along a street which could with every propriety be described as private.

The work of molecular biophysicist Enrique M. De La Cruz is known for ______blank traditional boundaries between academic disciplines. The university laboratory that De La Cruz runs includes engineers, biologists, chemists, and physicists, and the research the lab produces makes use of insights and techniques from all those fields.

The güiro, a musical instrument traditionally made from a dried and hollowed gourd, is thought to have originated with the Taíno people of Puerto Rico. Players use a wooden stick to scrape along ridges cut into the side of the gourd, creating sounds that are highly ______blank: the sounds produced by güiros can differ based on the distance between the ridges, the types of strokes the player uses, and the thickness of the gourd.

Visual artist Gabriela Alemán states that the bold colors of comics, pop art, and Latinx culture have always fascinated her. This passion for the rich history and colors of her Latinx community translates into the ______blank artworks she produces.

In 1973, poet Miguel Algarín started inviting other writers who, like him, were Nuyorican—a term for New Yorkers of Puerto Rican heritage—to gather in his apartment to present their work. The gatherings were so well attended that Algarín soon had to rent space in a cafe to accommodate them. Thus, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe was born. Moving to a permanent location in 1981, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe expanded its original scope beyond the written word, hosting art exhibitions and musical performances as well. Half a century since its inception, it continues to foster emerging Nuyorican talent.

Some studies have suggested that posture can influence cognition, but we should not overstate this phenomenon. A case in point: In a 2014 study, Megan O’Brien and Alaa Ahmed had subjects stand or sit while making risky simulated economic decisions. Standing is more physically unstable and cognitively demanding than sitting; accordingly, O’Brien and Ahmed hypothesized that standing subjects would display more risk aversion during the decision-making tasks than sitting subjects did, since they would want to avoid further feelings of discomfort and complicated risk evaluations. But O’Brien and Ahmed actually found no difference in the groups’ performance. 

The following text is from the 1923 poem “Black Finger” by Angelina Weld Grimké, a Black American writer. A cypress is a type of evergreen tree.

I have just seen a most beautiful thing,
Slim and still,
 Against a gold, gold sky,
 A straight black cypress,
Sensitive,
Exquisite,
A black finger
Pointing upwards.
Why, beautiful still finger, are you black?
And why are you pointing upwards?

In studying the use of external stimuli to reduce the itching sensation caused by an allergic histamine response, Louise Ward and colleagues found that while harmless applications of vibration or warming can provide a temporary distraction, such ______blank stimuli actually offer less relief than a stimulus that seems less benign, like a mild electric shock.

In Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, an almost imperceptible smile from potential suitor Henry Crawford causes the protagonist Fanny Price to blush; her embarrassment grows when she suspects that he is aware of it. This moment—in which Fanny not only infers Henry’s mental state through his gestures, but also infers that he is drawing inferences about her mental state—illustrates what literary scholar George Butte calls “deep intersubjectivity,” a technique for representing interactions between consciousnesses through which Austen’s novels derive much of their social and psychological drama.

Beginning in the 1950s, Navajo Nation legislator Annie Dodge Wauneka continuously worked to promote public health; this ______blank effort involved traveling throughout the vast Navajo homeland and writing a medical dictionary for speakers of Diné bizaad, the Navajo language.

Text 1

The idea that time moves in only one direction is instinctively understood, yet it puzzles physicists. According to the second law of thermodynamics, at a macroscopic level some processes of heat transfer are irreversible due to the production of entropy—after a transfer we cannot rewind time and place molecules back exactly where they were before, just as we cannot unbreak dropped eggs. But laws of physics at a microscopic or quantum level hold that those processes should be reversible.

Text 2

In 2015, physicists Tiago Batalhão et al. performed an experiment in which they confirmed the irreversibility of thermodynamic processes at a quantum level, producing entropy by applying a rapidly oscillating magnetic field to a system of carbon-13 atoms in liquid chloroform. But the experiment “does not pinpoint ... what causes [irreversibility] at the microscopic level,” coauthor Mauro Paternostro said.

In Nature Poem (2017), Kumeyaay poet Tommy Pico portrays his ______blank the natural world by honoring the centrality of nature within his tribe’s traditional beliefs while simultaneously expressing his distaste for being in wilderness settings himself.

In 2007, computer scientist Luis von Ahn was working on converting printed books into a digital format. He found that some words were distorted enough that digital scanners couldn’t recognize them, but most humans could easily read them. Based on that finding, von Ahn invented a simple security test to keep automated “bots” out of websites. The first version of the reCAPTCHA test asked users to type one known word and one of the many words scanners couldn’t recognize. Correct answers proved the users were humans and added data to the book-digitizing project.

