The American continents are home to a huge diversity of languages, from Mayo, found in places like Mexico in North America, to Koreguaje, found in places like Colombia in South America. Much like the continents themselves, the variety of native languages in the Americas is ______.

The minor planet 1095 Tulipa was named after the plant genus that includes tulips, but given the sheer number of minor planets that have been discovered (more than 500,000 so far), most are given only an identification number. Because any name given to a minor planet needs to be unique to that body, naming each would be ______.

Drivers who strongly believe that the toll they must pay to use the San Luis Pass-Vacek Toll Bridge, which spans the San Luis Pass in Texas, is currently too high are likely to be ______ arguments for increasing the toll. Advocates for a higher toll are likely to have more success if they instead direct their arguments toward a more persuadable segment of the population.

Though few critics consider Vasily Grossman's novel Stalingrad—which focuses on the experience of the Soviet Union in the early years of World War Ⅱ—to be as well written as his later book Everything Flows, some compliment it despite the damage ______ Soviet censors: Gary Saul Morson in The New York Review of Books called the novel “remarkably bold.”

Archaeologists studying the ancient city of Pompeii in Italy recently discovered a well-preserved food shop known as a thermopolium. The site contains food remains, artworks, and decorations. These items give researchers a better understanding of what daily life in Pompeii may have been like. For example, the archaeologists found a ceramic jar that they believe likely contained a meat and seafood stew.

Karl Polanyi and other historians of capitalism rarely discuss domestic capitalism in Africa before the period of European colonization, implicitly presenting capitalism as external to and imposed on Africa. Mariana Candido and other Africanist scholars have shown, however, that in parts of Africa, centrally administered industrial production, the legal treatment of land as private property, and other features of capitalism predated colonization. One reason for this discrepancy is that historians of capitalism tend to focus on longitudinal economic data drawn from archival records, which do not exist for much of precolonial Africa.

The following text is adapted from George Eliot’s 1857 short story “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton.” The Countess Czerlaski is a newcomer to the town of Milby.
I am by no means sure that if the good people of Milby had known the truth about the Countess Czerlaski, they would not have been considerably disappointed to find that it was very far from being as bad as they imagined. Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.

The following text is from Julia Alvarez's 2000 novel In the Name of Salomé. Salomé, a poet, is hosting guests in the front parlor of her family home, and Ramona is her sister. A salon is a social gathering for the exploration of intellectual ideas.
It was evening when the two men got up to leave. Tia Ana had already come into the room several times to see if these guests had departed yet. The front parlor had always been her special province, as she used it for her little school. Now, every evening, it turned into Salomé's salon, as Ramona called it, and it was never in order for its transformation back to a classroom the following morning.
©2000 by Julia Alvarez

Companies involved in petroleum extraction include drilling equipment among their assets. But petroleum extraction is a very carbon-intensive industry, so as social attitudes increasingly favor using less carbon-intensive sources of energy, demand for petroleum falls and the drilling equipment will eventually, or even suddenly, become a liability as reduced petroleum prices make it more difficult to recover the expense of maintaining such equipment.

Why do flat-headed cats purr but jaguars roar? Researchers hypothesize that this difference between the two feline species may be partly due to a U-shaped bone in their throats called the hyoid. Flat-headed cats, which are much smaller than jaguars, have a rigid hyoid that rumbles when the cat's larynx vibrates, resulting in a purr. By contrast, jaguars have a somewhat flexible hyoid, and the bone is attached to the skull with a stretchy ligament that flat-headed cats lack. These traits allow jaguars and most other species of big cats to produce powerful roars. The same traits may also prevent most big cats from purring.

