The minaret (or tower) is one of many features that are foundational to traditional mosque architecture and is therefore considered ______ aspect of mosque design. Even mosques that exhibit elements of multiple architectural styles, such as the Grand Jamia Mosque, which incorporates elements from the Islamic and Mughal styles, will also include several of these standard features.

The following text is adapted from Willa Cather’s 1912 novel Alexander’s Bridge.
For the next few days Alexander was very busy. He took a desk in the office of a [Scottish] engineering firm on Henrietta Street, and was at work almost constantly. He avoided the clubs and usually dined alone at his hotel.

Siemowit is said to have ruled what eventually became Poland in the 9th century. Unlike that of Zbigniew or other well-attested figures from early Polish history, Siemowit’s existence has been the subject of debate, as our knowledge of him is ______ somewhat dubious oral traditions first written down hundreds of years after the events they describe.

Parapuzosia seppenradensis, known to have lived in what is now Texas, and Parapuzosia leptophylla, known to have lived in what is now Austria, were both ammonites, but P. seppenradensis was much larger than P. leptophylla. Recent research by Christina Ifrim, Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, and colleagues has suggested that this ______ resulted from the unique predator threat faced by each species.

In their study of fossils of the extinct arthropod Mollisonia symmetrica, Javier Ortega-Hernández, James Weaver, and team reported some obvious indications of M. symmetrica’s nervous system—for example, nerves extending into the animal’s body parts. They also saw signs of what might be a synganglion, a brain-like mass of nerve tissue, in the animal’s head. This evidence is exciting because it could help us better understand how M. symmetrica is related to other arthropods, such as lampyrid beetles and barnacles.

High-speed rail systems, in which trains can move at great speeds, are expanding in many countries because high-speed rail can reduce the number of automobiles on the road and ultimately conserve energy. In the Netherlands, for instance, 90 kilometers of high-speed rail lines are in operation as of 2023, and 167 kilometers are under construction.

A microgenre is a specialized genre consisting of a comparatively small number of stylistically similar artists. The microgenre of electronic music known as hyperpop emerged in the 2010s, with the American duo 100 gecs as an early exponent. Their combination of dense synthesizer arrangements and metallic percussion with vocals electronically shifted in pitch above the natural range of lead vocalist Laura Les exemplifies the hyperpop sound. More recently, Japanese-British recording artist Rina Sawayama has contributed to that sound by incorporating pop melodies into it.

Women like Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein made important early contributions to the history of US cryptology, a field concerned with secure data communication and storage. Feinstein provided important intelligence information to US policymakers during World War II and the Cold War as a result of her decoding efforts for the Army Signal Intelligence Service. In this way, Feinstein and others like her helped make it possible for more women—such as Anna Lysyanskaya, who currently works in and teaches digital cryptography—to enter the field of cryptology.

Tokyo has high pedestrian traffic, but other cities cannot increase their pedestrian traffic simply by replicating a single feature of Tokyo—e.g., its high population density—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 personal preference, others have shown the importance of perceived safety, and so on, and it is clear that none of these factors in isolation fully explains pedestrian habits in a given city.

New York–based artist Uman is no stranger to crossing borders: born in Somalia, she lived in Kenya and Denmark before moving to the United States. Her art, too, straddles multiple boundaries. Drawing on knowledge of everything from East African fabrics to Arabic calligraphy, Uman’s kaleidoscopic paintings often combine abstract shapes with anthropomorphic elements, like eyes, mouths, and gestures. Moreover, she seeks to cultivate a practice of “constant evolution” untethered from any prescriptive agenda, so that her art navigates a liminal space between tradition and autobiography, community and itinerancy, and activism and contemplation.

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, Armin P. Moczek 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.

Deposits of valuable objects, or hoards, have been unearthed in many different parts of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Some of these hoards were discovered before 2000; for example, ______

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a 1900 novel by L. Frank Baum. In the novel, Dorothy lives in Kansas with her aunt and uncle, but she later finds herself in a land called Oz. The narrator indicates that her aunt and uncle’s house in Kansas is remote and solitary, writing that ______

Nautilids are marine mollusks that begin growing their shells before emerging from their eggs and continue to add shell segments throughout their lifetimes. The walls between their shells’ chambers are called septa, and the concentration of the isotope oxygen-18 they contain exactly reflects the isotope’s concentration in the water at the depth at which the septa formed. Paleontologist Amane Tajika and colleagues examined each of the septa in two nautilid shells; finding that sample M20 had a higher concentration of the isotope than sample F07 did, the researchers concluded that M20 must have formed at a significantly lower temperature than F07 did.