Particle physicists like Ayana Holloway Arce and Aida El-Khadra spend much of their time ______blank what is invisible to the naked eye: using sophisticated technology, they closely examine the behavior of subatomic particles, the smallest detectable parts of matter.

In recommending Bao Phi’s collection Sông I Sing, a librarian noted that pieces by the spoken-word poet don’t lose their ______blank nature when printed: the language has the same pleasant musical quality on the page as it does when performed by Phi.

Text 1

What factors influence the abundance of species in a given ecological community? Some theorists have argued that historical diversity is a major driver of how diverse an ecological community eventually becomes: differences in community diversity across otherwise similar habitats, in this view, are strongly affected by the number of species living in those habitats at earlier times. 

Text 2

In 2010, a group of researchers including biologist Carla Cáceres created artificial pools in a New York forest. They stocked some pools with a diverse mix of zooplankton species and others with a single zooplankton species and allowed the pool communities to develop naturally thereafter. Over the course of four years, Cáceres and colleagues periodically measured the species diversity of the pools, finding—contrary to their expectations—that by the end of the study there was little to no difference in the pools’ species diversity. 

The recent discovery of a carved wooden figure dating to around 2,000 years ago in a ditch in England was truly surprising. Wooden objects ______blank survive for so long due to their high susceptibility to rot, but archaeologists suspect layers of sediment in the ditch preserved the figure by creating an oxygen-free environment.

Due to their often strange images, highly experimental syntax, and opaque subject matter, many of John Ashbery’s poems can be quite difficult to ______blank and thus are the object of heated debate among scholars.

The Appalachian Trail is a hiking path in the eastern United States. Much of the 2,000 mile trail passes through wilderness areas. In order to ______blank those areas, the United States Congress passed the National Trails System Act in 1968, ensuring that the trail would not be sold or commercially developed.

The following text is from Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth. Lily Bart and a companion are walking through a park.

Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations. The landscape outspread below her seemed an enlargement of her present mood, and she found something of herself in its calmness, its breadth, its long free reaches. On the nearer slopes the sugar-maples wavered like pyres of light; lower down was a massing of grey orchards, and here and there the lingering green of an oak-grove.

Composer Florence Price won first place for her score Symphony in E Minor at the 1932 Wanamaker Foundation Awards. The piece was performed the following year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a significant recognition of its quality. Price continued to compose many musical pieces throughout her career, blending traditional Black spirituals with classical European Romantic musical traditions. In recent years, Price’s concertos and symphonies have been performed and recorded by several major orchestras, further preserving her work for others to enjoy.

Some bird species don’t raise their own chicks. Instead, adult females lay their eggs in other nests, next to another bird species’ own eggs. Female cuckoos have been seen quickly laying eggs in the nests of other bird species when those birds are out looking for food. After the eggs hatch, the noncuckoo parents will typically raise the cuckoo chicks as if they were their own offspring, even if the cuckoos look very different from the other chicks.

While scholars believe many Mesoamerican cities influenced each other, direct evidence of such influence is difficult to ascertain. However, recent excavations in a sector of Tikal (Guatemala) unearthed a citadel that shows ______blank Teotihuacán (Mexico) architecture—including a near replica of a famed Teotihuacán temple—providing tangible evidence of outside influence in portions of Tikal.

The following text is adapted from Sui Sin Far’s 1912 short story “Mrs. Spring Fragrance.” Mr. and Mrs. Spring Fragrance immigrated to the United States from China.

Mrs. Spring Fragrance was unaware that Mr. Spring Fragrance, tired with the day’s business, had thrown himself down on the bamboo settee on the veranda, and that although his eyes were engaged in scanning the pages of the Chinese World, his ears could not help receiving the words which were borne to him through the open window.

While we can infer information about climate activity in Earth’s distant past from physical evidence, we of course cannot observe past climates directly. To study early Earth’s climate in action, we must ______blank that climate using computer models that represent various climate conditions consistent with the physical evidence.

The following text is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.

[Jay Gatsby] was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness.

Text 1

In a study of the benefits of having free time, Marissa Sharif found that the reported sense of life satisfaction tended to plateau when participants had two hours of free time per day and actually began to fall when they had five hours of free time per day. After further research, Sharif concluded that this dip in life satisfaction mainly occurred when individuals spent all their free time unproductively, such as by watching TV or playing games.

Text 2

Psychologist James Maddux cautions against suggesting an ideal amount of free time. The human desire for both free time and productivity is universal, but Maddux asserts that individuals have unique needs for life satisfaction. Furthermore, he points out that there is no objective definition for what constitutes productivity; reading a book might be considered a productive activity by some, but idleness by others.

In 1877, 85% of California’s railways were already controlled by the Southern Pacific Railroad. The company further solidified its ______blank in rail access to the state’s Pacific coast when it completed the Sunset Route in 1883: running from Louisiana to Southern California, the route established the first transcontinental rail line across the southern United States. 

