Farmhouse Interior, painted in the realist style by Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch, depicts a peasant woman knitting at a table while a cat sits underneath. The realists’ emphasis on accurately portraying the experiences of average working people was largely a rejection of the romantic style evident in many paintings by Pierre-Auguste Cot, which instead ______ their subjects’ positive traits, altering subjects to appear more beautiful or heroic than they actually were.

Cacao was domesticated in South America. Its physical structure is no longer identical to the structure of the wild plant it is descended from. Maize (corn) also ______ its wild ancestor. That ancestor plant had a few small kernels. Indigenous people in Mexico carefully bred the crop until it had numerous fleshy kernels.

The following text is from Billie Jean King's 2021 autobiography All In.
[P]eople on both sides of my family had repeatedly demonstrated an independent streak. In the end, that was the temperament I gravitated toward, too. Both the Moffitts and the members of my mother's clan, the Jermans, came from mining and oil-geyser towns on the western frontier. They kept their heads down and worked, worked, worked. But they also bucked convention.
©2021 by Billie Jean King Enterprises, Inc.

Chengdu, China, was named a City of Gastronomy by UNESCO in 2010, a title that ______ that Chengdu has a unique and vibrant food culture worthy of celebration.

The following text is from Louise Erdrich’s 1986 novel The Beet Queen. Celestine takes her infant daughter with her to the butcher shop where she makes sausages.
Sometimes Celestine turned around and met the direct gaze of her daughter, a look so penetrating that Celestine’s breath caught. She dropped the spice, the string, the knife she was using, and took the girl up in her arms, ready for her to speak as if a spell had suddenly lifted.
When the baby flexed her entire body and struggled to free herself, Celestine put her down. No matter how thorough Celestine’s exhaustion, no matter how little sleep she’d had, there was a nerve of excitement running through each hour.
©1986 by Louise Erdrich

In 1940, John H. Sengstacke founded the National Newspaper Publishers Association to support Black-owned papers. Sengstacke’s accomplishment is just one example of the rich history of Black journalism in the United States. That history is preserved by the National Association of Black Journalists, which was founded in Washington, DC, in 1975 to support Black media professionals and honor people like Sengstacke.

Though Vasily Grossman’s novel Stalingrad is considered inferior to his later work Everything Flows, some critics praise it despite an arduous writing process required to satisfy Soviet censors (Jordan Penney in PopMatters called Stalingrad “powerful”). Of the novel’s eleven drafts, the second is inexplicably missing, the sixth closely hews to Soviet orthodoxy, and published versions most resemble the fifth. The English edition’s translators culled material from unpublished drafts and published Russian versions to create a comprehensive edition.

Vehicle transmissions and many other widely used mechanical systems have moving parts that rub or slide against one another, creating friction. This friction increases energy consumption and causes wear, which decreases the stability and life span of the system. Using carbon nanotubes and oil, Jun Qu and colleagues at a US Department of Energy lab have created a coating for moving parts that reduces friction to the point where it is almost nonexistent. The new coating is suitable for common applications, unlike other approaches that require special conditions.

Probabilistic models generate predictions based on outcomes of analogous past events, but even as these models project likely outcomes, they implicitly acknowledge that lower-frequency events may occur instead. Because they accommodate multiple potential outcomes, such models may seem incompatible with causal determinism—the view that particular outcomes are inevitable given certain preconditions. But complete foreknowledge of relevant conditions is generally unavailable, suggesting that a state of uncertainty ultimately prevails in which outcomes can be predicted but not definitively foretold.

Optimal foraging theory (OFT) holds that animals’ foraging behaviors reflect cost-benefit trade-offs that vary by species and with dynamic ecological circumstances. One such circumstance is lunar intensity, which Burt Kotler and colleagues found to be negatively associated with foraging by greater Egyptian gerbils but Eduardo Fernández-Duque and colleagues found to be positively associated with foraging by Azara’s night monkeys. This discrepancy is explicable in terms of OFT: the monkeys’ greater reliance on vision means that higher lunar intensity benefits them more than it benefits the gerbils.

High-speed rail (HSR) systems have trains that move at much higher speeds than traditional trains. HSR is expanding in Norway, Japan, and many other countries around the world. The United States, however, has been slow to build HSR systems. Researchers surveyed United States residents about their attitudes toward HSR. The researchers claim that this survey reveals that there is strong support for building more HSR lines in the United States.

Elisabeth Pötzelsberger and colleagues gathered data on 23 non-native tree species grown in Europe. They analyzed reports from Austria, Poland, 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 Austria had a greater number of damaging fungus species than either of the other countries did.

