The following text is adapted from William Wordsworth’s 1798 poem “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.”
Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

Although oil shocks—such as the 10% rise in oil prices in November 1970—can strongly affect individual consumers, Gbadebo Oladosu and colleagues have shown that at the level of national economies, their effects are often quite ______. The effect of recent oil shocks on the gross domestic product of Germany, for example, was only slightly greater than zero.

Writer Lydia Davis observed that while ______ literary forms, such as the poem, are recognizable as such even as they evolve, there are pathbreaking “intergeneric” forms that might, for example, use elements of both fables and realist narratives to create something unclassifiable. Davis’s own very short literary pieces arguably fit in this category, since they straddle the line between prose and poetry.

Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth’s analysis of the debt repayments and expenditure of the government of Philip II (who ruled an empire including Spain and Milan from 1556 to 1598) found a seeming contradiction: although the government had several short-term cash shortages, it ran an even larger surplus than did the government of eighteenth-century Britain, a nation considered ______ of fiscal virtue.

The following text is from Anthony Trollope’s 1855 novel The Warden. Charles James is the son of a high-ranking clergy member.
Charles James was an exact and careful boy; he never committed himself; he well knew how much was expected from the eldest son of the Archdeacon of Barchester, and was therefore mindful not to mix too freely with other boys. He had not the great talents of his younger brothers, but he exceeded them in judgment and propriety of demeanour; his fault, if he had one, was an over-attention to words instead of things; there was a thought too much finesse about him, and, as even his father sometimes told him, he was too fond of a compromise.

The establishment of urban green spaces for the abatement of fine particulate matter and other major air-pollutant concentrations is gaining public support, but urban planners must proceed with caution given subtleties in the body of evidence for the strategy’s efficacy. High-level reports have attributed pollutant reductions to cities’ inclusion of green spaces; however, one study found that while trees are negatively associated with air pollutants when considered on a citywide scale, at the street level, this association is minimal and at times positive. Because research tends to focus on large-scale effects in cities, decision-makers may be unaware that those outcomes are not always generalizable across spatial scales.

The Skin I’m In was Sharon G. Flake’s debut novel. It was published in 1998. A debut novel is the first book that an author has published. Debut novels are especially interesting to literary critics (people whose job it is to evaluate books) and readers because these books offer a look at new voices in the literary world.

The following text is adapted from L.M. Montgomery’s 1923 novel Emily of New Moon. Emily, a young girl who lives on a farm run by her aunt Elizabeth, wants to be a published writer someday.
One of the things they [argued] about was the fact that Emily, as Aunt Elizabeth discovered one day, was in the habit of using more of her egg money to buy paper than Aunt Elizabeth approved of. What did Emily do with so much paper? They had a fuss over this and eventually Aunt Elizabeth discovered that Emily was writing stories. Emily had been writing stories all winter under Aunt Elizabeth’s very nose and Aunt Elizabeth had never suspected it. She had fondly supposed that Emily was writing school compositions.

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 Finland compares to that in other countries. The student finds that ______

Ratified in 2017 by two-thirds of World Trade Organization member nations, the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) is a trade-reform measure that aims to reduce redundant customs procedures and other costly aspects of international trade. In a 2021 report, economist Jayson Beckman modeled global market prices of several agricultural commodities under both the TFA and an alternative trade-reform scenario: removal of agricultural tariffs (taxes on imports that generally increase prices on imported goods). After reviewing data from the report, a student concludes that overall, consumers of the commodities listed in the table would likely benefit more from the TFA than they would from tariff removal.

Issuing a one-dollar coin yields positive seigniorage—the profit generated when the face value of a coin exceeds the unit cost of producing it—for Singapore’s government, which in turn can be used to fund such services as transportation. Some countries, such as the Netherlands, have ceased manufacturing certain coins because their production created negative seigniorage. In an economics class discussing the data in the table, one student argues that in 2023, the one-cent coin was the least financially sensible for the US to produce, while another student argues that the five-cent coin was.