Mathematician Claude Shannon is widely regarded as a foundational figure in information theory. His most important paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” published in 1948 when he was employed at Bell Labs, utilized a concept called a “binary digit” (shortened to “bit”) to measure the amount of information in any signal and determine the fastest rate at which information could be transmitted while still being reliably decipherable. Robert Gallagher, one of Shannon’s colleagues, said that the bit was “[Shannon’s] discovery, and from it the whole communications revolution has sprung.”

Text 1

Today the starchy root cassava is found in many dishes across West Africa, but its rise to popularity was slow. Portuguese traders brought cassava from Brazil to the West African coast in the 1500s. But at this time, people living in the capitals further inland had little contact with coastal communities. Thus, cassava remained relatively unknown to most of the region’s inhabitants until the 1800s.

Text 2

Cassava’s slow adoption into the diet of West Africans is mainly due to the nature of the crop itself. If not cooked properly, cassava can be toxic. Knowledge of how to properly prepare cassava needed to spread before the food could grow in popularity. The arrival of formerly enslaved people from Brazil in the 1800s, who brought their knowledge of cassava and its preparation with them, thus directly fueled the spread of this crop.

Mônica Lopes-Ferreira and others at Brazil’s Butantan Institute are studying the freshwater stingray species Potamotrygon rex to determine whether biological characteristics such as the rays’ age and sex have ______blank effect on the toxicity of their venom—that is, to see if differences in these traits are associated with considerable variations in venom potency.

A study by a team including finance professor Madhu Veeraraghavan suggests that exposure to sunshine during the workday can lead to overly optimistic behavior. Using data spanning from 1994 to 2010 for a set of US companies, the team compared over 29,000 annual earnings forecasts to the actual earnings later reported by those companies. The team found that the greater the exposure to sunshine at work in the two weeks before a manager submitted an earnings forecast, the more the manager’s forecast exceeded what the company actually earned that year.

Text 1

Fossils of the hominin Australopithecus africanus have been found in the Sterkfontein Caves of South Africa, but assigning an age to the fossils is challenging because of the unreliability of dating methods in this context. The geology of Sterkfontein has caused soil layers from different periods to mix, impeding stratigraphic dating, and dates cannot be reliably imputed from those of nearby animal bones since the bones may have been relocated by flooding.

Text 2

Archaeologists used new cosmogenic nuclide dating techniques to reevaluate the ages of A. africanus fossils found in the Sterkfontein Caves. This technique involves analyzing the cosmogenic nucleotides in the breccia—the matrix of rock fragments immediately surrounding the fossils. The researchers assert that this approach avoids the potential for misdating associated with assigning ages based on Sterkfontein’s soil layers or animal bones.

Cucurbits, a group of plants that includes squash and melons, relied on mastodons to spread their seeds in the Ice Age. When these animals died out, cucurbits faced extinction in turn, having lost their means of seed dispersal. Around this time, however, the ancestors of Indigenous peoples in North America began raising cucurbits as crops, thus ______blank the plants’ survival.

To develop a method for measuring snow depth with laser beams, NASA physicist Yongxiang Hu relied on ______blank; identifying broad similarities between two seemingly different phenomena, Hu used information about how ants move inside colonies to calculate how the particles of light that make up laser beams travel through snow.

The following text is adapted from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1921 short story “John Redding Goes to Sea.” John is a child who lives in a town in the woods.

Perhaps ten-year-old John was puzzling to the folk there in the Florida woods for he was an imaginative child and fond of day-dreams. The St. John River flowed a scarce three hundred feet from his back door. On its banks at this point grow numerous palms, luxuriant magnolias and bay trees. On the bosom of the stream float millions of delicately colored hyacinths. [John Redding] loved to wander down to the water’s edge, and, casting in dry twigs, watch them sail away down stream to Jacksonville, the sea, the wide world and [he] wanted to follow them.

The following text is adapted from Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel Hard Times. Coketown is a fictional town in England. 

[Coketown] contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. 

Whether the reign of a French monarch such as Hugh Capet or Henry I was historically consequential or relatively uneventful, its trajectory was shaped by questions of legitimacy and therefore cannot be understood without a corollary understanding of the factors that allowed the monarch to ______blank his right to hold the throne.

According to statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the best way to predict the amount of time a nonperishable entity (such as a building or a technology) will continue to exist is to examine how long it has survived so far. In this view, an item’s age is the strongest ______blank how much longer it will last.

Text 1

Films and television shows commonly include a long list of credits naming the people involved in a production. Credit sequences may not be exciting, but they generally ensure that everyone’s contributions are duly acknowledged. Because they are highly standardized, film and television credits are also valuable to anyone researching the careers of pioneering cast and crew members who have worked in the mediums.

