The following text is from Lilliam Rivera's 2020 novel Never Look Back. The text describes the narrator's friend Pheus, a young musician, after finishing a performance during a church service.
Pheus pulls a handkerchief from his back pocket and wipes his forehead. I mime a quiet clap for him. He does a slight bow and flashes his dimples. This is where Pheus truly shines. When Pheus is in front of an audience, it's as if he becomes another person, a more heightened version of himself.
©2020 by Lilliam Rivera

Native Hawaiian fiber artist Marques Hanalei Marzan creates art using the techniques of lauhala weaving. Lauhala weaving is a traditional Hawaiian art form that uses leaves of the hala tree. Often, Marzan doesn't have a specific ______ what the final product will look like when he starts a new piece. Instead, he makes up his designs as he weaves, allowing inspiration to take him in unexpected directions.

In a study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, participants with clinically typical eyesight were shown a drawing of a broken line, with the break in the line situated in a blocked part of their field of vision. The participants still perceived the line as continuous, suggesting that when visual information is incomplete, the brain can ______, filling in what is missing.

The following text is from Shirley Jackson’s 1951 novel Hangsaman.
Natalie was leaving for her first year in college a week after her brother went back to high school; sometimes twenty-one days resolved itself into three weeks, and seemed endless; sometimes it seemed a matter of minutes slipping by so swiftly that there would never be time to approach college with appropriate consideration, to form a workable personality to take along.
©1951 by Shirley Jackson

The Marsalis family is often referred to as "the first family of jazz." Four of the children of celebrated pianist Ellis Marsalis Jr. went on to become performers who are also critically acclaimed: drummer Jason, trombonist Delfeayo, saxophonist Branford, and trumpeter Wynton. Wynton notably went on to become the first jazz composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music (for his oratorio Blood on the Fields).

Community science, which involves professional scientists collaborating with members of the public to study a topic, is often an effective and engaging way to conduct research. It can increase the amount of data researchers can collect, offer insight into the daily life of a scientist, and spark youth interest in science. This approach was essential to the success of biologist Abigail Merrill and colleagues’ study of how weather relates to a butterfly’s flower choice, which included findings from hundreds of students and community members in northwestern Arkansas.

Text 1
Scientists can learn a lot about the Hispaniolan ground sloth and other prehistoric sloths from their fossils. But it can be hard to study sloths alive today. In the wild, the Linnaeus’s two-toed sloth and other sloths spend most of their time in trees. They’re difficult to observe because of their excellent camouflage and slow movements.
Text 2
Rebecca Cliffe and other scientists can now record the previously hidden activities of tree-dwelling sloths by using a backpack monitor. Such monitors can provide information to correct misconceptions. It was long believed that sloths are slow because of laziness. But, in fact, sloths’ slow movements are useful. Being slow protects them from predators with keen eyesight.

Humans aren’t the only ones who use tools. Other animals also find tools helpful. Octopuses use two halves of a seashell to provide protection or a place to hide. And despite sometimes being thought of as simple, many birds make clever use of tools as well. New Caledonian crows are well known for creating hooks and spears from twigs. Furthermore, palm cockatoos have been observed using leaves to pad their beaks when opening nuts.

Women like Minnie McNeal Kenny made important early contributions to the history of US cryptology, a field concerned with secure data communication and storage. Kenny worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) and received the NSA’s two highest awards. She also held administrative positions at the National Cryptologic School. In this way, Kenny 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.

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 Mahmoud-Reza Hemami and colleagues found to be negatively associated with foraging by Iranian jerboas but Deborah J. Curtis and colleagues found to be positively associated with foraging by mongoose lemurs. This discrepancy is explicable in terms of OFT: the lemurs’ greater reliance on vision means that higher lunar intensity benefits them more than it benefits the jerboas.

Most bird species that are capable of flight weigh less than a kilogram (kg), which is not surprising considering the burden that extra body weight puts on a flying animal. But not all flying birds are so light, as we can see most clearly in the example of the ______

A student is writing a research paper on the history of irrigation in the United States, situating the development of Lake Yosemite (created in Merced County, California, in 1888) in a larger historical context. The student claims that California’s climate renders irrigation an essential component of agriculture in some parts of the state but not in others.

