The following text is adapted from Yone Noguchi's 1914 memoir The Story of Yone Noguchi. Noguchi is returning home after eleven years abroad.
I reached Tsushima, my native town, at evening.
I frightened my old father at the station, who was actually trying to find me among some other people. There is no wonder that he could not recognise me; I must have changed a great deal.

The ______ Keshni Kashyap's book Tina's Mouth has been very positive. Many reviewers have praised the book, and it won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature.

Some social scientists argue that while a belief in the importance of reason and progress is key to democracy, the public's understanding of history is also central to its subsequent comprehension of a state's politics, and if an electorate is to function, historical issues cannot remain the dominion only of academics. History is too ______ to leave to historians alone.

A speaker at a recent children's book publishing conference noted that, while many illustrators do excellent work, in her mind, no one has ever ______ Jerry Pinkney's work as the illustrator of The Talking Eggs: A folktale from the American South: there is no better example of the form, according to the speaker.

The Village Politicians, painted in the realist style by Wilhelm Leibl, depicts a group of peasants clustered together in conversation and emphasizes accuracy in its portrayal of the experiences of ordinary working people. This style largely ______ the conventions of the romantic style evident in many paintings by Thomas Couture, which instead accentuated their subjects' positive traits by, for example, placing them in staged settings with expensive looking decorations and presenting them with smooth, unblemished skin.

In the early days of television in the 1940s, many people thought that US television programs would rely on the financial support of ad agencies and commercial sponsors, much like radio did. But advertisers hesitated to jump into a new space, particularly at a time when the manufacturing of new television sets was stalled due to the US's involvement in World War Ⅱ. Broadcasters, like the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), needed to persuade advertisers to support their programming despite not knowing whether there would be a robust television audience to begin with.

The following text is from Armando Palacio Valdés's short story "The Love of Clotilde," originally published in Spanish in 1884. In the story, Don Jerónimo is a financial supporter of artists in the theater.
Any youth from the provinces who arrived in Madrid with a drama in his pocket could take no surer road to seeing it produced than that which led to the home of Don Jerónimo. One and all, he received them with open arms, the good and the bad alike. There is no denying that, since he was rather brusque in his ways, he never spared the young authors who asked his advice and read him their productions, but criticized vigorously, even to the verge of insult.

Dubautia raillardioides is a species in a family of plants known collectively as the silversword alliance, all of which grow only on the Hawaiian Islands. Members of this alliance exhibit an extraordinary range of phenotypes, with some species maturing into vines and others into shrubs and trees. All species in the alliance descended from a single ancestral tarweed plant that arrived on the islands around 5 million years ago. The tarweed's descendants diversified into distinct species as they adapted to live in the wide variety of habitats found on the Hawaiian Islands.

Mexican textile artist Victoria Villasana weaves stories of triumph, using her unique method of applying colorful yarn to photographs of people. In some works, Villasana focuses on celebrating cultural icons who are people of color, as she does in her depiction of artist Frida Kahlo. However, in other works, Villasana honors ordinary people, as she does in her captivating portrayal of a woman holding a baby. Villasana sees both of these approaches as ways of depicting the power and interconnectedness of all people.

Community science involves professional scientists collaborating with members of the public to study a topic. This approach to research can promote community engagement by offering insight into the daily life of a scientist. It's also very effective because it greatly increases the amount of data that can be collected, such as when biologist Abbigail Merrill and colleagues studied butterfly size and its relation to behavior and used findings reported by hundreds of students and community members in northwestern Arkansas.

Biologists Christina Zdenek, Damian Candusso, and their team exposed various snakes to airborne sound and recorded whether they moved toward or away from the sound. The table shows the results for three of the snakes observed in the study. Based on the table, a student concludes that Glory and Boss behaved similarly in the sound trials.