Text 2

Video game scholars face a major challenge in the industry’s failure to consistently credit the artists, designers, and other contributors involved in making video games. Without a reliable record of which people worked on which games, questions about the medium’s development can be difficult to answer, and the accomplishments of all but its best-known innovators can be difficult to trace.

Text 1

The live music festival business is growing in event size and genre variety. With so many consumer options, organizers are finding ways to cement festival attendance as a special experience worth sharing. This phenomenon is linked to the growing “experiential economy,” where many find it gratifying to purchase lived experiences. To ensure a profitable event, venues need to consider the overall consumer experience, not just the band lineup.

Text 2

Music festival appearances are becoming a more important part of musicians’ careers. One factor in this shift is the rising use of streaming services that allow access to huge numbers of songs for a monthly fee, subsequently reducing sales of full-length albums. With this shift in consumer behavior, musicians are increasingly dependent on revenue from live performances.

In the mid-nineteenth century, some abolitionist newspapers ______blank westward migration in the United States; by printing a letter that described the easy fortunes and high salaries miners could make in California during the Gold Rush, Frederick Douglass’s newspaper North Star was one such publication that inspired readers to relocate.

Like other tribal nations, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation is self-governing; its National Council generates laws regulating aspects of community life such as land use and healthcare, while the principal chief and cabinet officials ______blank those laws by devising policies and administering services in accordance with them.

A journalist and well-respected art critic of nineteenth-century Britain, Lady Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake did not hesitate to publish reviews that went against popular opinion. One of her most divisive works was an essay questioning the idea of photography as an emerging medium for fine art: in the essay, Eastlake ______blank that the value of photographs was informational rather than creative.

Artificially delivering biomolecules to plant cells is an important component of protecting plants from pathogens, but it is difficult to transmit biomolecules through the layers of the plant cell wall. Markita del Carpio Landry and her colleagues have shown that it may be possible to ______blank this problem by transmitting molecules through carbon nanotubes, which can cross cell walls.

Critics have asserted that fine art and fashion rarely ______blank in a world where artists create timeless works for exhibition and designers periodically produce new styles for the public to buy. Luiseño/Shoshone-Bannock beadwork artist and designer Jamie Okuma challenges this view: her work can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and purchased through her online boutique.

The following text is adapted from Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 novel An Old-Fashioned Girl. Polly, a teenager, is visiting her friend Fanny.

Fanny’s friends did not interest Polly much; she was rather afraid of them [because] they seemed so much older and wiser than herself, even those younger in years. They talked about things of which she knew nothing and when Fanny tried to explain, she didn’t find them interesting; indeed, some of them rather shocked and puzzled her.

A number of Indigenous politicians have been elected to the United States Congress since 2000 as members of the country’s two established political parties. In Canada and several Latin American countries, on the other hand, Indigenous people have formed their own political parties to advance candidates who will advocate for the interests of their communities. This movement has been particularly successful in Ecuador, where Guadalupe Llori, a member of the Indigenous party known as Pachakutik, was elected president of the National Assembly in 2021.

The following text is adapted from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1902 novel The Sport of the Gods. Joe and some of his family members have recently moved to New York City.

[Joe] was wild with enthusiasm and with a desire to be a part of all that the metropolis meant. In the evening he saw the young fellows passing by dressed in their spruce clothes, and he wondered with a sort of envy where they could be going. Back home there had been no place much worth going to, except church and one or two people’s houses.

Nigerian American author Teju Cole’s ______blank his two passions—photography and the written word—culminates in his 2017 book, Blind Spot, which evocatively combines his original photographs from his travels with his poetic prose.

The following text is from Claude McKay’s 1922 poem “Morning Joy.” The speaker is looking out a window and observing a wold, or large area of land.

At night the wide and level stretch of wold,

Which at high noon had basked in quiet gold,

Far as the eye could see was ghostly white;

Dark was the night save for the snow’s weird light.

 

I drew the shades far down, crept into bed;

Hearing the cold wind moaning overhead

Through the sad pines, my soul, catching its pain,

Went sorrowing with it across the plain.

The work of Kiowa painter T.C. Cannon derives its power in part from the tension among his ______blank influences: classic European portraiture, with its realistic treatment of faces; the American pop art movement, with its vivid colors; and flatstyle, the intertribal painting style that rejects the effect of depth typically achieved through shading and perspective.

San Francisco is known for the colorful murals painted on many of its buildings. The densest collection of murals is found on Balmy Alley in the Mission District neighborhood. In the 1970s, Latina artists painted vivid scenes of community life on walls along this block. As the original murals have faded, later generations of artists have painted new ones over them. As a result, Balmy Alley has become a living showcase of San Francisco’s artistic spirit, with its murals reflecting changes in the cultural life of the city.