Describing adverbs as “silly,” novelist Chuck Palahniuk is one of several authors and literary critics who have recommended minimizing the use of adverbs, especially those ending in -ly (e.g., “graciously”), in works of fiction. To investigate the prevalence of -ly adverbs in novels, author and statistician Ben Blatt used natural language processing—machine learning technology that reads and interprets text—to calculate the rates at which these words occur in the novels of William Faulkner, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. Blatt concluded that in Faulkner’s oeuvre, there is a negative correlation between -ly adverb proliferation and perceived literary merit.

Students in a biology class investigated why individual house mice (Mus musculus) can differ from one another in their circulating sodium level. The students compared wild-type mice and knockout mice, which are mice with specific genes deactivated, when mice of each type were placed in similar naturalistic environments and taken for periodic blood sampling. Finding that knockout mice with the gene Asb5 deactivated tended to have lower concentrations of sodium in their blood than did wild-type mice, the students concluded that differences in circulating sodium level among house mice in nature are solely attributable to variations in the level of expression of Asb5.

Neuroscientist Artin Arshamian and his team sought to determine what affects a person’s perception of an odor as pleasant: is it culture, personal taste, or aspects of human anatomy? The team assessed odor preferences in ten groups of people with different modes of living (urban, agricultural, and hunter-gatherer) including urban dwellers from a large city in Thailand and Chachi people from a small community in Ecuador. The team observed that across cultures, people generally rated odors about the same: vanillin, which smells like vanilla, was typically rated more pleasant than isovaleric acid, which smells like human sweat. The team therefore concluded that ______

The towns Entebbe and Jamame are both located almost directly on the ______ they are in different countries. Entebbe is in Uganda, while Jamame is in Somalia.

Having trained as astronauts for years, ______

In 1991, New Jersey ______ official fossil: the Hadrosaurus foulkii, which is a Cretaceous period dinosaur.

Nicosia is home to roughly 27 percent of Cyprus’s total population. This means that about 1 in 4 ______ live in Cyprus live in Nicosia!

In the Persian language, people commonly begin a folktale with a phrase that roughly translates to “there was and there was not.” In English, beginning with the phrase “once upon a time” is common. Indeed, how a folktale begins depends largely on the language in which ______ being told.

San Juan High School and Grand County High School are two of several Utah ______ enormous geoglyph of the letters SJ overlooks San Juan High, while a geoglyph of the letter G overlooks Grand County High.

Enacted in 1868, Luxembourg’s 5,601-word constitution, in contrast to Canada’s, which was enacted in 1867 and contains a far greater number (19,565) of words, ______ as the 9th shortest in the world. Such data are studied by constitutional scholars like Giovanni Sartori, who can use them to draw broader conclusions.

If you were to view the Namarunu volcano in Kenya from above, you might notice that its low profile and gently sloping sides make it look a bit like a shield lying flat on the ground. ______ it makes sense that Lydia Jennings and other volcanologists classify Namarunu as a shield volcano.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Jane is the nickname of a dinosaur fossil specimen housed at the Burpee Museum of Natural History.
• The Burpee Museum of Natural History is located in Rockford, Illinois.
• Jane is a member of the genus Tyrannosaurus.
• Big Mike is the nickname of a dinosaur fossil specimen housed at the Museum of the Rockies.
• The Museum of the Rockies is located in Bozeman, Montana.
• Big Mike is a member of the genus Tyrannosaurus.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Incarnations (2015) is an epistolary novel by English author Susan Barker.
• Epistolary novels are novels written primarily as a series of fictional documents.
• These documents can be letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings, and more.
• The Incarnations consists primarily of letters.
• The letters are sent between a taxi driver named Wang Jun and a mysterious woman.

• Maya Lin is an American 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 Water Line in 2006.
• It is an installation composed of aluminum tubing that fills an entire gallery room.
• She completed Seven Earth Mountain in 2015.
• It is an installation composed of soil that fills an entire gallery room.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Urban natural areas are city spaces that feature elements of nature.
• Facade-bound green walls are urban natural areas defined as exterior walls that have plants growing on them.
• They can benefit cities by enhancing air quality.
• Urban grasslands are urban natural areas defined as areas of pastures or meadows in cities.
• They can benefit cities by increasing diversity among bird species.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• When the electrons of a chemical element change energy states, certain wavelengths of light are released.
• This unique collection of wavelengths is known as the emission spectrum of the element.
• Magnesium’s emission spectrum includes the 517.2 nanometer (nm) wavelength.
• Helium’s emission spectrum includes the 587.5 nm wavelength.
• The green portion of the visible spectrum is made up of light with wavelengths of 500–570 nm.

