The following text is from Rudolfo Anaya’s 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima. The young narrator is eating breakfast with his two sisters in their home in rural New Mexico.
I sat across the table from Deborah and Teresa and ate my atole and the hot tortilla with butter. I said very little. I usually spoke very little to my two sisters. They were older than I and they were very close. They usually spent the entire day in the attic, playing dolls and giggling. I did not concern myself with those things.
©1972 by Rudolfo Anaya

The percentage of US forest land that a 2023 federal report identified as being either mature or old growth exceeds other recent estimates. Given how little ______ there is among scientists regarding the scope of these categories, this discrepancy shouldn’t be surprising: forest researchers regularly dispute one another’s classifications.

Some robots such as KHR-1 (developed in 2004) and Sophia (developed in 2015) feature humanoid characteristics like bipedal locomotion so that people will find it easier to interact with them. While these features can help to ______ feelings of comfort in people, a robot that looks too human can fall into the “uncanny valley,” meaning that its appearance unintentionally unsettles those who encounter it.

Karam Kang has demonstrated that lobbying does little to alter the probability that a particular energy policy under consideration by the United States Congress will be enacted, but lobbying is not as ______ as this finding seems to suggest. As Kang herself notes, lobbying can shape which policy proposals members of Congress bring forward for consideration in the first place.

People sometimes dismiss a claim if it comes from a source they regard as self-interested, but from a strictly logical perspective, the source of a claim is ______: it has no direct bearing on whether the claim is true.

When people think of dinosaurs with feathers, they typically think of winged dinosaurs, such as the four-winged Microraptor. However, many dinosaurs that didn’t have wings also had feathers on their bodies. For instance, research indicates that the wingless, peacock-sized Caudipteryx likely had feathers.

The following text is from Annie Dillard’s 1987 autobiographical novel An American Childhood. The narrator is a young girl living in Pittsburgh.
I walked. My mother had given me the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number. I walked and memorized the neighborhood. I made a mental map and located myself upon it. At night in bed I rehearsed the small world’s scheme and set challenges: Find the store using backyards only. Imagine a route from the school to my friend’s house.
©1987 by Annie Dillard

Joseph A. Walker’s award-winning play The River Niger was produced in 1972 by the groundbreaking Negro Ensemble Company (NEC). NEC cofounder Robert Hooks, an actor, producer, and activist, had met actor and playwright Douglas Turner Ward while they were performing in a 1960 touring production of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. Together, they envisioned a theater company that would nurture and showcase the work of Black theater professionals. Since NEC’s founding in 1967, its workshops and performances have given Black playwrights, including Walker, a forum for their compelling stories.

The food industry has long used thermal technologies to preserve food in large batches. Recent advancements in ohmic heating were made through research in Brazil on the preservation of acerola pulp. Ohmic heating is generally considered to be an improvement over more conventional thermal preservation methods: whereas conventional methods transfer energy from the surface of a food to its interior, ohmic heating passes electric current through food products to generate heat within the food itself, thus reducing industrial cooking times.

“Tomato” is an example of a loanword—that is, a word that originated in one language and was later adopted by another. The word came to English indirectly from tomate, the Spanish word for the widely cultivated plant. Spanish had borrowed it from Nahuatl, an Indigenous language of Central Mexico, in which the word’s original form is tomatl. “Barbecue” is also Indigenous in origin and entered English through Spanish. But in this case, the original source was Taino, a language of the Caribbean islands, in which the word for the cooking technique is barbakoa.

In terms of total area, the Navajo Nation is the largest tribal nation in the United States. It covers 24,425 square miles in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. Most tribal nations in the US are much smaller. For example, the total area of the Muscogee Nation in Oklahoma is 4,867 square miles. And in Montana, the total area of the Blackfeet Nation is ______

While doing research for a paper about copper mining, a student finds a table with information about four different countries. The student notes that one country that mined 0.73 million metric tons of copper in 2020 had mined ______

“A Pair of Silk Stockings” is an 1897 short story written by Kate Chopin. In the story, Chopin suggests that the protagonist, Mrs. Sommers, experiences a shift in her sense of self as a result of putting on certain articles of clothing, writing, ______

A student in an economics course is examining the decline since 1950 in average hours worked per person per year in various nations due to both increased productivity and the adoption of policies that limit working hours. The first task in this investigation is to determine how the decline in Brazil compares to that in other countries. The student finds that ______

The Mammillaria cactus M. phitauiana occurs naturally only in the state of Baja California Sur in Mexico, and the smallness of its range makes it especially vulnerable to extinction. The traditional single-species approach to conservation emphasizes the need to focus on individual species most at risk, like M. phitauiana, but recently, conservationists have argued that an ecosystem-based approach that incorporates the many interactions between the climate, terrain, and various species of a given geographical area may lead to better outcomes for all the species in a given location. If this view is correct, the single-species approach to the conservation of M.phitauiana could thus ______

It is widely known that New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) ______ a vast collection of oil paintings, including Franz Marc’s The World Cow and Katherine S. Dreier’s Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp.