Life Among the Paiutes is an 1882 autobiographical narrative by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. In the work, Winnemucca explicitly indicates when and how she is shifting the focus of the narrative, as when she writes, ______

Studies have found that when looking at other people’s eyes, humans tend to perceive dilated pupils positively and constricted pupils negatively. Noting that a dark iris—the colored portion surrounding the pupil—is hard to distinguish from the black of the pupil (and thereby affects the pupil’s apparent size) and that many domestic dogs have dark irises, Akitsugu Konno et al. showed close-up images of dogs’ faces to human participants and asked them to rate the dogs’ traits and their own attitudes toward the dogs. Their findings suggest that ______

The hwamei and other fruit-eating bird species introduced to the Hawaiian island of Oahu in the last 150 years have recently been found to spread seeds from the fruits of forest plants native to Oahu that are at risk of extinction, such as the kolea lau nui tree. Many of these vulnerable plant species rely on the activity of fruit-eating birds to help spread the plants’ seeds in the wild. All fruit-eating bird species native to Oahu have gone extinct, suggesting that ______

Maria Ines Cordeiro is the director of the National Library of Portugal in Lisbon. In this role, Cordeiro ______ the library’s collections, which feature a large number of works by celebrated Portuguese writers.

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) is considered a satire of another novel popular at the time: Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which Austen’s heroine, Catherine Morland, is depicted reading. However, the similarity of the ______ experiences—the predicaments of both Catherine and Radcliffe’s Emily St. Aubert result from men’s greed—suggests that underlying the satire is a social critique.

The foxtail pine (Pinus balfouriana) known as RCR 1, located in the United States, is one of the oldest known trees in the world, at 1,666 years old. With almost two millennia of climate data in its tree ______ single tree like this, claims dendrochronologist Valerie Trouet, can tell the history of the world.

The grammar of the Gujarati language includes several noun cases common to most Indo-Aryan ______ the locative case, for instance, indicates that an action is occurring at, on, or near a particular noun.

The transit method, a means of indirect planetary discovery, has detected previously unknown exoplanets at vast distances from ______ the super Earth TRAPPIST-1b; at 352 light-years away, the super Earth Kepler-102 f; and, as of 2023, over 4,000 other exoplanets that are too far away and dim to be observed directly.

Tacettin Diker is well known for his work as a puppeteer. ______ he specializes in shadow puppetry. This style of puppetry involves holding a figure in front of a light source to project a shadow onto a translucent screen.

Portuguese researcher Isabel C.F.R. Ferreira reports that the caffeic acid in cauliflower mushrooms benefits the mushroom by combating harmful molecules called free radicals. ______ Ferreira suggests that the acid can promote cellular health in humans, who also experience free radical damage.

In economics, sugar is considered a soft commodity, while copper and crude oil are considered hard commodities. The categorical distinction between soft and hard commodities lies not in the products’ strength or durability but in their origin: the former type is grown or farmed, while the latter is mined or drilled. ______ pine lumber is as much a soft commodity as sugar, despite its decidedly sturdier composition.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• A copyright prevents a book’s contents from being reproduced (published) without permission from the copyright holder.
• When a book’s copyright expires, the book enters the public domain and can be legally reproduced by anyone.
• Billy Budd, Sailor is a novella by Herman Melville.
• It entered the public domain in 2020.
• The Common Reader is an essay collection by Virginia Woolf.
• It entered the public domain in 2021.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes.
• During the Industrial Revolution (from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s), the number of people living in urban areas of the UK grew substantially (30%).
• Urbanization occurred as large segments of the country’s rural population relocated to cities to support the burgeoning manufacturing industry.
• The industrial city of Manchester, England, experienced the most population growth (2,000%).
• A comparison of a 1746 map of Manchester with maps of the city from the late 1800s reflects the city’s expansion.
• According to historian Donna Sherman, these maps present “a powerful visual representation of the transformation of Manchester’s landscape.”

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.
• Frances E. Allen won the award in 2006 for seminal contributions to optimizing compiler techniques.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• In the 1940s, geneticist Barbara McClintock discovered mobile segments of DNA.
• McClintock called these segments "controlling elements," but they are now commonly known as transposable elements (TEs).
• TEs are capable of altering gene expression as they change position within a cell's genome.
• In 1950, geneticist Esther Lederberg discovered a process (the lysogenic cycle) by which bacteria-infecting viruses (phages) pass their genetic material to a host cell's descendants.
• Phage DNA will enter a bacterial host cell and incorporate itself into the host cell's genome.
• When the host cell divides, the phage DNA replicates along with the host's DNA.

The following text is from Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd. In the text, the narrator describes an open tract of land.
The changes of the seasons are less obtrusive on spots of this kind than amid woodland scenery. Still, to a close observer, they are just as perceptible; the difference is that their media of manifestation are less trite and familiar than such well-known ones as the bursting of the buds or the fall of the leaf.