Blue holes—large marine sinkholes, like the Dahab Blue Hole in Egypt—can be hundreds of meters deep and are sometimes part of widespread subterranean networks of passageways. In 2021, researchers conducted the first formal study of the Taam Ja’ Blue Hole (TJBH), located in a bay of fresh water and salt water on Mexico’s coast, and reported a maximum depth of 274 meters. Juan Carlos Alcíreca-Huerta and colleagues later reinvestigated the depth of the TJBH, determining that it exceeded 400 meters; additionally, they detected variations in characteristics across water layers. Layers more than 400 meters deep began to show density and salinity conditions akin to those of the nearby Caribbean Sea. Alcíreca-Huerta and colleagues therefore suggest that ______

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 features. For example, data from the US Geological Survey show the ______ and most recent deformation (less than 15 thousand years ago) of the Belted Range fault in Nye County, Nevada.

When the electrons of a chemical element change energy states, they release certain wavelengths of light that are unique to that element. This means that the emission of light with a wavelength of 481 nanometers (nm), which falls in the 450–500 nm range defining the blue portion of the visible spectrum, ______ the element zinc as the source of the light.

The quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) known as Pando, located in the United States, is one of the oldest known trees in the world, at 14,000 to 80,000 years old. With up to eighty millennia of climate data in its tree ______ single tree like this, claims dendrochronologist Valerie Trouet, can tell the history of the world.

As the exoplanet 51 Pegasi b orbits a star 50 light-years from Earth, the gas giant’s gravity causes the star to wobble. In 1995, astronomers observing the wobble—indicated by redshifts and blueshifts in the star’s spectral wavelengths—eventually attributed ______ to the gravitational influence of the previously undetected exoplanet.

Wakening was first released in 2013. This short ______ is about a woman attempting to solicit help from an ancient creature, was directed by Cree-Métis filmmaker Danis Goulet.

In July 1862, Joseph Pierce joined the US Army. He went on to serve in the 14th Connecticut Volunteers during the US Civil War and, ______ earned a place in US history as one of the war’s few Chinese-born American soldiers.

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, Russia, in 2018. The event, which is held every four years, used to be much smaller and more limited geographically. ______ the 1962 World Cup in Chile included only 16 teams, all from Europe and the Americas.

Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), in which artificial workers overthrow their masters, left an indelible mark on the science fiction genre, and the English language, by introducing the term “robot” (derived from the Czech word robota, meaning “indentured labor” or “drudgery”). ______ Čapek’s play also contributed to a venerable literary and mythological tradition: using artificial beings as mirrors and foils for humanity.

In a given rock formation, Albian rock from 113 million years ago might directly abut Viséan rock from 346.7 million years ago, with millions of years of material missing in between. ______ time did not stand still during these intervening years; the unaccounted-for sedimentary material was likely removed from the stratigraphic record via erosion and weathering.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Rhine River is in Europe.
• It ranks No. 129 among the longest rivers in the world.
• It is 1,233 kilometers long.
• The Niger River is in Africa.
• It ranks No. 14 among the longest rivers in the world.
• It is 4,200 kilometers long.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The A.M. Turing Award is a prestigious award given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
• The ACM gives the award for “major contributions of lasting importance to computing.”
• It is named after groundbreaking British mathematician Alan Turing.
• Douglas Engelbart won the award in 1997.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• In music theory, the term “key” refers to the set of musical notes that forms the foundation of a piece of music.
• In Ideas Toward an Aesthetic of Music (1806), German poet and composer Christian Schubart describes the mood of various musical keys.
• He describes the key of C minor as expressing “longing.”
• “Don’t Speak” (1996) by No Doubt is a song written in C minor.

Emerging bioacoustics technologies have ______ long-standing challenges to wildlife research by enabling scientific observation without a human presence in the field. For example, these tools have been used for continuous, unattended monitoring of insect species and for tracking nocturnal birds when they move into inaccessible areas of wetlands where traditional observation methods fail.

The following text is adapted from John Matheus’s 1926 short story, “Mr. Bradford Teaches Sunday School.” Mr. Bradford is driving through the countryside in Florida.
The moss in the towering water oaks had become enlivened with a verdant sheen of silver and hung like festoons of carnival or like funeral decorations for the mourning of the dead. The pine green was resplendent. The bald cypresses spread themselves along the water courses while the willows wept as they always did. Mr. Bradford was conscious of this gorgeous display of nature.

As a work of scholarship, Advancing U.S. Latino Entrepreneurship (2020) is notable for its ______. Featuring contributions from Zulema Valdez, Bea Stotzer, and others, it explores contemporary issues while also providing context dating all the way back to the sixteenth century on Latino populations and their experiences with business and commerce.