Hawaiian home lands are areas of public land in the state of Hawaii that have been reserved for use by the Kanaka Maoli, or the Native Hawaiian people. The largest of the home lands, Homuula-Upper Piihonua, covers nearly 100 square miles on the island of Hawai'i. Most of the home lands are much smaller. For example, the total area of Kamoku-Kapulena is 7.47 square miles, and the total area of Nanakuli is ______

The Age of Innocence is a 1920 novel by Edith Wharton set in New York City in the 1870s. In the novel, Newland Archer attends an opera; in the audience is May Welland, with whom he is romantically involved. Newland visualizes the details of a future with May: ______

Water flowing around an obstruction creates vortices (patterns of swirls) of varying size; by detecting the vortices, fish can determine the size and position of the obstruction. Testing by Yuzo R. Yanagisuru, Otar Akanyeti, and James C. Liao using models of three head shapes—narrow (low ratio of width to length), intermediate, and wide (high ratio of width to length)—showed that for large vortices, fish with intermediate heads would be better able than wide-headed fish to distinguish between vortices and general turbulence in the water. A second research team has therefore hypothesized that in low-visibility conditions, intermediate-headed fish will be more likely than wide-headed fish to detect obstructions that create large vortices.

As the second-most populous continent in the world, Africa was home to an estimated 1.186 billion people in 2015. In a paper for a social studies class, a student nonetheless notes that countries with very large populations may be less densely populated than are countries with much smaller populations, as can be seen by comparing ______

Humans have a very strong bias toward right-handedness, with approximately 85-90% having right as their dominant hand. Among studies of nonhuman primates, James Welles's 1976 study of captive chimpanzees and catarrhine monkeys reported more right-handed individuals than left-handed ones, but William C. McGrew and colleagues’ 1999 study of wild chimpanzees did not find a tendency toward right-handedness. It's important to note, however, that captive animals spend significantly more time with humans than wild animals do, and therefore ______

Used in everything from food to cleaning products, emulsifiers are compounds that serve to stabilize an emulsion—a mixture of two or more liquids that otherwise would not easily blend together. The emulsifiers used by ______ like palmitic acid, allow these scientists to blend oil and water into homogeneous formulations such as lotions and perfumes.

Many mechanical calculators were powered by a notched cylinder mechanism called the Leibniz wheel. Leibniz wheel calculators were popular in the first half of the twentieth ______ these ingenious devices were eventually replaced by electronic calculators.

Nigerian American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola uses black-ink pens to create highly detailed drawings of human figures. Her portrait of novelist Zadie ______ is displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

The constitution of Australia, enacted in 1901, enshrines 11 total rights across 17,318 words of text. According to constitutional scholar George Tsebelis, who examines the implications of constitutional length on civil rights, ______ 102nd in a global ranking of the shortest constitutions.

Between June 22 and July 2 each year, particles shed by comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke enter Earth's atmosphere at a velocity of 18 kilometers per second. Relatively few of these particles are likely to reach Earth's ______ since the meteoroids' compression of the air surrounding them causes the vast majority to burn up in the mesosphere, producing the June Boötid meteor shower.

While most animals prefer the safety of nighttime migration, many poisonous amphibians—a category that includes the red-bellied newt and the fire salamander—safely engage in migratory behavior during the day. ______ with the sun in the sky, the amphibians’ striking color patterns deter visually oriented daytime predators by serving as a warning of toxicity.

Residents of Cairo, Egypt, rely on its rapid transit system, the Cairo Metro, for millions of trips each year. ______ city officials strive to maintain the system's 71 stations to ensure each of these journeys is as smooth as possible.