The metal displayed in the structure of ARK by APOLLO Architects Associates and the metal hardware in One-Room Residence of 5 Layers by Matsuyama Architect and Associates are representative aspects of a juxtaposition common in contemporary Japanese architecture: the ______ of sleek, contemporary elements and traditional organic materials in a single design is a trend with both aesthetic and highly practical purposes.

Bats that hunt nocturnally emit pulses of sound that can help them locate airborne moths in the dark. This predation method placed evolutionary pressure on nocturnal moths, some of which eventually developed the ability to detect the pulses, thereby enabling them to ______ predation; other moths (particularly the ancestors of butterflies) shifted away from nocturnalism and adapted to being active only during daylight.

Described in treatises mainly published between 1768 and 1950 (such as John Austin’s A System of Stenographic Music), musical stenography used quickly written squiggles and dots in an attempt to preserve, in print and in real time, the ______ features of live performances—those that result from impromptu deviations of performers when fidelity to an established musical score is not mandated.

The Pacific halibut is ectothermic, or cold-blooded, and the yellowfin tuna is a regional endotherm, meaning that parts of its body are typically warmer than the surrounding water. The basking shark had been classified as a full ectotherm, a position that became ______ after researchers Haley R. Dolton and colleagues showed that the basking shark’s body temperature is consistently 1.0 to 1.5°C warmer than the water.

The Heege Manuscript (HM) is a collection of booklets of once-unbound paper sheets on which Richard Heege copied various texts at his fifteenth-century home between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in England. Most other contemporaneous personal manuscripts like the Findern Anthology (FA) consist primarily of pieces for polite society like genteel romances and other readings favored by elites, whereas the HM has a distinctive emphasis on the popular, including entertainments like nonsense verse, and the practical, with advice about religion.

The following text is Emily Dickinson’s circa 1859 poem “Setting Sail.”
Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea, —
Past the houses, past the headlands,
Into deep eternity!
Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

Text 1
The University of Chicago and the online class provider Udacity are two of the many institutions offering training programs in entrepreneurship. But what results do such programs produce? In a study of college students in Scotland, researcher Laura Galloway and colleagues addressed this question and reported that participants who received entrepreneurial training showed positive attitudes toward entrepreneurship.
Text 2
While studies of entrepreneurial training typically report positive results, a close look at these studies reveals widespread methodological shortcomings. This research literature is plagued by unclear hypotheses, insufficient sample sizes, a lack of control groups, and failures to establish pretraining baselines for the measured attributes of participants.

Prabuddha De et al. found that a recommender system (RS)—an algorithm that generates personalized product suggestions for online shoppers—impacted consumer behavior and increased sales, a result that was corroborated by Dokyun Lee and Kartik Hosanagar. However, Lee and Hosanagar also determined that whereas an RS had a stronger positive effect on item views for utilitarian products (e.g., toothbrushes) than for hedonic products (e.g., chocolates), the RS had a stronger positive effect on likelihood of purchase for hedonic products than for utilitarian ones.

Due to the Chorotega region’s climate, various types of forested areas were converted to cattle pasture as rising international meat prices drove a cattle ranching boom in the 1960s and 1970s. Juan Pablo Arroyo-Mora and colleagues used historical aerial photography and remote sensing data to track fragmentation metrics across different land use capability classes (categories that indicate possible uses of forest land). One such metric, edge density, can be used to indicate the regularity of forest patch sizes, with decreases in edge density suggesting a trend towards uninterrupted forest patches with more regular shapes. The team found a range of edge density levels, from lows of around 80 meters per hectare or less in the 1960s and 1970s for all classes, to a high in 1986 of approximately ______

Studies of the population density of cougars (Puma concolor) have yielded a range of results, which may in part reflect differences in the effectiveness of the methods that researchers have used in their studies. For example, the difference between the maximum population density reported by Linda L. Sweanor et al. and that reported by Robin E. Russell et al. might be artificially large if the use of ______

Vegetation has two primary mechanisms by which it reduces air pollution: deposition (absorption of pollutants) and, the more effective, dispersion (dilution of pollutants by ventilation). Accordingly, establishment of green space to reduce major air pollutants such as fine particulate matter in urban areas receives considerable attention. Research by Zander S. Venter et al. comprised data from air-quality monitoring stations in Austria, the US state of California, and thousands of other global locations over a ten-year span, coupled with aerial imagery of those locations from the same period. The researchers ultimately recommended that reducing anthropogenic emissions remain the primary focus of urban air-quality improvement efforts.