Whether the reign of a French monarch such as Francis II or Louis XI 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.

Studying wrappers from discontinued candies, cover images from out-of-print magazines, and posters promoting concerts by long-forgotten musicians may seem like a frivolous pursuit, but ephemeral objects like these are useful as ______ cultural change, revealing shifts in norms, values, and concerns that traditional objects of historical inquiry may not.

Studying wrappers from discontinued candies, menus from nineteenth-century restaurants, and flyers promoting long-forgotten sporting events may seem like a frivolous pursuit, but ephemeral objects like these are useful as markers of cultural change: they can ______ shifts in norms, values, and concerns that traditional objects of historical inquiry may not.

______ though it seemed to many mathematicians, the Marden tameness conjecture, posed in 1974, eventually yielded to the efforts of Ian Agol, who presented a proof of it in 2004.

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

Scholarly interest in literary juvenilia—writings by children and teenagers—tends to focus on unpublished works by authors who became famous as adults, such as Charles Dickens’s poem “The Bill of Fare,” which he wrote around the ages of 18–20, because they offer insights into their authors’ artistic development. But some scholars also argue that recovering juvenilia by lesser-known writers is essential to understanding literary history: Daisy Ashford’s novels, which she published as a child, were widely read by contemporaries and are therefore deserving of closer attention.

To understand how temperature change affects microorganism-mediated cycling of soil nutrients in alpine ecosystems, Eva Kaštovská et al. collected plant-soil cores in the Tatra Mountains at elevations around 2,100 meters and transplanted them to elevations of 1,700–1,800 meters, where the mean air temperature was warmer by 2°C. Microorganism-mediated nutrient cycling was accelerated in the transplanted cores; crucially, microorganism community composition was unchanged, allowing Kaštovská et al. to attribute the acceleration to temperature-induced increases in microorganism activity.

Michael G. Campana and colleagues relied on historical DNA (hDNA)—genomic data incidentally preserved in specimens housed in natural history collections—to investigate the evolutionary origins of a fungal pathogen affecting bats. Although this approach offers unique benefits, such as access to genomic data from extirpated populations, it remains a relatively underutilized resource because hDNA is often to some extent degraded, a situation not easily remediable under current methodological paradigms and with extant DNA extraction and analysis technologies.

In a paper for an art history class, a student claims that Rosa Bonheur’s 1855 painting The Horse Fair marks a significant change in Bonheur’s artistic development.

Neurobiologists Laura Cuaya, Raúl Hernández-Pérez, and colleagues investigated the language detection abilities of eighteen dogs. The researchers monitored the brain activity of Kun-kun (a border collie), Bingo (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.

“Poetry” is a 1919 poem by Marianne Moore. The poem highlights an ambivalence toward poetry as the speaker acknowledges its merits while also expressing a sense of displeasure, writing ______

Cane is a 1923 novel by Jean Toomer. In one portion of the novel, Toomer uses figurative language to connect the narrator’s urban environment of Washington, DC, and the rural South of the narrator’s past, writing, ______

Some climate models for the western United States predict that while total annual precipitation may remain unchanged from the present level, precipitation will become concentrated into fewer but more intense rain and snow events. University of Texas climate scientist Geeta Persad and her colleagues simulated how the amount of water entering aquifers and the amount being used for irrigation purposes would change if this were to occur. Persad and her colleagues concluded that concentration of precipitation into fewer events would result in a higher number of dry days, triggering more irrigation, but that this change in irrigation output is highly sensitive to the baseline concentration of precipitation that currently exists in an area.