An accomplished birder might be able to spot thousands of different species over the course of a career, from Milvus migrans to Gallinula chloropas, but no birder has ever achieved the ultimate ______ an in-person glimpse of all 10,000-plus species of birds.

In 1987, chemist Ahmed Zewail devised a novel technique in optical spectroscopy that allowed him to study ultrafast chemical reactions occurring within molecules. Years later, he ______ for this groundbreaking research with the Robert A. Welch Award and the Priestley Medal from the American Chemical Society and hence would become known as the father of femtochemistry.

Today, the Michelin Guide is widely known as the arbiter of fine dining, with its coveted 3-star rating being awarded to top restaurants like Jade Dragon in______ when brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin created the guide in 1900, it was little more than a marketing gimmick—a way to increase profits for their tire company by encouraging their customers to drive across France, visiting the guide’s recommended hotels and restaurants along the way.

When attempting to determine a fault’s seismic history, geophysicists like Dr. Estella Atekwana at the University of Delaware rely in part on data about the fault’s physical dimensions and geological ______ the Juniper Mountain fault in Malheur County, Oregon, the US Geological Survey compiles such data in several ways: by exchanging information with state geological surveys, by linking maps of the fault with sources that offer detailed descriptions of it, and by maintaining a database of quantitative data such as the fault’s length (17 km).

For Italy, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since 1949, NATO’s principle of collective defense confers both benefits and ______ organization’s many members, nations as disparate as the US and Lithuania, are all bound to defend Italy, the reverse is also true.

If you could travel in a spaceship to Elara, one of Jupiter’s many moons, you’d find a moon with a prograde orbit. This means that Elara orbits Jupiter in the same direction that Jupiter rotates on its axis. ______ at Harpalyke, another Jovian moon, you’d find an example of a retrograde orbit, with the moon revolving around Jupiter in the opposite direction.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Scientists have long sought to determine the origin of glass in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
• A 2017 study concluded that ancient glass fires had melted the area’s sandy soil into glass.
• In 2021, a different study revealed that the mineral signatures of glass samples were consistent with the mineral signatures of comet samples collected by NASA.
• That study concluded that the glass had formed as a result of a cometary explosion close to the desert’s surface.

• Maya Lin is a US artist known for her memorials and large-scale installation artworks.
• She became famous in 1982 when she completed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which consists of two 246-foot granite walls.
• She completed Groundswell in 1993.
• It is an installation composed of glass that fills an entire gallery room.
• She completed Water Line in 2006.
• It is an installation composed of aluminum tubing that fills an entire gallery room.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The El Carmen-Verde Mountains are a mountain range located in northwestern Mexico.
• The range is one of the dozens of “sky islands” in the southwestern US and northwestern Mexico.
• A sky island is an isolated mountain range whose environment differs drastically from that of the surrounding lowlands.
• The US Forest Service (USFS) said, “The mountains are ‘islands’ surrounded by deserts that are ‘seas.’”
• The USFS said, “Each Sky Island is a unique ecosystem.”

• The Paralympic Games are a series of international sporting events involving athletes with an impairment.
• A gold medal indicates that an athlete finished in first place.
• Frank Höfle competed as a Paralympic cross-country skier from 1988 to 2006.
• He won seventeen medals, ten of which were gold.
• Daniel Dias competed as a Paralympic swimmer from 2008 to 2020.
• He won thirty-eight medals, twenty-five of which were gold.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The human tongue contains taste receptors for a rich, savory flavor called umami.
• Umami is triggered by the compounds in a variety of foods, including salmon and caramelized onions.
• Participants in a study tasted a sample of sugar kelp, a type of brown seaweed.
• They rated its umami intensity as moderate.
• The participants tasted a sample of hidaka-konbu, another type of brown seaweed.
• They rated its umami intensity as high.

A number of recording artists combine Indigenous music with other musical styles. Wolastoq musician Jeremy Dutcher masterfully incorporated traditional Wolastoq songs into experimental pop on his album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa. Similarly, Atikamekw singer- songwriter Laura Niquay ______ powwow music with folk-rock on her album Waska Matisiwin.

Whether the reign of a Trench monarch such as Louis VI or Louis Philippe I was considered historically significant or, conversely, relatively______ , 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 assert a claim to the throne successfully.

Barring major archaeological discoveries, we are unlikely to ever have ______ account of ancient Egypt under the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, as much of the evidence of her reign was deliberately destroyed by her successors.