Terrestrial plants typically carry a negative electrical charge, while bees and other pollinators tend to accumulate a positive charge. A team of researchers therefore hypothesized that electrostatic attraction (mutual attraction between objects with opposite charges) might enhance pollen transmission between plants and their pollinator species. The team’s experiments showed that the maximum positive charge of wintering honeybees is sufficiently high to facilitate electrostatic pollen transfer, a finding that suggests that ______

Namibia has classified the house sparrow as an invasive species that could harm some of the country’s native species. But researchers Alejandro Camacho and Jason McLachlan have pointed out that “invasive” and “native” are labels that describe temporary circumstances. Changes in Earth’s climate may force animals from their current ranges. Climate changes may also create good habitats in areas where a species couldn’t live previously. These observations suggest that ______

Password strength meters (PSMs) provide real-time feedback to users during the password-creation process about how secure a potential password is. PSMs often include “nudges”—design elements meant to encourage the creation of robust passwords. Other PSMs provide direct guidance on how to create strong passwords. A research team found that the strongest passwords resulted from a combination of these approaches. The team also found that the specific type of nudge (reciprocity, compensation, etc.) did not significantly affect user behavior. It therefore follows that when creating passwords, users receiving ______

The Okavango Delta is a vital water source and hub for biodiversity in southern Africa. Koketso Mookodi, a director of the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project (NGOWP) in Botswana, helps educate the public about ______ important place.

After screening Stellar by Anishinaabe filmmaker Darlene Naponse, the members of the selection committee for the Native Women in Film Festival were so impressed by the feature-length romance that they chose ______ as one of the films to be shown at the festival.

Robert B. Elliott was one of the nearly two thousand African Americans who won a public office during the Reconstruction era, the twelve-year period that followed the Civil War. A politician from South Carolina, ______

The relationship between grassland arthropod populations and agricultural fertilizers containing macronutrients—such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—was the focus of a 1992 study in the ______ by the researcher Walther van Wingerden, the study examined a variety of arthropod specimens, which had been collected by hand.

Known in Taiwan for hosting its first televised cooking show, renowned ______ Fu Pei-mei taught viewers how to cook Chinese cuisine for almost 40 years. Fu gained acclaim outside of Taiwan as well, particularly from the success of her first bilingual Mandarin-English cookbook, published in 1969.

Anthropologist, activist, and musician Lila Downs draws on a variety of Mexican musical genres in her 2023 album La Sánchez. ______ she draws on corridos, rancheras, and other genres of northern Mexico, even though she is from the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca. “La Sánchez is my contribution,” Downs says in an interview, “as a southern woman, that also considers this music as hers.”

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, Germany, in 2006. ______ only 16 teams, all from Europe and the Americas, competed in the 1958 World Cup in Sweden.

Broadcasting from the Yankton Sioux Tribe’s lands in southern South Dakota, the Native-run radio station KDKO 89.5 FM does much to serve the local Dakota-speaking community. ______ it broadcasts local news and music as well as programming in the Dakota language.

In the West African country of Sierra Leone, the percentage of the population living in cities rose from 40.8% to 42.9% between 2015 and 2020. ______ urbanization rates climbed across West Africa as a whole, rising 3.2 percentage points in that five-year period.

Al-Andalus, the historical region of the Iberian Peninsula that includes most of modern-day Spain, was ruled by various Arabic-speaking Muslim states between the eighth and fifteenth centuries. ______ many Arabic words, such as “alacrán”—meaning “scorpion”—made their way into the Spanish language.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Dnieper River is in Europe.
• It ranks No. 48 among the longest rivers in the world.
• It is 2,287 kilometers long.
• The Indus River is in Asia.
• It ranks No. 19 among the longest rivers in the world.
• It is 3,610 kilometers long.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• 2024: Spain and Portugal sponsored a workshop to address recent encounters between Iberian orcas and marine vessels off the Iberian Peninsula.
• Many of the 637 documented incidents involved pods of orcas damaging vessels by ramming, nudging, or biting the rudders.
• Studies of Iberian orcas suggest recent increases in tuna populations have reduced the time the orcas spend hunting by 99%.
• Researchers believe this shift has increased the number of interactions between marine vessels and understimulated orcas.
• The workshop advised mariners to avoid orcas pending further testing of the efficacy of TAST, a harmless acoustic deterrent.

Danza Azteca arose in the 1500s when the traditions of the Chichimeca Jonaz people ______ those of other tribes in Central Mexico, creating a hybrid dance form that spread across Mexico and later to Mexican communities in the US. Chichimeca Jonaz influences can still be seen in the performances by groups like Danza Azteca Citlaltonac, which is based in Coachella, California.

In a 2020 paper, Arya Udry et al. cautioned that although similarities in the isotopic signatures of elements detected in Mars’s atmosphere and in Martian meteorites recovered on Earth make it tempting to treat the geochemical properties of the meteorites as ______ those of Mars’s interiors, Mars’s geology cannot be ascertained based solely on meteorite-sample analyses.

