The following text is adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 novel The Namesake. Gogol is an elementary school student in Massachusetts.
In art class, his favorite hour of the week, he carves his name with paper clips into the bottoms of clay cups and bowls. He pastes uncooked pasta to cardboard, and leaves his signature in fat brush strokes below paintings.
©2003 by Jhumpa Lahiri

The sloping tile roofs and picturesque facade of Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo in Carmel, California, are enduring symbols of the Spanish contribution to Californian architecture. Elements of this style have been reproduced throughout the state—the design of Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, for example, is considered to ______ the style of the Spanish missions.

In a garden, ______ the spread of unwelcome weeds such as nutgrass can be difficult because weeds usually spread easily and quickly become unmanageable, making it hard to remove them completely.

Certain features are almost always included in the designs of mosques, like the minaret (or tower), which is considered to be a ______ of mosque architecture. Even mosques that exhibit elements of multiple architectural styles, such as the Shah Jahan Mosque, which incorporates elements from the Mughal, Safavid, and Timurid styles, will also include several of these standard features.

Benjamin Prud’homme and colleagues have explored how convergent evolution—a phenomenon that occurs when the same trait evolves independently in two reproductively separate lineages—can result from a genetic mechanism share by both lineages. Meanwhile, Patricla J. Wittkopp and colleagues have investigated how convergence occurs through different genetic mechanisms, but the relative prevalence of convergence through shared and different genetic processes is still poorly understood. This motivated biologists Delbert A. Green Ⅱ and Cassandra G. Extavour to evaluate both types of convergence in a single study for their 2012 paper.

In Ojibwe, an Indigenous language from the Great Lakes region of what are now the United States and Canada, wása means “far,” whereas wa-wása means “far apart.” This phenomenon, in which an element of a root word is repeated, sometimes with modification, within another word that is related to the root word, is called reduplication. In this case, the element “wá” in wása gets repeated in wa-wása. There are many examples of this type of reduplication in Ojibwe.

Text 1
Uisdean Nicholson and his team have discovered evidence in seismic data of a 40-kilometer-wide subsurface crater beneath nearly a kilometer of water off the coast of West Africa that is consistent with a 400-meter-wide asteroid striking the seafloor. This structure, which the team named Nadir, exhibits all the telltale signs of a high-velocity impact crater: an elevated rim, a circular shape, a terraced floor, and a pronounced area of uplift at its center.
Text 2
Both carbonate dissolution and subsurface salt withdrawal can cause craterlike depressions without the need for a high-velocity impact. However, carbonate dissolution is very unlikely to have occurred in the vicinity of Nadir, and although subsurface salt withdrawal could have plausibly occurred in this area and would result in a depression with a terraced floor or a circular shape, it would not exhibit the area of central uplift seen at Nadir.

The following text is from Julia Alvarez's 2000 novel In the Name of Salomé. The narrator and her sister, daughters of a famous poet, are being tutored by Alejandro Román.
Our tutor, Alejandro Román, brought his younger brother, Miguel, to class one day. By now I was eighteen and had learned everything Alejandro had to teach me, so I was glad for a new face. Miguel was an aspiring poet, and he had heard from his brother that the Urena girls were none other than the daughters of Nicolás Urena, and they were smart as clockwork. Miguel was hoping not only to meet us but to make the acquaintance of the poet himself at Mamá's house.
©2000 by Julia Alvarez

Motivated to sell as many paintings as possible, Alfred Hair, an influential figure among the landscape artists known as the Florida Highwaymen, pioneered “fast painting,” which in part involved working across multiple canvasses at once. That many of Hair's acolytes, including Isaac Knight, imitated the technique accounts in part for the impressionistic qualities that are now synonymous with the group's shared aesthetic. But not all Highwaymen fully embraced this approach; for instance, though Willie Reagan was also prolific, his paintings were executed with greater attention to detail.

Vancouver has high pedestrian traffic, but other cities cannot increase their pedestrian traffic simply by replicating a single feature of Vancouver—e.g., its high number of pedestrian amenities—that is associated with walkability. As urbanist Mariela Alfonzo argues, many factors influence people's decision-making about whether to walk: some studies have shown the importance of demographic characteristics, others have shown the importance of average commuting distance, and so on, and it is clear that none of these factors in isolation fully explains pedestrian habits in a given city.

Elisabeth Potzelsberger and colleagues gathered data on 23 non-native tree species grown in Europe. They analyzed reports from Great Britain, Switzerland, and Hungary about the number of these species grown in those countries as well as the numbers of insect and fungus species that damage those trees. The researchers concluded that Great Britain had a greater number of damaging fungus species than either of the other countries did.