Among the most visited art museums in the world, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid had approximately 4.4 million visitors in 2019. The Museo Reina Sofia also offers virtual tours that art lovers can view online for free. Although there were initial concerns that people who viewed the virtual tours would then consider an in-person visit unnecessary, museum administrators claim that their surveys of in-person visitors show that those concerns were unjustified.

The Clouds is a 423 BCE play by Aristophanes, originally written in ancient Greek. At the time, professional intellectuals called sophists taught customers rhetorical techniques to use in public speaking, along with providing instruction in other subjects. In the play, Aristophanes satirizes sophists as teaching people to speak dishonestly, as seen when the character ______

The musical Hadestown was produced off-Broadway in New York in 2016. A revised version of the musical premiered on Broadway in 2019, in a larger production. In a review of the Broadway production, theater critic Jesse Green enthusiastically praised the musical's storytelling. However, Green also explained that he had seen the earlier version of Hadestown in 2016 and had found the storytelling to be very confusing. This suggests that in Green's view, ______

Biochemists Ⅰ. Sam Saguy and Eli J. Pinthus studied the mass and heat transfer processes that occur when foods, such as the Indian snacks makka poha and shankarpali, are fried in oil. During frying, water in the crust evaporates, leaving voids that oil can fill, thereby increasing the food's fat content. As the process continues, water from the food's center moves to the crust as long as the crust remains permeable. Therefore, the less moisture a food loses during frying, ______

Water boils at around 212°F at sea level, but in Superior, Colorado (elevation: 5,495 feet above sea level), it boils at around 202°F. Food writer J. Kenji López-Alt, who explores the science behind cooking, ______ that lower boiling points at higher elevations “can wreak all sorts of havoc on recipes.”

Many Farms Chapter is one of the 110 chapters of the Navajo Nation (Naabeehó Bináhásdzo). The chapter, known as Dá'ák'eh Haláni in the Navajo language (Diné bizaad), was the subject of a profile ______ in the Navajo Times on August 22, 2013.

With the short documentary Rick Bartow: The Man Who Made Marks, Osage and Cherokee director Nanette Kelley joined the growing number of Indigenous women adding their voices to North American ______ film, a selection of the Native Women in Film Festival, is about the art of painter and musician Rick Bartow.

Working with equipment designed for a billionths of a meter scale, ______

Just as the Arrhenius equation in chemistry is named not after its first discoverer but after the physicist who further developed the equation, so too does the Cavendish balance in physics take its name from a ______ who was not the first to construct the device.

Jetties—long, narrow structures that extend from a landmass into the water—are often constructed to protect coastlines from erosion. Jetties can sometimes have the opposite ______ obstructing the natural flow of sand along the shore can lead to increased erosion in some areas.

The editors of Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape turned to Arturo Longoria, a nonfiction writer, to craft the entry for “arroyo,” a term referring to the bed of an intermittently dry stream or creek. For “lek,” however, the editors chose the ______ author of The Very Rich Hours.

Guard cells are specialized cells that are part of a plant's pores. These cells help regulate the amount of carbon dioxide a plant takes in. ______ they help regulate a plant's water loss.

Elara, one of the eighty known moons of Jupiter, is designated as Jupiter Ⅶ (“Ⅶ” means “7”). Roman numerals typically indicate the order in which the moons were named rather than the order of their proximity to Jupiter. It is incorrect to assume, ______ that Elara is the seventh moon from Jupiter in terms of proximity.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Dinosaur fossil specimens can be found at science museums all over the world.
• A dinosaur fossil specimen nicknamed Stan is housed at the Black Hills Institute in Hill City, South Dakota.
• Stan, a Tyrannosaurus, lived in the Late Cretaceous period.
• A dinosaur fossil specimen nicknamed Horridus is housed at the Melbourne Museum in Melbourne, Australia.
• Horridus, a Triceratops, lived in the Late Cretaceous period.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Grimanesa Amoros is a Peruvian American artist well known for her LED light sculptures.
• Her sculpture Uros House is made of smooth multicolored LED domes.
• It occupies 250 cubic feet of space.
• Her sculpture Ocupante is made of entangled blue and white LED tubes.
• It occupies 80,000 cubic feet of space.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Researchers in a 2021 study wanted to determine the rate at which 17 languages conveyed both information and syllables.
• They calculated the bits of information conveyed per second (the IR, or information rate).
• The IR was found to be approximately consistent across the 17 languages (an average of 39 bits per second).
• They calculated the number of syllables spoken per second (the SR, or syllable rate).
• Spanish had the second-fastest SR (7.7 syllables per second).
• Vietnamese had the sixteenth-fastest SR (5.3 syllables per second).

