Wireless headphones and other small electronic devices sometimes use batteries that can't be taken out and swapped for new ones. Environmental policy researcher Jessika Richter warns that once these internal batteries stop working, the devices become ______ and are typically thrown away, creating harmful waste.

It is hardly an exaggeration to characterize modern Hawaiian literature as having ______ the traditional stories of the Kanaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people. In a variety of ways, Samuel Kamakau, Kristiana Kahakauwila, and other acclaimed writers have drawn on these stories to craft a rich portrait of the Hawaiian Islands and their people.

The following text is from Charles Chesnutt's 1905 novel The Colonel's Dream. Mr. French and Mr. Kirby work together.
Mr. French, the senior partner, who sat opposite Kirby, was an older man—a safe guess would have placed him somewhere in the debatable ground between forty and fifty; of a good height, as could be seen even from the seated figure, the upper part of which was held erect with the unconscious ease which one associates with military training.

The Dhaka Stock Exchange in Dhaka, Bangladesh is a dedicated exchange for investing in companies operating in Bangladesh, ensuring those companies receive certain regulatory oversight. Knowing this can ______ potential investors' worries about bureaucratic minutiae and thereby allow them to instead focus on identifying sound business opportunities.

Shedding light on the thermal biology of fungi, research by Radames Cordero et al. indicates that certain mushrooms (including Marasmius capillaris and species from the genus Russula) can achieve a hypothermic state through evaporative cooling. Effects of this thermoregulation were not limited to the fungi's fruiting bodies and root-like hyphae: temperature reductions were observed in the air immediately surrounding the mushrooms. Though slight, the reductions inspired an air-cooling device; using approximately 400 grams of mushrooms, the team's prototype lowered the air temperature in a controlled environment by 10°C in forty minutes.

Animals use many objects as tools to achieve goals more easily. Such goals include grooming, finding food, and protecting themselves. For a long time, people thought tool use was unique to primates. Elephants and other animals, though, have busted the myth that tool use requires hands. Inventively, elephants use branches to scratch themselves. Woodpecker finches also get creative. They use cactus spines to pry insects from hiding places.

Founded in Denver in 1991, the Museo de Las Americas is dedicated to art from Latin America, including the art of Indigenous peoples. Since its founding, it has acquired more than 4,800 objects for its permanent collection. More recently founded US-based institutions devoted to Latino cultures include the Latino Cultural Center. Located in Dallas, it focuses on Latino cultures and art in the United States.

The following text is from Virginia Woolf's 1919 novel Night and Day. The text describes a gathering of young artists and intellectuals.
One person after another rose, and, as with an ill-balanced axe, attempted to hew out his conception of art a little more clearly, and sat down with the feeling that, for some reason which he could not grasp, his strokes had gone awry. As they sat down they turned almost invariably to the person sitting next them, and rectified and continued what they had just said in public.

In 2016 Marta S. Pimentel and colleagues published a study concluding that ocean acidification has a strong effect on the behavior of Sparus aurata, a species of fish. However, Pimentel and colleagues' study relied on a mean sample size of only 12 fish. In a 2022 review of various scientists' conclusions about the impacts of ocean acidification on fish behavior, Timothy D. Clark and colleagues caution that relying on such a relatively small sample size can increase the potential for biased analysis. Such analysis, in turn, can contribute to reports of exaggerated effects.

Immanuel Wallerstein 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. Crislayne Alfagali and other Africanist scholars have shown, however, that in parts of Africa, wage labor competition, the manufacture of surplus goods for monetized sale, 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.

Effect of Neighboring Species on Pollinator Visits to Target Species

Researchers Carolina Laura Morales and Anna Traveset gathered data about flowering plants growing alongside each other in various locations. In each case, the researchers identified one plant as a "target species" and a nearby plant as a "neighboring species." The researchers then calculated a positive or negative value to show how the neighboring species affected pollinator visits to the target species. One example of a neighboring species with a negative effect value is the ______

Pyramids in Egypt and the Americas

A student is writing an essay about four pyramids for a history class and wants to note how long ago each pyramid was built and how tall each pyramid is. Consulting the table, the student finds that El Castillo was built 1,100 to 1,400 years ago and is ______

Uncle Vanya: Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts is an 1898 play by Anton Chekhov, originally written in Russian. In the play, Professor Serebrakoff and his wife Helena have come to stay at their country estate, which Vanya manages with the help of Sonia, the professor's daughter from a previous marriage. Chekhov portrays the professor as being unable to adjust to living at the country estate, as is evident when ______