Poems is an 1895 collection of poetry by Frances E.W. Harper. In one of Harper's poems, the speaker criticizes activists who champion humanitarian causes in other countries while overlooking local concerns, saying, ______

Many plants have leaves that are larger on one side of their long central axis than the other, a phenomenon known as asymmetrical orientation. University of California, Berkeley biologist Ciera Martinez and colleagues examined several species of grapevines and closely related plants, which have leaves that grow in pairs, to see if both leaves in a pair tend to be oriented toward the same side (that is, have more tissue on the same side) or not. They found that opposite-side orientation was much more common than same-side orientation; in the Amur grape, for example, approximately ______

Mooseberry (Viburnum edule) plants are native to Alaska, where harsh conditions have historically impeded potential invasive species. As the boreal climate has warmed in recent decades, however, common knotgrass (Polygonum aviculare) plants have established themselves in Alaska. It has been suggested that warming-induced delays in the onset of subfreezing temperatures in autumn can benefit invasives more than native species; to evaluate this possibility, biologists Christa Mulder and Katie Spellman tracked V. edule and P. aviculare, along with other native and invasive species, over several years, concluding that invasives are advantaged by delays in subfreezing temperature onset in Alaska.

Northeastern Kansas's Jefferson County is among the most rural counties in the United States: the US Census Bureau classified it as 98.8% rural in 2010. Researchers studying populations of counties like Jefferson often struggle to recruit and retain participants. Melissa Valerio and colleagues tested whether a method called snowball sampling could improve recruitment and retention. Working in two rural counties, the researchers identified a small number of people who had the characteristics desired for a proposed study and asked them to recruit additional participants from their social networks. Valerio and colleagues found that participants recruited via snowball sampling showed a much higher retention rate than did people recruited by strangers, suggesting that ______

Miniature Self-Portrait (1556) is one of dozens of remaining works by Sofonisba Anguissola. Currently, her painting ______ at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where visitors can view the Italian Renaissance artist's work on display.

The human foot contains a variety of skeletal muscles, each playing an important role in the foot's healthy movement. The extensor digitorum brevis, which is attached to the calcaneus, ______ responsibility for extending the middle toes.

Louisiana resident Oscar James Dunn, one of the nearly two thousand African Americans elected to public office during the decade that followed the Civil War, ______ his term as lieutenant governor in 1868.

The giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) known as D-23, located in the United States, was one of the oldest known trees in the world, at 3,075 years old. With over three millennia of climate data in its tree ______ single tree like this, claims dendrochronologist Valerie Trouet, can tell the history of the world.

After finding information about Blanche Kelso Bruce, who represented Mississippi in the United States Senate, the student discovered biographical sketches of two other Black Americans who served in ______ Ralph Harold Metcalfe of Illinois and Alton R. Waldon Jr. of New York.

John Thomson employed the pseudonym “Gracchus”—the name of an ancient Roman politician—in political essays he wrote in 1795, a choice that accomplished far more than simply concealing his authorship. ______ it wasn't an arbitrary pen name but rather a complex rhetorical strategy through which Thomson aligned his political views with the venerated republican ideals of the ancient world, thereby bolstering the authority of his writing.

In Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—where, early on, the author marvels at a single goldfish's delicate fins but later winces when imagining a horde of goldfish laying and eating their own eggs—Dillard struggles to reconcile the complicated juxtapositions of the natural world. ______ nature's mesmerizing intricacy and pitiless harshness prove inextricably linked for Dillard, like “two branches of the same creek.”

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Galápagos penguin is a species of bird that can be found on the Galápagos Island of Floreana.
• It has an average weight of 2.5 kilograms.
• The grey warbler finch is a species of bird that can be found on the Galápagos Island of Floreana.
• It has an average weight of 9 grams.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Mohs scale of mineral hardness is a ten-point scale that orders minerals by hardness based on their ability to scratch other minerals.
• Minerals with larger numbers are harder than minerals with smaller numbers and can leave visible scratches on them.
• Minerals with smaller numbers are softer than minerals with larger numbers and cannot leave visible scratches on them.
• The mineral fluorite has a Mohs scale number of 4.
• The mineral orthoclase has a Mohs scale number of 6.
• The mineral corundum has a Mohs scale number of 9.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Zora Neale Hurston was an acclaimed writer.
• Her first published work of fiction was a short story.
• It was called “John Redding Goes to Sea.”
• It first appeared in Stylus in 1921.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Body positions are a fundamental aspect of dance.
• In Vaganova method ballet, there is a position for the dancer's arms called first position.
• In the position, both arms are rounded to roughly align the fingers with the navel.
• In Royal Academy of Dance ballet, there is a position for the dancer's arms called demi-seconde position.
• In this position, both arms are out to the sides but angled downward.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Save Me is a 2018 sculpture by American artist Olivia Steele.
• It is a pink neon sign that spells out the title phrase.
• Neon signs became popular with advertisers in the 1920s and began to decline in popularity in the 1960s.
• Neon signs became popular with artists in the 1960s and continue to be popular today.
• Writer Sarah Archer says, “[Neon signs] must be made by hand because there's no cost-effective way to mass-produce them.”