The Lascaux Cave paintings — detailed paintings of animals found in what is now France and dating from around 17,000 years ago — are sometimes said to be emotionally powerful despite their age, but in fact the paintings are ______ precisely because of their age. It is the link of shared humanity with the artists across so many centuries that gives the Lascaux Cave paintings such resonance.

Rome has high pedestrian traffic, but simply replicating a feature of Rome associated with walkability — e.g., its high number of street crossings—may be insufficient to induce increased walking in other cities. As urbanist Mariela Alfonzo argues, our understanding of individuals’ decision-making about whether to walk is insufficiently robust: some studies emphasize the role of demographic characteristics, others the role of sidewalk width, and so on, but walking decisions are made in complex contexts in which multiple conditions and needs inform individuals’ choices.

Text 1
Scholarship today overrepresents formal experimentation, such as H.D.’s use of minimalistic, image-based structures, well beyond the degree to which it actually influenced US poetry during the modernist period (roughly 1900-1945). Meanwhile, the work of Dorothy Parker, who relied on conventional poetic forms associated with previous literary periods, attracts woefully little attention from scholars of modernism.
Text 2
Distant reading, or computer-assisted quantitative analysis of massive collections of digitized texts, can reveal stylistic elements that have heretofore escaped notice, despite being shared by numerous texts from the modernist period. For too long, scholars have focused on experimental versus conventional poetic forms, inhibiting inquiry into other points of stylistic correspondence among poems that would enrich our understanding of the modernist canon.

In her 1998 book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Y. Davis bases her analysis in part on recordings of songs sung in the 1920s by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith. Davis focuses on how Rainey and Smith improvised the lyrics — replacing the original lines with mischievous jokes and wordplay. Davis’s work was particularly labor intensive because in order to transcribe, or write down, the lyrics as Rainey and Smith sang them, Davis had to listen repeatedly to the vinyl recordings, which weren’t very clear.

The following text is from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1830 short story “Sir William Phips.”
Few of the personages of past times (excerpt such as have gained renown in fireside legends as well as in written history) are anything but mere names to their successors. They seldom stand up in our Imaginations like men. The knowledge, communicated by the historian and biographer, is analogous to that which we acquire of a country by the map,—minute, perhaps, and accurate, and available for all necessary purposes, but cold and naked, and wholly destitute of the mimic charm produced by landscape painting.

Rafael Nunez and colleagues studied how members of the Yupno, an Indigenous group in Papua New Guinea, conceptualize time. The researchers recorded Yupno speakers explaining certain temporal words and phrases, such as kalip bishap, a past-oriented expression that translates to “past times,” and coded each speaker’s manual gestures. Previous research has found a tendency in many cultures to make temporal distinctions using spatial concepts and gestures, particularly along egocentric axes (i.e., relative to the orientation of the speaker): for instance, Hebrew speakers often refer to the front/back axis to describe events in time. In an anthropology paper, a student claims that the tendency toward ego-based conceptualizations of time is universal.

Many films in a language other than English grow to be financially successful over the course of their time in movie theaters in the United States, but some become immediate successes in their opening weekends. A journalist claims that a film’s reception can greatly influence its longterm success. Indications that the film is of high quality, such as an Oscar nomination, can dramatically boost public interest in the film and thus its overall earnings, even with a relatively modest opening weekend performance: for example, ______

Neurobiologists Laura Cuaya, Raül Hernândez-Pérez, and colleagues investigated the language detection abilities of eighteen dogs. The researchers monitored the brain activity of Barack (a golden retriever), 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 differences in dogs’ anatomical features may affect their ability to distinguish speech from nonspeech.

Permafrost in Alaska has been degrading, potentially enabling increased carbon dioxide (CO2) absorption through greater productivity of bristle-pointed iris (Iris setoso) 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 modeled seasonal changes in net CO2 in Alaska in a landscape grid of 1 square kilometer (km2) cells and again in a grid of 10 km2 cells, which are finer resolutions than most models of net CO2 have achieved. The researchers concluded that variations in the landscape affect net CO2 in ways that most models are too coarse to capture.