The following text is from Georgia Douglas Johnson’s 1922 poem “Benediction.”

Go forth, my son,
Winged by my heart’s desire!
Great reaches, yet unknown,
Await
For your possession.
I may not, if I would,
Retrace the way with you,
My pilgrimage is through,
But life is calling you!

Text 1

On April 26th, 1777, Sybil Ludington rode 40 miles by horse through Putnam County, New York, to gather up local militia. British forces were burning nearby Danbury, Connecticut, and Ludington wanted to rally rebel troops to meet them. Although she was only 16 years old at the time, her brave feat made Ludington one of the heroes of the American Revolution. Since then, Ludington has been widely celebrated, inspiring postage stamps, statues, and even children’s TV series. 

Text 2

Historian Paula D. Hunt researched the life and legacy of Sybil Ludington but found no evidence for her famous ride. Although many articles and books have been written about Ludington, Hunt believes writers may have been inventing details about Ludington as they retold her story. Ludington is revered by Americans today, but there simply isn’t a strong historical record of her heroic ride.

New and interesting research conducted by Suleiman A. Al-Sweedan and Moath Alhaj is inspired by their observation that though there have been many studies of the effect of high altitude on blood chemistry, there is a ______blank studies of the effect on blood chemistry of living in locations below sea level, such as the California towns of Salton City and Seeley.

Musician Joni Mitchell, who is also a painter, uses images she creates for her album covers to emphasize ideas expressed in her music. For the cover of her album Turbulent Indigo (1994), Mitchell painted a striking self-portrait that closely resembles Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889). The image calls attention to the album’s title song, in which Mitchell sings about the legacy of the postimpressionist painter. In that song, Mitchell also hints that she feels a strong artistic connection to Van Gogh—an idea that is reinforced by her imagery on the cover.

The following text is from the 1924 poem “Cycle” by D’Arcy McNickle, who was a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

There shall be new roads wending,
A new beating of the drum—
Men’s eyes shall have fresh seeing,
Grey lives reprise their span—
But under the new sun’s being,
Completing what night began,
There’ll be the same backs bending,
The same sad feet shall drum—
When this night finds its ending
And day shall have come.....

In habitats with limited nutrients, certain fungus species grow on the roots of trees, engaging in mutually beneficial relationships known as ectomycorrhizae: in this symbiotic exchange, the tree provides the fungus with carbon, a nutrient necessary for both species, and the fungus ______blank by enhancing the tree’s ability to absorb nitrogen, another key nutrient, from the soil.

The following text is adapted from Oscar Wilde’s 1897 nonfiction work De Profundis. 

People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going. They can’t know. In one sense of the word it is of course necessary to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

Although critics believed that customers would never agree to pay to pick their own produce on farms, such concerns didn’t ______blank Booker T. Whatley’s efforts to promote the practice. Thanks in part to Whatley’s determined advocacy, farms that allow visitors to pick their own apples, pumpkins, and other produce can be found throughout the United States.

For his 1986 album Keyboard Fantasies, Beverly Glenn-Copeland wrote songs grounded in traditional soul and folk music, then accompanied them with futuristic synthesizer arrangements featuring ambient sounds and complex rhythms. The result was so strange, so unprecedented, that the album attracted little attention when first released. In recent years, however, a younger generation of musicians has embraced the stylistic experimentation of Keyboard Fantasies. Alternative R&B musicians Blood Orange and Moses Sumney, among other contemporary recording artists, cite the album as an influence.

Close analysis of the painting Girl with a Flute, long attributed to the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, has revealed subtle deviations from the artist’s signature techniques. These variations suggest that the work may be that of a student under Vermeer’s tutelage—potentially ______blank our understanding of Vermeer as a solitary artist.

Stephen Hannock’s luminous landscape paintings are appealing to viewers but have elicited little commentary from contemporary critics, a phenomenon that may be due to the very fact that the paintings seem so ______blank. Many critics focus their attention on art that is cryptic or overtly challenging. 

Anthropologist Kristian J. Carlson and colleagues examined the fossilized clavicle and shoulder bones of a 3.6-million-year-old early hominin known as “Little Foot.” They found that these bones were ______blank the clavicle and shoulder bones of modern apes that are frequent climbers, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, suggesting that Little Foot had adapted to life in the trees.

Although the playwrights hoped that their play would be ______blank when performed live, critics generally agreed that the production and performances had the opposite effect, wearying audiences instead of energizing them.