Though most hoaxes perpetrated as jokes by mischievous users of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that almost anyone can freely edit, have quickly been detected and removed, a few invented entries, such as those for the British radio station Groove Radio and the television miniseries Sheer Perfection, persisted on the site for many years before they were finally recognized as ______ and deleted.

Given that the organizers specifically ______ that the conference was intended to explore excellence in the field of children's literature, an education specialist proposed a presentation on the works of celebrated illustrator John Steptoe, with particular emphasis on his work in the book Mother Crocodile: An Uncle Amadou Tale from Senegal.

New and interesting research conducted by Suleiman A. AI-Sweedan and Moath Alhaj is inspired by their observation that though studies of the effect of high altitude on blood chemistry are ______, the effect of blood chemistry of living in locations below sea level, such as the California towns of Niland and Coachella, has received comparatively little notice.

Paleontologists think that Unenlagia, Phuwiangosaurus, and other long-extinct theropods and sauropods may have breathed using air sacs connected to tubelike extensions inside the animals' bones. Such structures are found in modern birds, which is why some paleontologists treat the respiratory systems of birds as ______ those of Unenlagia, Phuwiangosaurus, and other theropods and sauropods.

Ellen Meiksins Wood 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. John Iliffe and other Africanist scholars have shown, however, that in parts of Africa, surplus capital accrual, the existence of salaried labor, 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.

Founded in Denver in 1991, the Museo de Las Americas is one of the best-known US-based institutions showcasing Latino cultures. Since its founding, it has acquired more than 4,800 objects for its permanent collection. Since 2000, the number of Latino cultural institutions in the US has expanded considerably. LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, which opened in Los Angeles in 2011 and focuses on Mexican American art and culture, is among the most prominent.

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 Rodrigo A. Vasquez found to be negatively associated with foraging by olive grass mice but Patricia C. Wright found to be positively associated with foraging by three-striped night monkeys. This discrepancy is explicable in terms of OFT: the monkeys' greater reliance on vision means that higher lunar intensity benefits them more than it benefits the mice.

Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth's research into the debt defaults of Philip II (who ruled an empire including Spain and Milan from 1556 to 1598) relates to other work on European early modern state finance, including Eugene White's research on surpluses and state borrowing. But Drelichman and Voth's unique contribution to the field is their reconstruction of the earliest extant set of annual fiscal records for any sovereign state, demonstrating in turn that Philip's defaults were caused by short-term cash shortages, not long-term unsustainable debts.

While observing birds for a biology class, a group of students noticed a lesser sand plover (Charadrius mongolus), a bird of the order Charadriiformes (shorebirds), slowly move away, make loud noises, and feign an injured wing as the group approached the bird's ground nest. Researching this behavior, the students learned that this phenomenon is commonly referred to as "broken-wing display" and is meant to lure predators away from the nesting site and toward a seemingly vulnerable adult bird. Upon learning of other birds that also exhibit the behavior they had observed, the students hypothesized that the phenomenon is exclusive to shorebirds.

Researchers have used several different methods to determine the population density of cougars (Puma concolor). A student claims that the use of biopsy darting, snow backtracking, and counting remains produces the most precise results, with the smallest difference between minimum and maximum densities.

Neurobiologists Laura Cuaya, Raul Hernandez-Perez, and colleagues investigated the language detection abilities of eighteen dogs raised in similar settings. The researchers monitored the brain activity of Akira (a labradoodle), Mini (a mixed breed), and other dogs while the animals listened to three recordings: one of The Little Prince being read in Spanish, the second in Hungarian, and a third made up of short, randomly selected fragments of the first two, scrambled so that they didn't resemble human speech. Each dog was familiar with either Spanish or Hungarian, but not both. The team concluded that the amount of previous language exposure a dog has received may influence its ability to distinguish familiar languages from unfamiliar ones.