Studies have demonstrated that positive feedback enhances real-world exercise performance and exercisers’ psychological experience of physical activity. Nicole Trewick and team tested their prediction that positive feedback would produce analogous results among participants cycling on a stationary bike in a virtual reality environment. After monitoring participants’ pedaling rate and heart rate to determine the effects on their physical endurance (e.g., their ability to sustain a certain target pedaling and heart rate) of feedback (positive, negative, or neutral) delivered at regular intervals, the researchers used participants’ questionnaire responses to assess their psychological experience of the task.

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 the Semelai people from a small community in the Malay Peninsula and the Chachi people from a small community in Ecuador. The team observed that across cultures, people generally rated odors about the same: eugenol, which smells like cinnamon, was typically rated more pleasant than caprylic acid, which smells like rancid wax. The team’s study thus undermined the idea that ______

A soil’s microbial community (the microbial taxa present in their relative abundances) is known to affect plants’ cyclical processes. Lady Grant and colleagues hypothesized that microbial communities could also affect plants’ flavor chemistry, including volatiles and secondary metabolites like glucosinolates. Recognizing that soil moisture varies by location in the wild and could influence plants’ chemistry, Grant et al. introduced distinct microbial communities to individually potted mustard plants (Brassica juncea) growing in a controlled environment, then measured the plants’ glucosinolates, like indole and allyl (the most prominent), that create the spicy and bitter flavors in mustard. This method thus enabled the researchers to ______

Alabama resident James T. Rapier, one of the nearly two thousand African Americans elected to public office during the decade that followed the Civil War, ______ his term as a member of the US House of Representatives in 1873.

Occurring in the constellation Perseus, 240 million light-years from Earth, SN 2006gy was a ______ explosion of a massive star, which blasts large amounts of radiation, heavy elements, and debris into space—that was first detected by American astronomer Robert Quimby.

Al-Jami’ Al-Sahih (the Authentic Collection) is one of the hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that have survived from roughly the sixteenth century to the present ______ being passed down through private libraries in the city of Timbuktu, Mali. Many of these manuscripts can be found at the Al-Wangari Manuscript Library.

Taking a cultural studies approach to analyzing Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia would lead a critic to focus on the intersection with popular culture inherent in the novel. On the other hand, a New Critical analysis ______ on elements such as structure and imagery might yield a radically different interpretation of Cather’s novel.

The neurotechnology company Q30 Innovations is working on an exciting new technology: collars that increase blood volume in the brain to reduce potential damage to neurons. Q30 Innovations’s technology, alongside other such neuromodulation technologies that function by stimulating nervous system structures, ______ the way for future advancements in neurotechnology.

The legacy of the Spanish Empire, which once controlled portions of five continents, is evident in Spanish-speaking Honduras, one of many places that reveal their imperial history in their language. Contrast Honduras with Luxembourg, which ceased to be part of the empire in ______ the latter’s connection to the empire is so attenuated that Spanish is seldom spoken there today.

To determine the approximate age of ocher artifacts excavated from an archaeological site in China, archaeologist Fa-Gang Wang and colleagues collected samples of sediments surrounding the ocher artifacts; these samples were then analyzed using a method known as optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating. ______ OSL dating indicated that the ocher artifacts were between 39,000 and 41,000 years old.

Architect Victor Gruen, the designer of Indiana’s Woodmar Plaza shopping mall, conceived of the mall as an indoor version of the European town square, a communal space that encouraged visitors to stroll and linger. ______ he designed Woodmar Plaza with long, pedestrian-friendly promenades and ample seating areas clustered around fountains and greenery.

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 semipalmated sandpipers abandoned safe nesting grounds unnecessarily due to flock-mates’ false alarms.

As can be seen in the case of Others, a New York magazine published from July 1915 to July 1919, some small periodicals influential in the development of the modernist movement have been explored in depth by scholars. The Edinburgh magazine The Evergreen (1895–1897), ______ remains among those modernist periodicals “of interest and significance about which relatively little is known,” according to scholars Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Tea bricks were used as commodity money in 19th-century Mongolia.
• In a commodity money economy, specific goods act as a common unit of monetary exchange that can be used to buy and sell other goods.
• In a barter economy, goods are traded directly between parties without the use of money.
• Economists Bruce Champ and Scott Freeman: bartering requires that “the person with whom you wish to trade must not only have what you want but also want what you have. The inefficiency is apparent; a great deal of time is spent merely finding someone with whom to trade.”
• Champ and Freeman: when “individuals might come to accept one particular good in exchange for others even if they do not wish to consume that good…barter economies essentially become monetary economies.”

• Vexillology is the study of flags.
• The flags of many countries include symbols like animals, plants, or landforms.
• These symbols often represent an aspect of the region’s history, culture, or landscape.
• The flag of Zambia includes an eagle.
• The flag of San Marino includes a laurel branch.