New Zealand has classified the rainbow lorikeet as an invasive species that could harm some of the country's native species. But researchers Alejandro Camacho and Jason McLachlan have pointed out that Earth's climate is changing in ways that challenge such classifications. Climate changes may force animals from their current ranges. Climate changes may also create good habitats in areas where a species couldn't live previously. These observations suggest that ______

Gottfried Schlaug et al. established that musical training is associated with physical alterations in the brain. Noting that such alterations may affect how sonic stimuli engender a hedonic response (a feeling of satisfaction and pleasure). Antonia Olivia Dolan et al. recently had musicians and nonmusicians listen to recordings—Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love," Jose Gonzalez's "Heartbeats," and others—and adjust the volume to the most pleasurable level for each recording. Although musicians and nonmusicians were clinically comparable in terms of their ability to detect sounds, musicians preferred to hear the recordings at a higher volume than nonmusicians did, leading Dolan et al. to conclude that ______

A painting by 19th-century artist Katsushika Hokusai, ______

Philosophy is often ridiculed as an area of study that offers no real benefit in students’ job-hunting effort. This, however, cannot be further from the truth; because philosophy ______ students not what to think but how to think, the age-old discipline offers consistent, useful tools for academic and professional achievement.

Researchers Tammy Kernodle and Christina Zanfagna have lent their expertise on Black history and music to an important new ______ Timeline of African American Music, a digital resource that traces the development of individual musical genres (such as swing and bebop) while also revealing the connections between them.

Published in 1945, Gwendolyn Brooks's poem “Queen of the Blues” demonstrates Brooks's penchant for crafting short, compressed lines infused with bursts of vivid imagery and ______ the syncopated rhythms of the blues into her work.

As comet C/1911 N1 (Kiess) orbits the Sun, it is trailed by a stream of rocky particles. When Earth passes through this meteoroid stream each year, typically between August 28 and September 5, the 66-kilometer-per-second collision between these meteoroids and atmospheric gases ______ streaks of light in the sky—the Aurigid meteor shower.

Scientists studying asteroid deflection have focused on secondary objects such as S/2018 (15745), a moonlet orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Yuliya. In 2022 NASA intentionally crashed a probe into just such an object, successfully altering its orbit. ______ these results are no guarantee that Yuliya and other primary objects would be similarly affected.

Bill Belew's talent for intricately and expertly detailed costume design was on full display with the Blue Rain jumpsuit, created for musical icon Elvis Presley to wear onstage. ______ the suit's blue rhinestones showcased Belew's careful attention to detail.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• A merchant ship is any ship hired to carry cargo or passengers.
• A ship's carrying capacity is also known as its deadweight tonnage (DWT).
• In 2021, there were a total of 392 merchant ships registered in Saudi Arabia.
• The combined DWT of these ships was 13.7 million tons.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The French Republican calendar was used in France from 1793 to 1805.
• Each calendar week had ten days, two of which were called quintidi and decadi.
• Each quintidi was given a unique name in honor of an animal.
• Each decadi was given a unique name in honor of an agricultural tool.
• Belier, a quintidi in the month of Thermidor, was named after the ram.
• Crible, a decadi in the month of Nivose, was named after the sieve.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Kepler's first law of planetary motion states that the orbit of a planet around the Sun is an ellipse.
• The law also states that, in an elliptical orbit, the object being orbited is one of the ellipse's foci.
• Kepler's laws of planetary motion also apply to natural satellites (e.g., moons).
• Umbriel is a moon of Uranus that orbits the planet in 4.14 Earth days on average.
• Umbriel's orbit is elliptical.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The black-footed ferret is a mammal species.
• Up until 1981, it was believed to be extinct.
• That year, a live black-footed ferret was identified in the wild in the United States.
• The black-footed ferret is considered a Lazarus species.
• “Lazarus species” is a term for living species of organisms that were once believed to be extinct.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Louis Ballard was a classical composer and citizen of the Quapaw Tribe.
• He is one of the first composers to synthesize Western classical music with elements from various Native musical traditions.
• Ballard's Pan Indian Rhythms (1970) for percussion is written in a classical form.
• It incorporates Ute notched sticks, a traditional Native instrument.

Some cities track pedestrian activity to map their sidewalks, but this method often ______ sidewalks few pedestrians use, resulting in incomplete maps. Maryam Hosseini and her team found that a computer program trained to identify sidewalks in aerial images of Boston could also accurately identify sidewalks in aerial images of Philadelphia and even distinguished between concrete and granite.

The tendency to group authors together into distinct literary movements often encourages literary scholars to ______ subtleties in an author's style. Those studying the works of William Ellery Channing, for instance, may inadvertently overlook nuances in his work by focusing only on the most obvious ways in which his style corresponds to transcendentalism.

