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 shared by both lineages. Meanwhile, Patricia 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.

The following text is from William Carlos Williams’s 1925 creative nonfiction book In the American Grain. Williams is discussing how works by nineteenth-century US poet and fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe were received by American readers.
Poe must suffer by his originality. Invent that which is new, even if it be made of pine from your own yard, and there’s none to know what you have done. It is because there’s no name. This is the cause of Poe’s lack of recognition. He was American. He was the astounding, inconceivable growth of his locality.

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 Ureña girls were none other than the daughters of Nicolás Ureña, and they were smart as clockwork. Miguel was hoping not only to meet us but to make the acquaintance of the poet himself at Mama’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 Pötzelsberger 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.”

Nancy Bird-Walton, who was an aviation pioneer, undoubtedly accomplished much, but to gain a lasting place in our historical memory, there is little that can ______ being the first to do something. For example, people will always remember that Aloha Wanderwell was the first woman to drive herself around the world.

Despite stated claims of global relevance, much major research on income inequality performed in the 2010s suffered from a myopic focus on a few countries in North America and Western Europe, partly due to limited data availability. Researchers would later ______ this shortcoming after gaining new access to administrative records located in nations in Africa, such as Ivory Coast, and Eastern Europe, such as Poland.

In the 2010s, the price of vintage G.I. Joe 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.

The fact that publications by University of Minnesota economist Ellen R. McGrattan, who studies financial policy, are so frequently cited in other scholars’ work ______ the usefulness of her research for her peers—other economists clearly find her studies valuable for their own scholarship.

Shedding light on the thermal biology of fungi, research by Radamés Cordero et al. indicates that certain mushrooms (including Coprinellus micaceus and species from the genus Cantharellus) 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.

In Algeria, use of solid fuel (e.g., coal, wood) as a share of total household fuel use fell by approximately three-fourths between 2000 and 2019; such shifts are often 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). Rasmus Heltberg’s study of fuel use in Ghana shows this model to be reductive, however: household fuel use was heterogeneous, flexible, and influenced by several factors, including the stability of the local electrical grid.

In a study by Mika R. Moran, Daniel A. Rodriguez, and colleagues, residents of La Paz, Bolivia, and Fortaleza, Brazil, were surveyed about parks in their cities. Of the 528 respondents from La Paz, 67.5% indicated that they use the city's parks, and of the 938 respondents from Fortaleza, 35.7% indicated using city parks. Given that the percentage of La Paz respondents who reported living within a 10-minute walk of a park was much lower than that reported by Fortaleza respondents, greater proximity alone can’t explain the difference in park use.

The bird species Hylophilus ochraceiceps (the tawny-crowned greenlet) 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 H. ochraceiceps. Finding that the birds often froze in place or scattered into vegetation upon hearing the calls, they concluded that H. ochraceiceps associates T. caesius alarm calls with danger.

Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in 2007 is a quintessential instance of brand extension—the company leveraged its brand recognition as a computer manufacturer to enter a product category where it had not previously competed. An outstanding question is whether perceived category similarity predicts consumers’ likelihood of purchasing brand extensions. To answer this question, Alicia Grasby et al. identified 30 extended-brand pairs (e.g., the same brand of laundry detergent and air freshener) in 52 weeks of purchases by approximately 60,000 households and, for each pair, calculated the change in probability of a brand in one category being purchased if the same brand was purchased in the other category.

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 P3 gave equal ratings to the abstract and cubist paintings, the data in the graph indicate the model predicted that ______

In 1900, in collaboration with Cherokee cultural historian Will West Long, white ethnographer James Mooney assembled a collection of traditional oral stories related to him by Cherokee elders. Based on their content, Mooney categorized them into various genres: historical traditions, tales of animals, and so on. Noting that some stories feature detailed descriptions of geographic locations in the Cherokee homeland, Mooney demarcated those as a genre he referred to as “wonder stories.” While Long and Mooney’s collaboration proved valuable as an act of cultural preservation, it is important to bear in mind that Cherokee people are not known to have applied genre divisions to their stories before Mooney’s work. There is, therefore, ______

Many studies have found a positive association between levels of dissolved organic carbon and mercury in bodies of fresh water in North America. But Petri Porvari and Matti Verta did not find this correlation in a study conducted in Finland, leading some scientists to hypothesize that the association is particular to North America. However, several other studies conducted outside North America, such as one by Yao Luo and colleagues in China, showed similar results to the North American studies, while few have produced results similar to those of Porvari and Verta’s study, suggesting that ______

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

Prolonged exposure to anthropogenic noise (sounds from human sources like traffic or mining) can affect animals, as Lidia Eva Wysocki and colleagues found in a 2006 study of common carp. 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 fish showed larger differences than studies of birds did, for every class of animals examined, there were individual studies showing differences well above the average for fish. Therefore, the results of the meta-analysis suggest that ______

Although the epic poem The Poem of the Cid dates back to the 12th century, ______ compelling narrative still captivates readers today.