When it comes to crafting policy recommendations to protect species at risk, lessons from previous declines in biodiversity can be especially ______. The factors that contributed to the extinction of the Caribbean ground sloth around 3000 BCE, for example, may be applicable to endangered species today.

The Pacific halibut is an ectothermic (cold-blooded) fish, whereas the yellowfin tuna is a regional endotherm; unlike that of ectotherms, its body temperature remains above the ambient water temperature. The basking shark had been classified as a full ectotherm, but researchers Haley R. Dolton et al. found that its body temperature remains 1.0 to 1.5°C above ambient, which is ______ that classification.

In the late 2010s, the price of vintage cards from the game Magic: The Gathering rose dramatically, which had the counterintuitive effect of ______ demand: buyers who hadn't previously wanted to purchase Magic: The Gathering cards thronged the market, believing prices would continue to rise and the cards could be resold later at a profit.

Spanning the 1920s to the 1980s, Mexican architect Luis Barragán's prolific career evolved through distinct phases. As epitomized by the house in Calle Pedro Loza in Guadalajara, many of Barragán's first projects integrated traditional Mexican building techniques into Mediterranean designs. Extensive travels abroad later sparked an engagement with modernist and functionalist aesthetics—styles whose emphasis on utility and whose repudiation of traditional architecture's more ornamental elements are readily apparent in Barragán's Pizarro Suárez House.

Individual elephants and Arctic herbivores such as caribou tend to have fixed geographic ranges throughout their lifetimes, which had prompted some researchers to speculate that the Arctic woolly mammoth, an extinct elephantid, might have exhibited similar behavior. Mammoth tusks grew in sequential layers, incorporating ingested minerals and organics, and so each ivory stratum reflects the ratio of strontium isotopes (87Sr/86Sr) in the local environment; thus, the sequence of strata shows where the animal roamed during life. Recent analysis of the strontium ratios in the strata of one Arctic woolly mammoth tusk in relation to the geographic distribution of strontium ratios in the environment shows the animal's range begin to expand as it reached sexual maturity, only to contract again in its final 1.5 years.

Text 1
French Impressionist artist Edgar Degas insisted that his paintings be kept in their original frames after they were sold. Like many impressionist painters, Degas used painted frames that stood in contrast to the gold frames frequently seen at the Paris Salon, a prestigious art exhibition that was sponsored by the French government and promoted traditional painting styles. Impressionist painters likely chose these colorful frames to distinguish themselves from what was considered conventional at the time.
Text 2
Impressionist painters often focused on the interplay of color and light in their works. As such, those Impressionists who placed their works in painted frames instead of the more traditional gold ones did so for aesthetic reasons: a frame's color was likely chosen because it would harmonize with the colors or subjects in a painting. Gold, conversely, could distract from the subtleties in a painted scene.