As the use of non-oil energy resources has increased, the relationship between oil shocks—such as the 57% rise in oil prices from May 1979 to January 1980—and national economic activity has ______. Indeed, Gbadebo Oladosu and colleagues showed that the effect of recent oil shocks on the gross domestic product of India was only slightly greater than zero.

The Federalist Papers are a collection of 85 essays written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. They were published pseudonymously in the New York Packet and other New York newspapers in 1787–88 and argue that New Yorkers should vote to ratify the proposed United States Constitution. Though the authorship of most of the individual essays is certain, that of a few is in question: for instance, while No. 15, “The Insufficiency of the Present Confederation to Preserve the Union,” was surely penned by Hamilton, No. 52, “The House of Representatives,” may have been written by either Hamilton or Madison.

The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City has an exhibition of video games that includes Yars’ Revenge from 1982, which museum visitors can play on site, and SimCity 2000 from 1994, which visitors can see only in a video presentation. MOMA claims the video presentations are only for games that would be impractical to display in a playable form, but video games are an inherently interactive medium, a feature that is grossly absent in a video-only presentation.

The following text is from Anne Spencer’s 1922 poem "Translation."
We trekked into a far country,
My friend and I.
Our deeper content was never spoken,
But each knew all the other said.
He told me how calm his soul was laid
By the lack of anvil and strife.
"The wooing kestrel," I said, "mutes his mating-note
To please the harmony of this sweet silence."

The following text is adapted from Matthew Arnold's 1869 nonfiction book Culture and Anarchy.
The Times [a British newspaper], replying to some foreign strictures on the dress, looks, and behaviour of the English abroad, urges that the English ideal is that every one should be free to do and to look just as he likes. But culture indefatigably tries, not to make what each raw person may like, the rule by which he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that.

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. If, for example, the use of helicopter surveying tends to lead to overestimates of cougar population density, that may explain why the study by ______

Autofiction is an emerging literary form that incorporates autobiographical writing into fiction. Practitioners of autofiction emphasize the autobiographical aspects of their work by patterning their protagonists’ lives after their own, typically naming their protagonists after themselves. Autofiction usually borrows formal elements from autobiographical writing too, including its first person point of view and its use of a narrative voice so forthright that it borders on confessional. Ocean Vuong’s 2019 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a representative work of autofiction, one that erases the distinction that fiction typically observes between authors and the characters they create.

A tariff is a tax on imported goods intended to protect domestic producers of similar goods from international competition. Eliminating tariffs can lead to an influx of cheaper imported goods, lowering prices; in a place where domestic production is relatively expensive, this influx can suppress domestic production, as the country’s consumers favor more cheaply produced imported goods over domestically produced ones. A student consults a table showing projected changes in production and average market prices of agricultural commodities in four countries in a tariff-elimination scenario. Based on the data, the student claims that compared with India and Russia, agricultural production in Argentina and the United States is likely relatively inexpensive.

High entropy alloys (HEAs) typically combine five or more elements in roughly equal proportions, and medium entropy alloys (MEAs) typically combine three or four elements in similar proportions. HEAs and MEAs are known for withstanding cracking at extremely low (cryogenic) temperatures relatively well, though their fracture toughness generally falls as temperature does. Dong Liu et al. investigated the fracture toughness (both the initiation and propagation toughness) of the HEA CrMnFeCoNi and its MEA derivative CrCoNi and concluded that the alloys’ toughness performance differs from that of most HEAs and MEAs.

The Clouds is a 423 BCE play by Aristophanes, originally written in ancient Greek. At the time, professional intellectuals called sophists taught customers rhetorical techniques to use in public speaking, along with providing instruction in other subjects. In the play, Aristophanes satirizes sophists as having an exaggerated sense of their own wisdom, as seen when the character ______

Some studies of migrating animals measure how far the animals travel in a year by fitting individuals with GPS tracking collars. Other studies track annual round-trip distance (RTD), which is equal to double the distance separating the two habitats a population migrates between each year. A researcher argues that since GPS records all of an animal's movements, using the GPS method to track a population would result in significantly higher recorded travel distances than using the RTD method would. For example, it's very likely that the distance reported for the ______