Box modeling, used by digital artists to develop 3D assets for video games, yields objects with precise mathematical proportions. Granted, as they are formed from perfect geometric shapes, such 3D elements lack organic realism; ______ post-modeling processes such as UV surface mapping are needed to achieve the level of verisimilitude gamers expect.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Lighthouses send out crucial light signals to help ships and other watercraft navigate at night.
• Before automation, lighthouses were run by lighthouse keepers.
• Betsy Morrow Humphrey was the lighthouse keeper at Monhegan Island Light in Maine.
• She held this position from 1862 to 1880.
• Thelma Austin was the lighthouse keeper at Point Fermin Light in California.
• She held this position from 1925 to 1941.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• If a moon orbiting a planet comes close enough to that planet, tidal forces can cause the moon to break apart.
• In a 2022 study, researchers proposed that Saturn was once orbited by a large moon they named Chrysalis.
• Their simulations indicated that Chrysalis would likely have come very close to Saturn around 160 million years ago.
• At that distance, Chrysalis would have been broken apart by tidal forces.
• The researchers hypothesized that the resulting debris formed Saturn's rings.

• Birds of Northern South America is an identification guidebook by ornithologists Robin Restall, Clemencia Rodner, and Miguel Lentino.
• It lists the thirty-five hummingbird species found in Suriname.
• The brown violetear is a large hummingbird found in Suriname.
• It is identifiable by its dark violet ear patches and its short, black, straight bill.
• The little hermit is a small hummingbird found in Suriname.
• It is identifiable by its white central tail feathers and its long, black, curved bill.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Little is known about the life of Wong Fei-hung (1847-1925).
• He was born near Foshan, China, and gained local recognition as a physician and Hung Ga (also known as Hung Gar) Kung Fu master.
• He achieved many incredible martial arts feats—some confirmed and some rumored.
• He has become an internationally known folk hero thanks to his depiction in over a hundred films, television shows, and other media.
• In the 1991 film Once Upon a Time in China, actor Jet Li portrays Wong Fei-hung using superhuman kung fu abilities to save his community.

Possessing an outstanding collection of public art, Chicago has everything from monumental mosaics like Mare Chagall's Four Seasons at sites like Chase Tower to innovative street art like Kashink's mural Be The Change You Wish To See located on South Wabash Avenue. The ______ public art on display in the city can thus satisfy any art lover.

In a 2018 article about films depicting the experiences of Black Americans, critics for the New York Times praise Madeline Anderson's 1970 film I Am Somebody as “galvanizing” and Carl Franklin's 1995 film Devil in a Blue Dress as “picture-perfect.” Fans of the two films hope that such ______ will attract new audiences to these works.

The fossil remains of the individual known as Misliya-1, discovered in Israel in 2002, can help paleoanthropologists not only ______ steps in the evolution of hominids but also illuminate the Pleistocene epoch generally, revealing important details about the time in which Misliya-1 lived.

Companies are providing consumers with more opportunities to purchase customized products than ever before. Whether buying customized sneakers, jewelry, or clothing, consumers can participate in the design of products to meet their specific needs and tastes. In turn, companies profit too: studies have shown that consumers are willing to pay more and wait longer for a customized product. Still, it can be difficult for companies to offer customization while keeping costs low, as the standard methods of mass production may not be able to accommodate making a unique product each time.

HMS Surprise, first published in 1973, is a novel in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, which includes twenty completed books. Some critics have found fault with the abrupt endings of HMS Surprise and other books in the series, saying that they do not finish conclusively but arbitrarily stop. But other critics argue that the books should not be thought of as discrete texts with traditional beginnings and endings but as a single incredibly long work, similar to other multivolume stories, such as John Galswvorthy's The Forsyte Saga.

Vertical gene transfer involves the transmission of genetic material from a parent to offspring; horizontal gene transfer, on the other hand, involves the exchange of genetic material between organisms not in a parent-offspring relationship. While horizontal gene transfer is common among prokaryotes—single-celled organisms, such as the bacteria Brevibacillus borstelensis and Lactococcus lactis—it has rarely been observed among eukaryotes (multicellular organisms). However, new studies suggest that horizontal gene transfer is more common in eukaryotes than originally thought.