Bicycle sharing systems allow users to rent a bicycle at one location within a city and return it to any other designated location in that city, which can cause serious problems of bicycle supply and user demand within the city’s system. Tohru Ikeguchi uses open-source data and statistical modeling to identify when a high number of users making one-way trips is likely to leave some locations within the system ______blank bicycles and other areas with insufficient supply.

Text 1

The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event is usually attributed solely to an asteroid impact near Chicxulub, Mexico. Some scientists argue that volcanic activity was the true cause, as the K-Pg event occurred relatively early in a long period of eruption of the Deccan Traps range that initially produced huge amounts of climate-altering gases. These dissenters note that other mass extinctions have coincided with large volcanic eruptions, while only the K-Pg event lines up with an asteroid strike.

Text 2

In a 2020 study, Pincelli Hull and her colleagues analyzed ocean core samples and modeled climate changes around the K-Pg event. The team concluded that Deccan Traps gases did affect global conditions prior to the event, but that the climate returned to normal well before the extinctions began—extinctions that instead closely align with the Chicxulub impact.

In most building demolitions, the building materials are destroyed and sent to landfills. City officials in Portland, Oregon, wanted to reduce this waste. The officials passed a law requiring demolition companies to deconstruct some buildings instead. Deconstruction involves carefully taking buildings apart piece by piece. Damage to the materials is avoided so that they can be reused in new constructions. A 2019 study found that 27 percent of materials from deconstructions in Portland were able to be reused. The remaining materials were processed for recycling instead of going to a landfill.

Osage Nation citizen Randy Tinker-Smith produced and directed the ballet Wahzhazhe, which vividly chronicles Osage history and culture. Telling Osage stories through ballet is ______blank choice because two of the foremost ballet dancers of the twentieth century were Osage: sisters Maria and Marjorie Tallchief. 

In the Indigenous intercropping system known as the Three Sisters, maize, squash, and beans form an ______blank web of relations: maize provides the structure on which the bean vines grow; the squash vines cover the soil, discouraging competition from weeds; and the beans aid their two “sisters” by enriching the soil with essential nitrogen.

The following text is from Holly Goldberg Sloan’s 2017 novel Short. 

More than two years ago my parents bought a piano from some people who were moving to Utah. Mom and Dad gave it to my brothers and me for Christmas. I had to act really happy because it was such a big present, but I pretty much hated the thing from the second it was carried into the hallway upstairs, which is right next to my bedroom. The piano glared at me. It was like a songbird in a cage. It wanted to be set free.  

©2017 by Holly Goldberg Sloan

The printing of Virginia Woolf’s novels featured a creative ______blank between Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell: a talented painter, Bell worked closely with Woolf to create original cover art for most of the novels.

The following text is adapted from Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest.

CECILY: Have we got to part?

ALGERNON: I am afraid so. It’s a very painful parting.

CECILY: It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.

The following text is from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1910 poem “The Earth’s Entail.”

No matter how we cultivate the land,

Taming the forest and the prairie free;

No matter how we irrigate the sand,

Making the desert blossom at command,

 We must always leave the borders of the sea;

 The immeasureable reaches

 Of the windy wave-wet beaches,

The million-mile-long margin of the sea.

The spacecraft OSIRIS-REx briefly made contact with the asteroid 101955 Bennu in 2020. NASA scientist Daniella DellaGiustina reports that despite facing the unexpected obstacle of a surface mostly covered in boulders, OSIRIS-REx successfully ______blank a sample of the surface, gathering pieces of it to bring back to Earth.

Text 1

For decades, bluegrass musicians have debated whether their genre should exclude influences from mainstream genres such as rock. Many insist that bluegrass is defined by its adherence to the folk music of the US South, out of which bluegrass emerged. Such “purists,” as they are known, regard the recordings of Bill Monroe, which established the bluegrass sound in the 1940s, as a standard against which the genre should still be measured.

Text 2

Bluegrass isn’t simply an extension of folk traditions into the era of recorded music. In reality, Bill Monroe created the bluegrass sound in the 1940s by combining Southern folk music with commercial genres that had arisen only a few decades before, such as jazz and the blues. Since bluegrass has always been a mixed genre, contemporary bluegrass musicians should not be forbidden from incorporating into it influences from rock and other mainstream genres.

Text 1

Stage lighting theorist Adolphe Appia was perhaps the first to argue that light must be considered alongside all the various elements of a stage to create a single, unified performance. Researcher Kelly Bremner, however, has noted that Appia lacked technical expertise in the use of light in the theater. As a result of Appia’s inexperience, Bremner argues, Appia’s theory of light called for lighting practices that weren’t possible until after the advent of electricity around 1881. 

Text 2

Adolphe Appia was not an amateur in the practice of lighting. Instead, it is precisely his exposure to lighting techniques at the time that contributed to his theory on the importance of light. When working as an apprentice for a lighting specialist in his youth, Appia observed the use of portable lighting devices that could be operated by hand. This experience developed his understanding of what was possible in the coordination of elements on the stage.