The ______ of leaf-vein architectures—the branching venation of Ginkgo biloba, the hierarchical netlike venation of Clematis reticulata, and others—likely resulted from competing selective pressures to maximize fluid transport, photosynthesis, and robustness against herbivory. The associated trade-offs may account for the range of adaptations in different lineages.

The metal featured in both the structure of the ARK by APOLLO Architects Associates and the hardware in the House in Goido by FujiwaraMuro Architects is representative of a trend in contemporary Japanese interior design to juxtapose sleek, modern accents with traditional organic materials such as cypress. The prominent featuring of metal stems from the post–World War II emphasis on technological progress, while more traditional natural materials help preserve longstanding architectural and aesthetic approaches.

Text 1
In separate studies, Guihua Wang and colleagues and Xinhua He and colleagues examined whether plants transfer nutrients to one another using a common mycorrhizal network (CMN)—a lattice of fungal strands in the soil. Wang and colleagues excluded all pathways other than the CMN by using barriers to keep the plants’ root systems separate while allowing mycorrhizal strands through—an essential step He and colleagues’ study did not take.
Text 2
Wang and colleagues took the necessary precaution of separating the plants’ root systems (thereby excluding root-to-root transmission). However, any barrier used must allow the thread-like hyphae of a CMN to pass through, and this permeability would also allow liquids through. Thus, the researchers’ experimental design cannot ensure that any nutrient transfer observed can be attributed to a CMN and not to some other pathway.

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

Male orangutans typically disperse from the territory in which they were born when they reach maturity, whereas females typically do not. Beatrice Ehmann and her colleagues hypothesized that this difference in life trajectory should be reflected in the diets of immature orangutans: males should share fewer of their mothers’ dietary preferences than females do since those preferences tend to be particular to the food resources available in the local area and may be of relatively low utility beyond it. The researchers calculated the percent of mother orangutans’ diets shared with their offspring’s diets and the percent of immature orangutans’ diets not shared with their mothers’ diets.

Human taste receptors contain TRMP5 channels, which affect how sweet or bitter, among other flavors, things are. These channels are most active at high temperatures, conferring the greatest effect for food that is consumed hot. Conversely, for foods eaten cold (particularly below 59°F), these channels are less active and confer less flavor; thus, something like ice cream (containing large amounts of sugar) will taste as intended when eaten cold but may become cloyingly sweet once it melts.

The bird species Tachyphonus surinamus (the fulvous-crested tanager) practices a foraging strategy known as sallying (catching insects in flight and returning to a perch to eat them), enabling it to scan for prey and predators simultaneously. Conversely, Percnostola rufifrons (the black-headed antbird), with which T. surinamus shares territory in French Guiana, practices foliage gleaning (picking insects off leaves), substantially limiting the bird’s field of vision while foraging. Biologist Ari Martínez and colleagues hypothesized that the greater vulnerability inherent in the latter strategy is reflected in greater sensitivity to predator warning signals from neighboring species.

Canada, which, according to international indices, has relatively strong democratic institutions and low intranational income inequality, experienced an inflation rate of 2.26% in 2018, whereas Oman, which shows the opposite pattern on such indices, had an inflation rate of only 0.88% that year. Such a comparison may seem consistent with theoretical critique that by diluting control over the economy, democratic institutions inhibit states’ ability to counteract inflationary pressures, but when Raj Desai et al. examined democratic strength, intranational inequality, and inflation in more than 100 countries, they found that democratic strength, if associated with low inequality, restrains inflationary pressures, which would suggest that ______

Nature reserves and other types of protected areas (PAs) are established to promote conservation, but because they restrict certain economic activities, it is widely believed that they hinder local economic development. However, a study by Hasita Bhammar and team investigating five PAs, including Lower Zambezi National Park (a terrestrial PA in Zambia) and Abrolhos Marine Park (a marine PA in Brazil), estimated the impact of tourism on these regions and concluded that tourism likely results in increased household incomes in local communities. But whereas terrestrial PAs were in remote places with few alternative amenities to attract tourists, marine PAs were close to additional amenities not part of the PA. Thus, the researchers conceded that although ______

The subscription economy has rapidly expanded to include a wide range of products—from books to cloud storage—in part because consumers appreciate the convenience of automatic payments. But as a study by Ben Klopack and team shows, consumers are typically inattentive to automatic payments and remain subscribed to services long after their value has worn off. The study also found that subscribers were much more likely to discontinue a service when they had to make an active renewal decision (for example, when they need to update payment information to remain subscribed) than at other times. The researchers therefore concluded that a regulation requiring all subscribers to complete payments manually would likely ______

Should South Korea cut taxes? As of 2017, South Korea’s top tax rate (49%) was lower than the highest point on the country’s Laffer curve. A theoretical relationship between tax rates and revenues, the curve can be used to determine whether tax cuts will ultimately increase a country’s tax revenue, according to some ______ 2017 data suggested that South Korea was below the threshold for a tax cut.