Many contemporary Indigenous painters practice a specifically Indigenous mode of abstraction; for example, Dyani White Hawk assembles compositions out of motifs common in the beadwork and other traditional arts of her tribe. In contrast, the prominent Indigenous practitioners of abstract painting during the mid-twentieth century, such as the Luiseño artist Fritz Scholder, typically aligned their compositional strategies with Abstract Expressionism—a school of painting dominated by European American artists—instead of with traditionally nonrepresentational forms of Indigenous art. Thus, in the case of Scholder’s generation, the identification of an abstract painting as Indigenous art tends to ______

Paleoanthropologists have struggled to determine the onset of consistent clothing use by hominids. The appearance of hide-scraping tools by 780,000 years ago (780 Ka) enabled clothing production but does not entail it, and while clothing is thought to have been thermally superfluous for anatomically modern humans in their African range around their emergence by 300 Ka, it was essential for the persistence of humans outside Africa by 70 Ka. Melissa Toups et al. proposed a novel proxy: the evolution of the clothing-exclusive variant of the human-exclusive parasite Pediculus humanus (head lice), which Toups et al. date to as early as 170 Ka. This variant could not have emerged and survived without ample ecological niches, so if Toups et al. are correct, then ______

In biology, many initially disordered systems will naturally move toward greater order according to the principle of self-organization, a conceptual framework for pattern ______ biologists believe can be used to explain a range of organic phenomena, from population dynamics to the sociality of bees and ants.

Dong Lai and Diego J. Muñoz’s work on circumbinary disk accretion—a process in which, due to gravity, material from an orbiting disk spirals inward and accumulates onto two stars or black holes—relies heavily on simulations. Lai and Muñoz recognize the need for direct ______ recommending evolving binary star systems as a promising avenue for future study.

Conceptual artist Joan Jonas’s first work, Wind (1968), is a silent film depicting people on a beach struggling to move about in extremely windy conditions. Wind has been recognized for bringing the principles of postmodern dance—which demystifies traditional choreography by foregrounding features of movement that ballet and other classical dance forms obscure (such as clumsiness, weightiness, resistance, and ______ to video.

In a 2022 study, Fa-Gang Wang et al. concluded that ocher artifacts excavated from an archaeological site in China date to between 39,000 and 41,000 years ago. The reliability of the dates that Wang et al. have posited, which were obtained through processes that determined when buried mineral grains surrounding the ocher artifacts were last exposed to sunlight, ______ in part upon the researchers’ exclusion of mineral grains that lacked adequate sun exposure before burial.

In recent years, the English writer Matilda Betham (1776–1852), whose poetry was widely read during her lifetime, has been rediscovered by contemporary audiences—a resurgence of interest that is largely due to literary scholars such as Elaine Bailey, whose work ______ the richness of Betham’s poems and the poet’s historical importance to the Romantic literary movement encourages a broader rethinking of British Romanticism itself.

In 1977, legendary Puerto Rican performer Rita Moreno won an Emmy Award, making her one of the rare talents to earn the highest honors in television, music, film, and stage entertainment—the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony ______ the achievement is known as "winning the EGOT."

In a given rock formation, Tortonian rock from 11.6 million years ago might directly abut Capitanian rock from 264.3 million years ago. But how could this happen? Time did not actually stand still during the intervening 252.7 million years; ______ this geologic unconformity likely resulted from natural processes removing sedimentary material from the stratigraphic record.

Many historical accounts of the 1930s focus on the widespread movement of people from dust bowl–ravaged Great Plains states to faraway California. However, a 2016 study of 1940 census data complicates this popular narrative; ______ researchers determined, migrants in states hardest hit by prolonged droughts and dust storms—Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas—merely relocated within the region.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The French Republican calendar was used in France from 1793 to 1805.
• Each month was divided into three weeks of ten days each, followed by five supplemental days.
• Each day was named after a plant, animal, agricultural tool, or mineral as a way of honoring an aspect of rural life.
• Brumaire is the second month in the calendar.
• The fifth day of Brumaire is named Oie, which means "goose."

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• In a 2020 study, researchers in California investigated how many potential nesting sites female wood ducks visited during the nesting season.
• The researchers placed nest boxes throughout the survey area and tagged 138 female wood ducks with radio frequency ID trackers.
• These trackers recorded how many nest boxes each duck visited.
• 67 ducks (48.5%) visited only one nest box.
• 18 ducks (13.0%) visited 10 or more nest boxes.
• Younger ducks were more likely to visit multiple nest boxes.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Haym ibn Risch was a fourteenth-century Majorcan cartographer of portolan charts.
• Francesco Pizigano was a fourteenth-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 Bohemia is depicted as a horseshoe.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Squirrel pelts were used as commodity money in medieval Russia.
• 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."