The parasitic dodder plant increases its reproductive success by flowering at the same time as the host plant it has latched onto. In 2020, Jianqiang Wu and his colleagues determined that the tiny dodder achieves this ______blank with its host by absorbing and utilizing a protein the host produces when it is about to flower.

Text 1

Most scientists agree that the moon was likely formed after a collision between Earth and a large planet named Theia. This collision likely created a huge debris field, made up of material from both Earth and Theia. Based on models of this event, scientists believe that the moon was formed from this debris over the course of thousands of years.

Text 2 

Researchers from NASA’s Ames Research Center used a computer to model how the moon could have formed. Although simulations of the moon’s formation have been done in the past, the team from NASA ran simulations that were much more detailed. They found that the formation of the moon was likely not a slow process that took many years. Instead, it’s probable that the moon’s formation happened immediately after impact, taking just a few hours.

Sumerian civilization (which lasted from around 3300 to 2000 BCE) ______blank many concepts that persist into present-day civilizations: for example, the first description of the seven-day week appears in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.

Physicist Joseph Weber performed ______blank work in gravitational wave research in the 1960s and 1970s, conducting key experiments that scientists later used as the basis for their own investigations that led to the first verified detection of a gravitational wave in 2015.

According to Indian economist and sociologist Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889–1968), the Eurocentric concepts that informed early twentieth-century social scientific methods—for example, the idea that all social relations are reducible to struggles between individuals—had little relevance for India. Making the social sciences more responsive to Indians’ needs, Mukerjee argued, required constructing analytical categories informed by India’s cultural and ecological circumstances. Mukerjee thus proposed the communalist “Indian village” as the ideal model on which to base Indian economic and social policy.

The following text is adapted from Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto’s 1925 memoir A Daughter of the Samurai. As a young woman, Sugimoto moved from feudal Japan to the United States.

The standards of my own and my adopted country differed so widely in some ways, and my love for both lands was so sincere, that sometimes I had an odd feeling of standing upon a cloud in space, and gazing with measuring eyes upon two separate worlds. At first I was continually trying to explain, by Japanese standards, all the queer things that came every day before my surprised eyes; for no one seemed to know the origin or significance of even the most familiar customs, nor why they existed and were followed.

In the Here and Now Storybook (1921), educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell advanced the then controversial idea that books for very young children should imitate how they use language, since toddlers, who cannot yet grasp narrative or abstract ideas, seek reassurance in verbal repetition and naming. The most enduring example of this idea is Margaret Wise Brown’s 1947 picture book Goodnight Moon, in which a young rabbit names the objects in his room as he drifts off to sleep. Scholars note that the book’s emphasis on repetition, rhythm, and nonsense rhyme speaks directly to Mitchell’s influence. 

As an architect in Los Angeles in the 1950s, Helen Liu Fong became known for avoiding ______blank designs in her buildings. Instead of using standard shapes and colors, she typically explored innovative forms and daring hues.

It is by no means ______blank to recognize the influence of Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch on Ali Banisadr’s paintings; indeed, Banisadr himself cites Bosch as an inspiration. However, some scholars have suggested that the ancient Mesopotamian poem Epic of Gilgamesh may have had a far greater impact on Banisadr’s work.

The following text is adapted from Indian Boyhood, a 1902 memoir by Ohiyesa (Charles A. Eastman), a Santee Dakota writer. In the text, Ohiyesa recalls how the women in his tribe harvested maple syrup during his childhood.

Now the women began to test the trees—moving leisurely among them, axe in hand, and striking a single quick blow, to see if the sap would appear. The trees, like people, have their individual characters; some were ready to yield up their life-blood, while others were more reluctant. Now one of the birchen basins was set under each tree, and a hardwood chip driven deep into the cut which the axe had made. From the corners of this chip—at first drop by drop, then more freely—the sap trickled into the little dishes.

Text 1

In 2021, a team led by Amir Siraj hypothesized that the Chicxulub impactor—the object that struck the Yucatán Peninsula sixty-six million years ago, precipitating the mass extinction of the dinosaurs—was likely a member of the class of long-period comets. As evidence, Siraj cited the carbonaceous chondritic composition of samples from the Chicxulub impact crater as well as of samples obtained from long-period comet Wild 2 in 2006.

Text 2

Although long-period comets contain carbonaceous chondrites, asteroids are similarly rich in these materials. Furthermore, some asteroids are rich in iridium, as Natalia Artemieva points out, whereas long-period comets are not. Given the prevalence of iridium at the crater and, more broadly, in geological layers deposited worldwide following the impact, Artemieva argues that an asteroid is a more plausible candidate for the Chicxulub impactor.