Text 1
In separate studies, Stephen Meding and Robert J. Zasoski and Xinhua He and colleagues examined whether plants transfer nutrients to one another using a common mycorrhizal network (CMN)—a lattice of fungal strands in the soil. Meding and Zasoski excluded all pathways other than the CMN by using barriers to keep the plants’ root systems separate while allowing mycorrhizal strands through—a crucial step He and colleagues’ study did not take.
Text 2
Meding and Zasoski took the necessary precaution of separating the plants' root systems (thereby excluding root-to-root transmission). However, any barrier used must allow the thread-like hyphae of a CMN to pass through, and this permeability would also allow liquids through. Thus, the researchers’ experimental design cannot ensure that any nutrient transfer observed can be attributed to a CMN and not to some other pathway.

Optimal foraging theory (OFT) holds that animals’ foraging behaviors reflect cost-benefit trade-offs that vary by species and with dynamic ecological circumstances. One such circumstance is lunar intensity, which Joel Brown and colleagues found to be negatively associated with foraging by Arizona pocket mice but Deborah J. Curtis and colleagues found to be positively associated with foraging by mongoose lemurs. This discrepancy is explicable in terms of OFT: the lemurs' greater reliance on vision means that higher lunar intensity benefits them more than it benefits the mice.

Biologist Grace Herzel and colleagues conducted a study of how butterfly color and weather conditions relate to butterfly behavior, which wouldn't have been possible without data gathered by students and other amateur science enthusiasts in the community. Considering over three years’ worth of data, the researchers found that white butterflies were observed on green flowers more often than any other butterflies were, and that butterflies were observed to feed more often on cloudy days than on other days.

The bird species Myiobius barbatus (the bearded flycatcher) shares some territory in French Guiana with Thamnomanes caesius (the cinereous antshrike), which emits a loud alarm call when it detects predators. Biologist Ari Martinez and colleagues recorded T. caesius alarm calls and played them in the vicinity of wild M. barbatus. Finding that the birds often froze in place or scattered into vegetation upon hearing the calls, they concluded that M. barbatus associates T. caesius alarm calls with danger.

Researchers have used several different methods to determine the population density of cougars (Puma concolor). A student claims that the use of scat-detecting dogs produces the most precise results, with the smallest difference between minimum and maximum densities.

The linguistic niche hypothesis (LNH) posits that the exotericity of languages (how prevalent non-native speakers are) and grammatical complexity are inversely related, which the LNH ascribes to attrition of complex grammatical rules as more non-native speakers adopt the language but fail to acquire those rules. Focusing on two characteristics that are positive indices of grammatical complexity, fusion (when new phonemes arise from the merger of previously distinct ones) and informativity (languages' capacity for meaningful variation), Olena Shcherbakova and colleagues conducted a quantitative analysis for more than 1,300 languages and claim the outcome is inconsistent with the LNH.

Neuroscientist Kiyohito Iigaya and colleagues developed a computational model to predict how much a person will enjoy a particular work of art on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 4 (very much). They then recruited participants to use the same scale to rate several sets of paintings in various styles and calculated the correlation between the ratings predicted by the model and those reported by the participants. Assuming participant P7 gave equal ratings to the impressionist and color-field paintings, the data in the graph suggest that the model predicted that ______

Arthurian legends (tales related to the character of King Arthur) derive from many often contradictory sources, such as Vita Sancti Cadoci, composed in the 11th century, and Culhwch and Olwen from the second half of the 12th century. Sir Thomas Malory's 15th-century text Le Morte d'Arthur was an attempt to compile these stories into a coherent narrative. Many of Malory's sources derive from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, written in the 1130s. While neither History nor any works that predate it mention Arthur's famous Round Table at which his knights assembled, Le Morte d'Arthur does, suggesting that ______

Prolonged exposure to anthropogenic noise (sounds from human sources like traffic or mining) can affect animals, as Graeme Shannon and colleagues found in a 2016 study of black-tailed prairie dogs. Researchers conducted a meta-analysis of studies of how such noise affects animals and found that, for every study, relevant traits or behaviors of the animals were observably different between the exposed group and the otherwise similar but unexposed group. Although, on average, studies of mammals showed larger differences than studies of amphibians did, for every class of animals examined, there were individual studies showing differences well above the average for mammals. Therefore, the results of the meta-analysis suggest that ______

The term "retroflex" derives from Latin and means "bent back," an apt descriptor for the branch of consonants—retroflex consonants—pronounced with the tongue curling up and back in the mouth. In many languages, including English, these consonants are ______ in some dialects of Mandarin, however, four such consonants ("ch," "sh," "zh," and "r") are relatively common.