Ships in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were ranked based on military strength. The system considered the number of a ship’s cannons and decks. “First-rate” was the highest ranking, and “sixth-rate” was the lowest ranking, followed by unranked ships. The size of a ship’s crew was based on this ranking: first-rate ships had between 850 and 875 crewmen, while lower-ranked ships had fewer. Two of the ships in the British Royal Navy from this period were the Boyne (98 cannons and three decks) and the Britannia (120 cannons and three decks). Of these two, only the Britannia was ranked a first-rate ship. It can therefore be concluded that ______

In a 2018 study, Deepak Jaiswal and Rishi Kant found that consumers’ knowledge of environmental issues had no effect on the likelihood that the consumers would purchase environmentally friendly products. Since this study was based on fewer than 400 young adults in India, however, doubts have been raised about how reliable and representative the findings are. To better understand the issue, Wencan Zhuang and colleagues analyzed the results of 54 studies of eco-friendly consumer behavior, such as a 2018 study from Indonesia that included 916 participants and a 2018 study from India with 202 participants. Taking all 54 studies together, Zhuang and colleagues found a significant positive effect of environmental knowledge on eco-friendly purchasing decisions, suggesting that ______

In Norway, the Longyearbyen observatory site monitors activity in the upper atmosphere of the northern ______ in Australia, another observatory site, Buckland Park, monitors the sky of the southern hemisphere. Together, they are part of the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network—or SuperDARN, as space physicists like Tadahiko Ogawa call it.

Long attributed to Jacques-Louis David, the preeminent Neoclassical painter of his day, the 1801 painting Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes gained fresh attention in the 1990s when art historians discovered that the painting—which depicts a solitary young woman sketching—was actually the work of little-known French portrait ______ Marie-Denise Villers (1774–1821).

Along the hallowed walls of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art hangs 24.5-by-34.5-inch oil ______ which was created in 1964 by American artist Vija Celmins.

Legal scholars James Melton and Tom Ginsburg’s analysis of de jure judicial independence and its growth over decades ______ six constitutional features that enhance such independence, including judicial tenure and selection procedure. Romania’s constitution contains one of these features.

For Spain, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since 1982, NATO’s principle of collective defense confers both benefits and ______ organization’s many members, nations as disparate as the US and Slovenia, are all bound to defend Spain, the reverse is also true.

As of 2017, Italy’s top tax rate of 55% was lower than the country’s Laffer curve peak (70%). To some economists, whether a tax cut will ultimately increase Italy’s tax revenue is dependent on the country’s position on the Laffer ______ a theoretical relationship between tax rates and revenues, the curve was famously sketched on a napkin by economist Arthur Laffer in 1974.

Working together with the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, Dr. Lani Tsinnajinnie analyzed data about snowpack levels in the Chuska Mountains. She found that the snowpack (the amount of snow on the ground) was deepest in early March at lower elevations. At higher elevations, ______ the snowpack was deepest in mid-March.

Biographer Michael Gorra notes that the novelist Henry James “lived in a world of second thoughts,” frequently tinkering with his novels and stories after their initial publication. However, the differences between the 1881 first edition and the 1908 edition of his novel A Portrait of a Lady are extreme, even by James’s standards; ______ some critics regard the two editions as two different novels altogether.

Scientists studying asteroid deflection have focused on secondary objects such as S/2020 (2013 PY6), a moonlet orbiting the near-Earth asteroid 2013 PY6. In 2022 NASA intentionally crashed a probe into just such an object, successfully altering its orbit. Scientists have yet to demonstrate, ______ that 2013 PY6 and other primary objects would be similarly affected.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Documentary TV programs in the slow TV genre consist of uninterrupted broadcasts of ordinary events in real time.
• Nordlandsbanen: Minutt for Minutt is a Norwegian slow TV program.
• The 10-hour-long program documented a train ride from Trondheim to Bodø.
• It first aired in 2012.
• In her book Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure, British film scholar Helen Wheatley writes that slow TV “offers ‘unspectacular’ spectacle.”

• Calida Garcia Rawles is an African American painter.
• She is known for her large-scale, hyperrealistic paintings depicting African American figures in water.
• The painting Lightness of Being (24 × 30 in) depicts a young man with his arms outstretched floating on the right side of the canvas.
• Lost in the Shuffle (36 × 24 in) depicts two young men with their arms outstretched floating in the bottom left and upper right corners of the canvas.
• She paints the water with vivid blue colors, including periwinkle and cobalt.
• The mood in the paintings is placid.

• 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 Mater was completed in 1982.
• The work is composed of acrylic and oil stick on canvas and measures 72 inches by 84 inches.
• Mater was purchased by a private collection for $5.8 million in a 2009 auction.