In the 2010s, the price of vintage She-Ra action figures rose dramatically, which had the counterintuitive effect of ______ demand: buyers who hadn't previously wanted to purchase old action figures thronged the market, believing prices would continue to rise and the toys could be resold later at a profit.

With a shell that measured 1.7 meters, the extinct mollusk Parapuzosia seppenradensis is the largest ammonite in the fossil record. Ever since fossilized remains of this species were discovered in 1895, scientists have been perplexed by its size. After examining 154 ammonite fossils including some of P. seppenradensis from Montana and Parapuzosia leptophylla (a smaller ammonite species) from England, paleontologist Christina Ifrim, Andrew S. Gale, and colleagues concluded that P. seppenradensis may have evolved from P. leptophylla and gradually increased in size as larger ammonites were better able to escape being preyed on by mosasaurs.

In Egypt, use of solid fuel (e.g., coal, wood) as a share of total household fuel use fell by more than 90 percent between 2000 and 2015; such shifts are typically explained by appeal to the energy ladder, a model holding that fuel choice is mediated mainly by household income (specifically, high-technology fuels displace solid fuels as incomes rise). Alemu Mekonnen and Gunnar Kohlin's study of fuel use in Ethiopia shows how reductive this model is, however: although income of course constrained fuel choice, several circumstances, including the local availability of different fuel sources, influenced decisions.

Text 1

Isaac Asimov, author of Robots and Empire and I, Robot, is highly regarded despite his mediocre writing style. His prose is workmanlike; his characters are flat and discuss ideas rather than emotions. That his work is enjoyable despite this is a testament to his prodigious imagination—even if people read his books only for the ideas, they will have plenty to consider.

Text 2

Asimov is critiqued for his style, but it is wrong to fault a writer for failing to do what he never intended to do. For example, although most of his novel Foundation consists of people discussing science and politics and we find out little about his characters' lives, Asimov wanted to convey the vast sweep of human history over centuries, and one of his points is that at such a timescale, individuals don't matter. Thus his lack of characterization is central to his thematic aims.

Joel Brown and colleagues showed that high moonlight intensity inhibits the activity of the Arizona pocket mouse (Perognathus amplus), a finding explicable in terms of benefits and costs: greater lunar intensity may not enable the mice to increase foraging success enough to offset the higher chance of detection by predatory owls or hawks. Though many other nocturnal mammals respond to lunar intensity variations similarly to Arizona pocket mice, Azara's night monkeys (Aotus azarae) display the opposite pattern, as their heavy reliance on visual foraging results in a different balance of reward and risk.

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

Neurobiologists Laura Cuaya, Raul Hernandez-Perez, and colleagues investigated the language detection abilities of eighteen dogs. The researchers monitored the brain activity of Grog (a border collie), Alma (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.

While US public charities, like Habitat for Humanity International, must file Form 990 yearly with the IRS, private foundations, such as Lilly Endowment Inc., must file a different form, 990-PF. In addition, foundations that engage in certain prohibited activities must also file Form 4720 and pay a penalty tax on the money involved. Private foundations are prohibited from holding excess interests in a business enterprise, "self-dealing" (conducting activities that benefit foundation insiders), making taxable expenditures such as grants to noncharitable entities, and failing to cross a required threshold in making charitable distributions from income. Out of the organizations that filed Form 990-PF in the years 2003–2005, ______

Scholars cite Mr. President, the 1946 novel by Guatemalan author Miguel Angel Asturias, as a foundational text of magical realism, the Latin American style of fiction in which antirealistic plot devices—often borrowed from the folkloric traditions of Indigenous and colonial societies in the Americas—are deployed in an otherwise realistic mode of representation typical of the modern novel. This style has exerted a decisive influence on authors around the world, including Olga Tokarczuk, whose 1996 novel Primeval and Other Times resembles classic magical realist novels in its juxtaposition of literary realism with folklore—namely, that of Poland.