Most sand is beige because of deposits of gray-and tan- hued minerals, such as quartz and feldspar. The sand at Balos Beach in Greece is a more unusual ______ deposits of crushed coral and other organic matter lend the sand a unique pink hue.

The poem “Naomi,” which was published in 1960, contains three signature elements of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetic ______ compressed lines infused with bursts of vivid imagery; syncopated rhythms, largely inspired by the blues tradition; and a keen attention to everyday life in Brooks’s South Side Chicago neighborhood.

Neoclassical economic models assume that people consistently make rational economic decisions, but Laura Gee of Tufts University makes no such assumption; behavioral economists such as Gee, whose research focuses on charitable giving, ______ that economic decision-making can in fact be highly irrational.

While the greater adjutant (Leptoptilos dubius) can be found in places like the Central Tanintharyi Coast in Myanmar and the Chhep Wildlife Sanctuary in Cambodia, more than 80 percent of this endangered stork species is found in Assam, India. There, wildlife ______ is on the front lines of conservation efforts to bring adjutants back from near extinction.

The Roman poet Lucan’s Pharsalia, an epic poem about Julius Caesar, is an extant work: it can still be read. By contrast, lost works like Lucan’s poem praising Emperor Nero, Laudes Neronis—no copy of which exists—______ known to antiquarians only through references in extant works.

In their attempt to create a quantum random number generator, K. Muhammed Shafi et al. used a continuous-wave diode laser to fire photons at a periodically-poled potassium titanyl phosphate (PPKTP) nonlinear crystal. A plano-convex lens ______ the laser on the center of the 10-millimeter-long crystal ensured a spot size (a measure of the beam’s diameter) of 85 micrometers.

Christine Chen is a space scientist who works on the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST. Thanks in part to Chen’s contributions, the telescope is now positioned near the Sun-Earth L₂ Lagrange point, almost one million miles beyond Earth’s orbit. ______ the JWST’s predecessor, the Hubble Telescope, is only about 340 miles above Earth’s surface.

Contour modeling and box modeling, methods used by digital artists to create three-dimensional elements for video games, typically require software to process geometric shapes numbering in the thousands. ______ these approaches are more economical than surface model methods, which require more powerful and expensive processors to manage polygons numbering in the millions.

The total solar eclipse of April 16, 1178 BCE, was famously described in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. Another memorable solar eclipse occurred on April 21, 899 BCE, but unlike the 1178 BCE eclipse, the 899 BCE eclipse was annular. ______ the Moon didn’t cover the Sun completely, instead creating an annulus, or “ring of fire.”

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Pilot Knob National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) is a protected natural area in Missouri.
• It encompasses 90 acres.
• It was established to safeguard the habitat of the Indiana bat, an endangered species.
• The Pilot Knob NWR is managed by the US Fish & Wildlife Service.
• The US Fish & Wildlife Service limits human activities in the area.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Waiting is a 1987 black-and-white linocut print by Kuwaiti artist Thuraya Al-Baqsami.
• It depicts a tranquil, everyday scene (a woman in a headscarf gazing out a window).
• ¡Sera toda nuestra! (“It will all be ours!”) is a 1977 color linocut print by Mexican American artist Carlos Cortéz.
• It features a scene with an explicitly political point of view (a group of laborers preparing to go on strike).
• Lino cutting is an inexpensive printmaking technique in which an image is carved onto linoleum tile, covered in ink or paint, and stamped onto paper.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the city of Timbuktu was part of the Songhai Empire.
• Timbuktu was a center of trade and scholarship in the Sahara desert.
• The city was known for its hundreds of thousands of written manuscripts on both secular and religious subjects.
• The manuscripts survive today in dozens of private libraries across the city.
• The Pearls Leading to Accepted Guidance is one of these manuscripts.