The following text is from Thomas Mann's 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, translated by John E. Woods in 1995.
The story of Hans Castorp that we intend to tell here—not for his sake (for the reader will come to know him as a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man), but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us to be very much worth telling (although in Hans Castorp's favor it should be noted that it is his story, and that not every story happens to everybody)—is a story that took place long ago, and is, so to speak, covered with the patina of history and must necessarily be told with verbs whose tense is that of the deepest past.
©1995 by Alfred A. Knopf. Inc

Drosophila (fruit flies) have generation times of 10-12 days, so seasonal changes in rainfall and other environmental conditions can drive seasonal fluctuations in chromosome rearrangements in species such as D. persimilis and D. mediopunctata. Drosophila body size (for which wing centroid size serves as a proxy measure) correlates with life span. Banu Sebnem Onder and Cansu Fidan Aksoy measured the wing sizes of members of a D. melanogaster population in Yesilóz, Turkey, that were collected monthly between May and October over three years. Their research suggests that Drosophila collected in relatively warmer months should tend to have a longer life span, as is illustrated by the finding that ______

Hemerocallis sp. plants typically carry a negative electrical charge, while bees and other pollinators tend to accumulate a positive charge. Given that negatively and positively charged objects attract, a research team hypothesized that the difference in charges could attract Hemerocallis sp. stamens to the plants’ pollinators. Based on the team's experiments, the hypothesis was well supported for positive charges above a certain threshold. The team found that foraging honeybees exceeded that threshold, which suggests that ______

Growing seasons in Alaska have been extending further into the year in response to climate warming, potentially enabling increased carbon dioxide (CO₂,) absorption through greater productivity of marsh cinquefoil (Comarum palastre) plants and other vegetation, but also potentially enabling increased CO₂ output through greater heterotrophic respiration (CO₂ generated by the activity of soil microorganisms). Hydrologist Yonghong Yi and her colleagues developed a model incorporating numerous inputs—years of solar radiation and snow cover data among them—to evaluate the effects of warming on the CO₂ balance in Alaska, concluding that net CO₂ is likely to increase if warming hastens spring snow melt.

A team of public transportation experts in Detroit is creating a new streetcar stop for the Woodward Avenue Streetcar system that will service a neighborhood in which a stop does not currently exist. To decide where to place the stop, the team is using a survey from ten years ago that asked how far neighborhood residents would be willing to walk to a streetcar stop. The team also looked at studies showing that people's willingness to walk to public transit is influenced by factors like weather and the presence of paved sidewalks and available crosswalks. A researcher has argued that the survey does not accurately reflect the feelings of today's residents of this neighborhood.

Some food packaging contains silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs), which can leach into waterways and soils via wastewater. In a 2015 study, Tina Ramskov and colleagues found that Ag-NPs can accumulate in the bodies of marine annelid worms (Capitella teleta). While bioaccumulation of manufactured nanoparticles may be inherently worrisome, it has been hypothesized that Ag-NP bioaccumulation in invertebrates like C. teleta could serve a valuable proxy role, obviating the need for manufacturers to conduct costly and intrusive sampling of vertebrate species—such as Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), commonly used in regulatory compliance testing—for nanoparticle bioaccumulation, as environmental protection laws currently require.

To address the susceptibility of materials used in components of high-performance machinery, such as aircraft engines, to creep (deformation that is induced by persistent mechanical stress and that often occurs at elevated temperatures), materials researchers have developed silicon carbide (SiC) fibers for producing aerospace composites. Testing the thermomechanical properties of several commercially available SiC fibers, Ramakrishna T. Bhatt et al. found that in comparison with two polymer-derived SiC fibers, a nitrogen-treated SiC fiber exhibited a lower minimum creep rate, a measure of the rate at which a stress-exposed material deforms at a constant temperature and uniaxial load. The finding suggests that ______

Chelsea Wood et al. tracked temperature-driven changes in the abundance of Gonocerca sp. (a complex life cycle parasite, or CLP, that requires three host species throughout its life cycle), Gyrodactylus sp. (a directly transmitted parasite, which requires only one host species), and 83 other parasite taxa found on eight fish species. CLPs are transmitted when an infected host is ingested by an individual of another species, typically shielding CLPs from the external environment, whereas directly transmitted parasites are exposed to external conditions during transmission. However, Wood et al. found that three-host CLP abundance decreased as sea temperatures rose, whereas directly transmitted parasite abundance was largely stable, suggesting that ______