All stainless steel contains varying amounts of iron, carbon, and corrosion-inhibiting chromium. However, ferritic stainless steel, often used for induction cookers, contains a higher percentage of chromium (at least 10.5%) than does austenitic stainless steel and a higher concentration of iron, which is responsible for its magnetic properties. Unlike ferritic stainless steel, austenitic stainless steel has a face-centered cubic crystalline structure resulting from the addition of nickel to the alloy. Austenitic stainless steel has two subtypes: the 300 series, often used for storage containers, and the 200 series, which has less nickel and more manganese than the 300 series and is used for indoor architecture. Thus, stainless steel used to manufacture storage containers will have ______

As complex life cycle parasites, Lecithaster sp. and Capillaria parophrysi require multiple host species throughout their development. Extrapolating from parasite counts on Pacific herring and seven other fish species collected from Puget Sound from 1880 to 2019, Chelsea Wood et al. found that the abundance of three-host parasites, such as Lecithaster sp., negatively correlated with rising average annual sea temperatures; the abundance of two-host parasites, such as C. parophrysi, was largely stable. Noting that fish and other marine vertebrates are especially vulnerable to climate change, Wood et al. observed that all three-host parasites in the study depend on at least two vertebrate species, while all two-host parasites depend on only one, suggesting that ______

When Belgium joined Interpol—the International Criminal Police ______ in 1923, the Belgian Federal Police gained access to the combined resources of law enforcement agencies from around the globe.

Released in 1996, the AMD K5 microchip contained a single CPU, or core, to execute commands. The invention of the dual-core chip in the early 2000s led to a seismic shift in processing power. Since then, the average processing power of microchips—whose cores can number in the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands— ______ drastically.

Should Italy cut taxes? As of 2017, Italy's top tax rate (55%) was lower than the highest point on the country's Laffer curve, placing Italy below the threshold for a tax cut. A theoretical relationship between tax rates and revenues, ______ in 1974.

In 2018, Slovak photographer Maria Svarbova exhibited her work for audiences across the ______ vivid pastel colors, overexposed tones, and mirrorlike symmetry to evoke a Socialist-era aesthetic, her photos captivated viewers from South Korea to Portugal.

The mycorrhizal association between alder trees and Paxillus panuoides, a fungus commonly referred to as oyster roll-rim, is well ______ sharing nutrients via fungal hyphae and the host tree's roots, the organisms form a kind of social system more commonly associated with animals than plants: a community.

Proto-Indo-European—a protolanguage, or ancestral language of a family of descendant (daughter) languages—is said to be the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages. This is a hypothetical ______ Proto-Indo-European is only postulated, its characteristics being inferred from the linguistic properties of its 448 daughters.

The World Cup of men's soccer, one of the biggest sporting events on the planet, brought 32 national teams from six continents to the host country, Brazil, in 2014. The event, which is held every four years, has expanded greatly since it was played in Italy in 1934. ______ the World Cup included only 16 teams, most from Europe and the Americas.

In his 2016 poem “Orphan,” Blas Falconer explores Teresita Fernandez's sculpture Nocturnal (Horizon Line), a work that features horizontal bands of granite. ______ Falconer participates in a tradition dating back to Homer's Iliad: that of ekphrasis, poetry that engages with visual art.

Most solar eclipses from long ago have been forgotten, but not all. ______ scholars still discuss an eclipse that occurred on May 17, 2231 B.C.E. That's because it was the fifth-longest total eclipse before the Dark Ages—7 minutes, 21 seconds long.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Sue is the nickname of a dinosaur fossil specimen housed at the Field Museum of Natural History.
• The Field Museum of Natural History is located in Chicago, Illinois.
• Sue is a member of the genus Tyrannosaurus.
• Thomas is the nickname of a dinosaur fossil specimen housed at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
• The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is located in Los Angeles, California.
• Thomas is a member of the genus Tyrannosaurus.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Author H.P. Lovecraft wrote a number of horror stories.
• Designer Richard Launius created a board game based on these stories.
• The game is called Arkham Horror.
• It was released in 2005.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• In a 2010 study, Clark and Tilman found that the presence of plant litter had a negative effect on seedling emergence.
• The study was conducted in a grassland setting in the United States.
• In a 2002 study, Stammel et al. found that the presence of plant litter had a negative effect on seedling emergence.
• The study was conducted in a grassland setting in Germany.
• Seedling emergence is when a seedling sprouts above ground and begins photosynthesis.

• Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who produced more than two thousand drawings and paintings.
• Most of his works were completed in New York City in the 1980s.
• His work Untitled (Pollo Frito) was completed in 1982.
• The work is composed of acrylic, oil, and enamel on canvas and measures 60 inches by 120.5 inches.
• Untitled (Pollo Frito) was purchased by a private collection for $25.7 million in a 2018 auction.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Zim Smith Mid-County Trail is located in New York.
• It is one of more than 2,000 disused railroad corridors in the US that have been converted into public trails since the 1960s.
• Such trails are known as rail trails.
• The Union Pacific Railroad Trail in Nevada is parallel to an active railway, the Union Pacific Railroad.
• It is one of approximately 400 trails in the US that share a right-of-way with an active rail line.
• Such trails are known as rails-with-trails.