Scholarly discussions of gender in Shakespeare’s comedies often celebrate the rebellion of the playwright’s characters against the rigid expectations ______blank by Elizabethan society. Most of the comedies end in marriage, with characters returning to their socially dictated gender roles after previously defying them, but there are some notable exceptions.

Text 1

Philosopher G.E. Moore’s most influential work entails the concept of common sense. He asserts that there are certain beliefs that all people, including philosophers, know instinctively to be true, whether or not they profess otherwise: among them, that they have bodies, or that they exist in a world with other objects that have three dimensions. Moore’s careful work on common sense may seem obvious but was in fact groundbreaking.

Text 2

External world skepticism is a philosophical stance supposing that we cannot be sure of the existence of anything outside our own minds. During a lecture, G.E. Moore once offered a proof refuting this stance by holding out his hands and saying, “Here is one hand, and here is another.” Many philosophers reflexively reject this proof (Annalisa Coliva called it “an obviously annoying failure”) but have found it a challenge to articulate exactly why the proof fails.

Sueño de Familia is an exhibition of drawings, paintings, and ceramics that explores the artistic heritage of US-based artist Yolanda González. The exhibition ______blank five generations, featuring works by González’s great-grandfather, grandmother, mother, and niece as well as González herself. 

The following text is from Charlotte Forten Grimké’s 1888 poem “At Newport.”

Oh, deep delight to watch the gladsome waves
Exultant leap upon the rugged rocks;
Ever repulsed, yet ever rushing on—
Filled with a life that will not know defeat;
To see the glorious hues of sky and sea.
The distant snowy sails, glide spirit like,
Into an unknown world, to feel the sweet
Enchantment of the sea thrill all the soul,
Clearing the clouded brain, making the heart
Leap joyous as it own bright, singing waves!

In 2008 a complete set of ancient pessoi (glass game pieces) was uncovered from beneath a paving stone in modern-day Israel. Due to their small size, pessoi were easily misplaced, making a whole set a rare find. This has led some experts to suggest that the set may have been buried intentionally; however, without clear evidence, archaeologists are left to ______blank what happened.

Text 1

Like the work of Ralph Ellison before her, Toni Morrison’s novels feature scenes in which characters deliver sermons of such length and verbal dexterity that for a time, the text exchanges the formal parameters of fiction for those of oral literature. Given the many other echoes of Ellison in Morrison’s novels, both in structure and prose style, these scenes suggest Ellison’s direct influence on Morrison.

Text 2

In their destabilizing effect on literary form, the sermons in Morrison’s works recall those in Ellison’s. Yet literature by Black Americans abounds in moments where interpolated speech erodes the division between oral and written forms that literature in English has traditionally observed. Morrison’s use of the sermon is attributable not only to the influence of Ellison but also to a community-wide strategy of resistance to externally imposed literary conventions.

US traffic signals didn’t always contain the familiar three lights (red, yellow, and green). Traffic lights only ______blank red and green lights until the three-light traffic signal was developed in the 1920s.

The following text is adapted from Charles Chesnutt’s 1899 short story “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare.” The narrator and his wife have recently moved to the southern United States, and Julius is their carriage driver.

Julius [was] very useful when we moved to our new residence. He had a thorough knowledge of the neighborhood, was familiar with the roads and the watercourses, knew the qualities of the various soils and what they would produce, and where the best hunting and fishing were to be had. He was a marvelous hand in the management of horses and dogs.

Text 1

Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando is an oddity within her body of work. Her other major novels consist mainly of scenes of everyday life and describe their characters’ interior states in great detail, whereas Orlando propels itself through a series of fantastical events and considers its characters’ psychology more superficially. Woolf herself sometimes regarded the novel as a minor work, even admitting once that she “began it as a joke.”

Text 2

Like Woolf’s other great novels, Orlando portrays how people’s memories inform their experience of the present. Like those works, it examines how people navigate social interactions shaped by gender and social class. Though it is lighter in tone—more entertaining, even—this literary “joke” nonetheless engages seriously with the themes that motivated the four or five other novels by Woolf that have achieved the status of literary classics.

Given that the conditions in binary star systems should make planetary formation nearly impossible, it’s not surprising that the existence of planets in such systems has lacked ______blank explanation. Roman Rafikov and Kedron Silsbee shed light on the subject when they used modeling to determine a complex set of factors that could support planets’ development.

For her 2021 art installation Anthem, Wu Tsang joined forces with singer and composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland to produce a piece that critics found truly ______blank: they praised Tsang for creatively transforming a museum rotunda into a dynamic exhibit by projecting filmed images of Glenn-Copeland onto a massive 84-foot curtain and filling the space with the sounds of his and other voices singing.