Indigenous songs can be repositories of ecological information, from Karen (hta) Hin Lad Nai songs about bees to O’odham songs about desert plants. Kwakwaka’wakw song keeper Kwaxsistalla Wathl’thla aided research by ethnobiologist Dana Lepofsky et al. by contributing songs that reference creating terraced intertidal gardens to foster the healthy development of clams, a staple in the Kwakwaka’wakw people’s diet. Such structures date as far back as 3,500 years ago. Intriguingly, analysis of local paleoecological marine bivalve records has revealed significant increases in clam size and productivity as clam garden practices became more prevalent and harvesting pressure increased — a finding that bolsters the notion that ______

Saeed M.Z.A. Tarabieh conducted a study of consumer attitudes toward Jordanian food and beverage companies and found that for consumers who value environmental conservation, their likelihood of purchasing a product decreased when their perception of the product’s risk of causing environmental harm increased. Subsequently, other researchers conducted a study of various demographic groups in Greece, investigating participants’ intentions to purchase a new piece of furniture, and found that, on average, suburban residents had the highest perception among all the demographic groups in the study of the environmental risks of the piece of furniture. Assuming that the results of Tarabieh’s study are broadly applicable, this finding suggests that ______

Quasars — such as CTA 102, located in the Pegasus constellation — are extremely luminous galactic nuclei powered by supermassive black holes, some of which are known to have developed within the first billion years of the formation of the universe. Based on simulations they conducted, astrophysicists Daniel Whalen, Muhammad Latif, and colleagues concluded that these early quasars developed partly as a result of rare convergences of gases in space without the need for ultraviolet backgrounds or other extreme and implausible environmental conditions that models of the early universe have included to account for the presence of these quasars. If this conclusion is correct, it suggests that ______

The present-day city of Engels, Russia, was for years the capital of the Volga Germ an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, one of many nominally autonomous republics within the Soviet Union. Like ______ peer autonomous Soviet socialist republics, the Volga German Republic was established along ethnolinguistic lines: most of the republic’s residents spoke German.

Tonga’s constitution, enacted in 1875, contains just one of the six constitutional features that enhance judicial independence, as identified by legal scholars James Melton and Tom Ginsburg. After 1985, such de jure judicial independence became more prevalent, as exemplified in Swaziland’s constitution, enacted in 2005 and ______ five of these features.

The Limon technique, developed by Mexican-born dancer and choreographer Jose Limon, is known for its emphasis on breath control and its interplay of weight and ______ dancers may explore, for example, the moment of mid-air suspension at the top of a jump.

Chondrites are stony meteorites that are undifferentiated—that is, their contents have not melted and separated into distinct layers. They are hardly ______ many chondrites experience aqueous alteration as a result of exposure to fluids, as well as fracturing, veining, and localized melting due to collisions with other objects.

Named for the year in which it was detected by Japanese astronomers, SN 2018zd was a supernova (the explosion of a massive ______ in the constellation Camelopardalis, 70 million light-years from Earth, the transient yet powerful blast propelled particles and debris into space at extremely high speeds.

Not all plants benefit equally or from the same kind of ______ sweet gum and cucumber, for example, benefit from endomycorrhizal associations; many tree species, such as oak and pine, benefit from ectomycorrhizal associations; and plants in the Ericaceae family, such as lingonberry, don’t benefit from mycorrhizae at all.

Those who looked up at the right time on July 9,1926, would have witnessed an annular solar eclipse, during which the Moon blocks most of the Sun and causes it to look like a ring of light. ______ stargazers on December 24,1927, would have seen a partial solar eclipse, during which the Moon only blocks a portion of the Sun and causes it to look like a crescent.

With many elements, like selenium, scientists were able to isolate a relatively pure sample of the substance shortly after discovering its existence — but this wasn’t the case with all elements. ______ the isolation process took years. The element radon, for instance, was discovered in 1899 but not isolated until 1908.

In Tino Villanueva’s 2016 poem “Field of Moving Colors Layered,” the poet contemplates a painting that has inspired him: Alberto Valdés’s 1965 work Untitled. The painting, which features overlapping geometric shapes, fuels the poem’s exploration of temporality and identity. ______ in responding to Valdés’s artwork, Villanueva’s poem reflects on the relationship between poetry and other art forms.

• Grimanesa Amoros is a Peruvian American artist.
• She is well known for her large-scale LED light sculptures.
• Hedera debuted in 2018 in the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn, New York.
• It is made of entangled red and white LED tubes.
• It occupies 100,000 cubic feet of space.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Thailand’s annual Songkran Water Festival is held each April.
• It marks Songkran, the traditional Thai New Year.
• People splash and spray each other for fun at the festival’s community-wide water fights.
• In Bangkok, thousands gather along Silom Road for the city’s largest water fight.
• In Chiang Mai, thousands gather at a historical monument called the Tha Phae Gate for the city’s largest water fight.

• In a 2005 study, Janecek and Leps tested the effect of plant litter on seedling emergence in a grassland setting.
• Plant litter includes dead leaves and other plant material.
• The test site was a flooded grassland in the Czech Republic.
• It was in a temperate midlatitude climate.
• The researchers found that in these environmental conditions the presence of plant litter had a negative effect on seedling emergence.