Arthurian legends (tales related to the character of King Arthur) derive from many sources, such as Annales Cambriae, composed around 970, and Perceval the Story of the Grail from around 1181. One of the most significant sources, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, was written in Latin in the 1130s; some material from it was later adapted by the Norman poet Wace into the Roman de Brut in 1155. But while the Roman de Brut includes references to the famous Round Table at which Arthur's knights assembled, those seem to be Wace's own inventions, which suggests that ______

Although the language of the Olmec civilization, which flourished in southern Mexico circa 1500 BCE-400 BCE, hasn't been identified, it likely belonged to the Mixe-Zoquean family, a group of related languages whose present-day representatives are spoken in an area corresponding to ancient Olmec sites. The family can be subdivided into a Zoque branch, which includes Tabasco Zoque, and a Mixe branch, which includes Totontepec Mixe. Many words in the Mayan languages—languages spoken in the region but otherwise unrelated to the Mixe-Zoquean family—are Mixe-Zoquean in origin and were likely borrowed during the period when the Olmecs dominated the entire area. Tellingly, all those words derive from the Zoque branch, suggesting that ______

As of 2017, Slovakia's top tax rate of 36% was lower than the country's Laffer curve peak (65%). To some economists, whether a tax cut will ultimately increase Slovakia's tax revenue is dependent on the country's position on the Laffer curve, a theoretical relationship between tax rates and revenues ______ sketched on a napkin by economist Arthur Laffer in 1974.

A lady-in-waiting's account of Japanese courtly life in the tenth century, Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book is filled with daily observations and musings. Some of these appear as ______ "Depressing Things," Shonagon catalogs her distaste for waiting for a letter, dogs howling in the daytime, and rain on the last day of the year.

The story of Chile's electrification is perhaps most readily understood by studying developments in several key years: 1916, when engineer Arturo Salazar attended the Pan-American Scientific Conference; 1936, when the study entitled "Política eléctrica chilena" was ______ 1943, when the national electrical plan was finalized.

Mineralogists classify minerals by how much light can pass through them, labeling them as either transparent, translucent, or opaque. Given that only some light can pass through illite, for instance, it would be obvious to a mineralogist what illite's classification should ______

As categorized by linguists like Li Jen-kuei, the languages Fijian and Sundanese—spoken by roughly 11 million and 42 million people, ______ are part of the Austronesian language family, which altogether accounts for one-fifth of the world's languages.

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

Though he's performed on many respected albums, including The Heart of Things/Live in Paris by John McLaughlin, drummer Dennis Chambers may be best known for his time as house drummer for the hip-hop label Sugar Hill Records. He did not play drums on the label's classic song "Rapper's ______ he joined the label after the song's release.

In contrast to first-past-the-post electoral processes, the proportional representation system by which Austria's National Council is elected begins with citizens casting their votes not for specific candidates but for political parties. ______ once the votes have been tabulated, each party is awarded a number of seats proportional to the number of votes it received.

Long thought to be sessile (immobile), Chelonibia testudinari, barnacles that adhere to sea turtle shells, have been observed to shift slightly in position over time—a phenomenon that has been attributed to the barnacles' passive displacement by water currents. ______ a research team found that adult C. testudinari moved toward the heads of their sea turtle hosts and thus against the prevailing water flow, behavior consistent with self-initiated locomotion.

Since 1941, the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago, Illinois, has cultivated a multigenerational community of Black creatives—from writer Gwendolyn Brooks, to musician Nat King Cole, to visual artists like Yaounde Olu and Allen Stringfellow. ______ it has garnered a reputation as a hub of Black art and culture in Chicago.

In a given rock formation, Eifelian rock from 393.3 million years ago might directly abut Toarcian rock from 184.2 million years ago. But how could this happen? Time did not actually stand still during the intervening 209.1 million years; ______ this geologic unconformity likely resulted from natural processes removing sedimentary material from the stratigraphic record.

Some former Olympic demonstration events, like speed skating, were used to gauge the sport's popularity for future inclusion in the official Games, while others showcased lesser-known sports popular in that year's host country. ______ kendo, a Japanese form of fencing, may have lacked global name recognition, but it was an apt demonstration sport at the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Refrigerants are chemical compounds used in cooling technologies, such as air conditioners.
• Air conditioners can use refrigerants to absorb heat and release cold air.
• The refrigerant hexachloroethane is a perchlorocarbon (PCC).
• PCCs are composed of the elements chlorine and carbon.
• The refrigerant dimethyl ether is a hydrocarbon (HC).
• HCs are composed of hydrogen and carbon.

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.
• Billy Budd, Sailor is a novella by Herman Melville.
• It entered the public domain in 2020.
• The Common Reader is an essay collection by Virginia Woolf.
• It entered the public domain in 2021.