Scientists recently created a model to predict how shorter winters will affect future mammal population sizes in US national forests. Unfortunately, when the model is applied to large forests, its predictions for large-mammal populations are too high, and when applied to small forests, its predictions for small-mammal populations are too high. Tuskegee National Forest in Alabama is a small forest, covering less than 100,000 acres. If used to evaluate the effect of shorter winters on this forest in ten years, the model would likely therefore ______

The hypothesized protolanguage from which all Kartvelian languages have descended, ______

In a chemical reaction, the value known as molar mass helps convert between the mass of the reactants and the mass of the product. The gaseous ______ have molar masses of 42.08 and 44.10 g/mol, respectively.

The Roman historian Suetonius's De vita caesarum, a biography of the Roman Empire's first leaders, is an extant work: it can still be read. By contrast, Suetonius's book on miscellaneous topics, Pratum, no copies of which ______ is a lost work: it can be accessed only indirectly, through references to it in extant works.

Within Earth's biomes, there are four main types of desert: arid, semiarid, coastal, and cold. The Australian Desert in Australasia is an arid ______ with a total area of about 2,700,000 km², it is one of the largest deserts of any type.

On most of the world's beaches, sand is a predictable cream or beige color. The sand at Talofofo Beach in Guam is an ______ sand gets its shade from deposits of gray-and tan-hued quartz and feldspar, deposits of crushed olivine crystal and other organic matter lend the sand at Talofofo Beach a colorful green tint.

The parks of Austin, Texas, seem to be making people happier. In 2022, a team of researchers ______ to find connections between the physical location in which a social media post was created and the content of that post analyzed geotagged social media posts from various sites in Austin. The team found that posts from the city's parks contained more words associated with happiness than did the other posts.

The near-Earth asteroid Atira is orbited by the moonlet S/2017 (163693). In 2022 scientists studying asteroid deflection intentionally crashed a probe into a similar moonlet, Dimorphos, shortening its orbital period by 32 minutes. ______ it used to take Dimorphos 11 hours, 55 minutes to orbit the near-Earth asteroid Didymos; now it takes 11 hours, 23 minutes.

In his 2020 poem “This Town,” Saad Ali contemplates Ivan Aivazovsky's 1859 painting Lunar Night on the Black Sea. Translating the painting's depiction of a seascape into vivid figurative phrases—such as “a dozen sea shells converse”—Ali suggests the fluid interplay of poetry and painting. ______ Ali's poem highlights fundamental tensions between these modes of representation.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Georeferencing is the process of assigning geographic coordinates to an image.
• This process enables mapping software to place the image in its real-world location.
• A 2017 project by Tania López Marrero and colleagues georeferenced a set of aerial photographs of Puerto Rico's coastline taken in 1930.
• These photographs are the earliest known aerial photographs of Puerto Rico.
• López Marrero's project provided data that can help researchers analyze changes in Puerto Rico's coastline.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• A copyright prevents a book's contents from being reproduced (published) without permission from the copyright holder.
• When a book's copyright expires, the book enters the public domain and can be legally reproduced by anyone.
• Cane is a novel by Jean Toomer.
• It entered the public domain in 2019.
• Billy Budd, Sailor is a novella by Herman Melville.
• It entered the public domain in 2020.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Maya Lin is an American artist known for her memorials and works of installation art.
• She completed the Women's Table in 1993.
• It is a memorial sculpture consisting of a thirty-two-ton granite fountain, and it is designed to commemorate female students at Yale University.
• She completed Silver Upper White River in 2015.
• It is an installation composed of recycled silver that fills an entire gallery wall.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• A multiyear study called GREEN SURGE examined forty-four different types of UNAs (urban natural areas) in cities throughout Europe.
• A primary aim of the study was to determine the benefits of UNAs in these cities.
• Large urban parks are among the types of UNAs included in the study.
• Large urban parks are defined as green city areas reserved for recreational use.
• They can benefit urban environments by contributing to biodiversity.