Some places that were once part of the Spanish Empire, such as Sardinia, reveal few traces of a past connection to Spain, linguistic or otherwise. In contrast, Argentina broke free from the Spanish Empire in the nineteenth century yet still bears its imperial history in its language, Spanish ______ spoken by most current residents of Argentina.

On June 30, 1908, a 160-foot-wide space rock hurtling toward Earth exploded in a remote forested area of Siberia. Known as the Tunguska event, after a river that ran through the region, ______ June 30 has been officially denoted International Asteroid Day.

A single specimen of N. vivans, collected at a depth of 129 fathoms (236 meters) in the Indian Ocean, and a single specimen of P. obliquiloculata, collected at a depth of 260 fathoms (475 meters) in the South Atlantic, have been preserved as exemplars of their respective ______ former in a repository at Washington, DC’s Museum of Natural History and the latter in a repository at London’s Natural History Museum.

Breaking ties with the Soviet Union in 1991 catalyzed a host of infrastructural changes for the newly independent Latvia, among them a new country dialing code from the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee ______ incoming international telephone calls to reach the country.

Researchers recently theorized that Copper Age (3500 BCE to 2750 BCE) owl-shaped carvings collected from Iberian archaeological sites were likely toys created by children. This hypothesis, based on comparative analyses of owl drawings made by modern children, is supported by the objects predominantly being crafted from slate—a material that, because of its ______ be easily carved by small hands using rudimentary tools.

Located on the Emscher River in Germany, the city of Dortmund was a member of a powerful mercantile alliance that dominated northern European trade between the 13th and 17th ______ a loose confederation of cities from eleven modern-day countries, it has been described as a precursor to today’s European Union.

Paul Austerlitz of Gettysburg College, along with researchers Maureen Mahon of New York University and Michael Veal of Yale University, ______ on the advisory team for the Timeline of African American Music, an interactive digital resource that explores African American musical history from the 1600s to the present day.

In his meta-analysis of recent studies of animal information cascades, Joseph S. McCormick presents several examples of adaptive cascades (i.e., information transfers that benefit a collective), including one that involves humpback whales. However, not all cascades are beneficial. ______ his meta-analysis cites one study that described how black-throated blue warblers followed flock-mates' choice of habitat even when that habitat lacked adequate vegetative cover.

Although the Eskimo-Aleut language of Inuktun has only about 1,200 living speakers, most in Greenland, the New York City-based Endangered Language Alliance has identified a group of Inuktun speakers in the city’s borough of Manhattan. ______ in the borough’s Upper West Side neighborhood, these speakers are both helping to ensure Inuktun’s survival and contributing to the city’s unmatched linguistic diversity.

William Duer employed the pseudonym “Philo-Publius”—a reference to an ancient Roman statesman—in political essays he wrote in 1787, 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 Duer aligned his federalist views with the venerated republican ideals of the ancient world, thereby bolstering the authority of his writing.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• A U-shaped curve in a river channel is called a meander.
• A meander forms when water erodes sediment from one side of the riverbank and redeposits that sediment on the opposite side.
• Meanders will gradually change shape and migrate downstream over time.
• A river with high sinuosity has many meanders, and a river with low sinuosity has few.
• The Huallaga River in Peru has high sinuosity.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Gabriel de Vallseca was a fifteenth-century Majorcan cartographer of portolan charts.
• Domenico Pizigano was a fifteenth-century Venetian cartographer of portolan charts.
• Portolan charts were early nautical charts that mapped the waterways of the Mediterranean and Black Seas.
• Portolan charts in the Venetian tradition tended to be sparse in illustrations.
• Those in the Majorcan tradition tended to be richly illustrated.
• In Majorcan charts, the Atlas Mountains are depicted as a palm tree, and the Tagus River is depicted as a shepherd’s crook.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Atoms in a solid state are ordered and cannot move freely; atoms in a liquid state are disordered and can move three-dimensionally.
• Under high pressure and heat, potassium forms an unusual dual structure: a solid lattice of atoms (the host) surrounds partially liquid atom chains (the guest).
• This hybrid state (chain melt) was previously thought to be a transitional phase between solid and liquid states.
• A 2019 study confirmed that even under extreme heat, the host structure remained solid while the guest structure did not become fully liquid.
• These guest atoms exhibited disorder but were confined to one-dimensional movement by the host.
• Chain melt was determined to be a stable, distinct state.