Along with carbon dioxide concentration and temperature, light intensity affects the chemical reaction rate of ______ as light intensity increases, so does the rate at which the reactants (water and carbon dioxide) are converted into their products (glucose and oxygen).

The fungus Tricholoma matsutake, commonly referred to as matsutake, is known to establish ectomycorrhizal bonds with certain pine tree species; in many cases, such symbiotic relationships, wherein fungal hyphae make contact with the pine's root system, ______ extensive networks, which can be used to transport nutrients between trees.

Though he would go on to work with many respected bands, including CAB on their album CAB 2, American ______ may be best known for his time with Sugar Hill Records, where he helped craft the sound of early hip-hop music.

Gretchen Legler's short essay on “sound,” a word referring to a large inlet or channel of a sea or ocean, is included in the collection Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape. The book wasn't written solely by ______ other authors, such as Stephen Graham Jones and Barry Lopez, also contributed essays.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) tracks comparative price list data for its thirty-eight member countries. According to this data, in July 2021, a “basket” of goods and services priced at 100 US dollars (USD) in the United States would have cost 66 USD in fellow OECD member ______

In his painting At the Cycle-Race Track, Jean Metzinger aims to depict a bike race in four-dimensional space. Of course, Metzinger's painting doesn't technically represent a fourth dimension; humans can only see in three dimensions. ______ by depicting the race through multiple, simultaneous perspectives, Metzinger offers a fascinating glimpse at what this other universe might look like.

In 2015, geologist Peter Rogerson recalculated the geographic center of Nebraska, which had previously been determined in 1920 by the US Geological Survey (USGS). The USGS, Rogerson contended, had omitted important considerations, not least the curvature of the earth. ______ the state's USGS-determined center—a point 10 miles northwest of the municipality of Broken Bow—was inaccurate.

On August 5, 1938, aviator Douglas Corrigan received a ticker-tape parade in New York City in recognition of his transatlantic flight. Of the 206 ticker-tape parades held between 1886 and 2022, a number were for achievements in aviation. ______ Corrigan's parade was just one of 16 honoring pilots.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Bauhaus was an influential German art and design school founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius.
• Gropius was the school's director from 1919 to 1928.
• Hannes Meyer was its director from 1928 to 1930.
• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was its director from 1930 to 1933.
• Josef Albers was a painter and educator who began attending the Bauhaus in 1920.
• Stella Steyn was a painter and illustrator who began attending the Bauhaus in 1931.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Generally, an object will heat up when twisted.
• The twisting of an object is known as torsion.
• A 2019 study led by Zunfeng Liu and Ray Baughman tested the torsional heating of various fibers.
• When a 0.7-millimeter-thick sample of single-ply nickel-titanium (NiTi) wire was twisted, its average surface temperature increased by 21.3°C.
• When a 2-millimeter-thick sample of ethylene propylene diene monomer (EPDM) rubber fiber was twisted, its average surface temperature increased by 12°C.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Element abundance is a relative measure of the amount of a chemical element in a given environment.
• Abundance can be expressed as a mass fraction.
• A mass fraction is the ratio of the total mass of an element to the combined mass of all elements in a given environment.
• The mass fraction of magnesium (Mg) on Earth is 154,000 parts per million (ppm).
• The mass fraction of zinc (Zn) on Earth is 40 ppm.