The following text is from Mark Twain’s 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom, a child, has been told by his aunt to paint their house’s fence.
Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high.

The influence of William Shakespeare’s writings is clear in a vast range of subsequent literary works and is similarly ______ in many works in other media, from fine art (such as Edward Alcock’s painting Portia and Shylock) to popular music (such as the musician Elvis Costello’s song “Miss Macbeth”).

The Apollo Moon landings (1969–1972) brought atmospheric sensors and soil sensors to the Moon and produced large amounts of data, much of which was stored on technologies that are now obsolete. A data-transfer project is working to ______ these data so that the information is available to researcher Noah Petro, who is investigating the geology of the Moon.

The following text is adapted from the 1895 poem “Ojistoh” by Emily Pauline Johnson, a Kanienkahagen (Mohawk) writer also known as Tekahionwake.
I am Ojistoh, I am she, the wife
Of him whose name breathes bravery and life
And courage to the tribe who calls him chief.
I am Ojistoh, his white star, and he
Is land, and lake, and sky—and soul to me.

Mastering ‘ajami, a Syrian art of creating intricately painted wood panels, demands a skill set that ______ innate talent: crafting the panels requires not just the ability to draw but also an understanding of traditional techniques, materials, and design elements, necessitating expertise gained through dedicated guidance from experienced artisans.

In factories, humans and robots often work together. A research team ran an experiment to find out how working with robots affects relationships between human coworkers. The experiment included teams working together to make electric motor parts. One type of team included only humans and the other type included both humans and robots. Participants were paid for their work and were asked about their willingness to share their earnings with their human teammates. Participants from teams with robots were more likely to share with each other than participants from teams with only humans were.

Steve Carter’s award-winning play Eden was produced in 1976 by the groundbreaking Negro Ensemble Company (NEC). NEC cofounder Douglas Turner Ward, who worked as an actor, director, and playwright, had met actor and producer Robert Hooks while they were performing in a 1960 touring production of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. Together, they envisioned a theater company that would nurture and showcase the work of Black theater professionals. Since NEC’s founding in 1967, its workshops and performances have given Black playwrights, including Carter, a forum for their compelling stories.

Despite potential independent confirmation, the apparent detection in 2020 of phosphine (PH₃)—a gas that on Earth almost exclusively derives from biological sources—in Venus’s cloud deck remains controversial, in part because Venus is thought to be uninhabitable. To evaluate such a finding’s plausibility, William Bains et al. modeled multiple abiotic PH₃ pathways, including geochemical, atmospheric, and photochemical reactions, but none adequately explain the observed levels of PH₃. If Venusian PH₃ does exist, it would indicate insufficiencies in the current consensus on Venus’s chemistry.

Given the immense scope of space, the search for extraterrestrial life is almost necessarily concentrated on the exoplanets deemed to have the most plausible chance of success—typically, atmosphere-bearing terrestrial planets orbiting within a certain range of their stars (termed the habitable zone). Claiming that Earth experienced a long transition from single-lid to plate tectonics that accelerated the emergence and evolution of complex organisms, researchers Robert J. Stern and Taras V. Gerya hold that consideration of tectonics, an often overlooked factor, could help further narrow the search for advanced extraterrestrial species.

In what is now Washington state, the Tulalip Tribes operate the Hibulb Cultural Center. Relying on traditional knowledge to guide the design of exhibits, this institution presents Tulalip history and culture to the tribes’ citizens. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, a tribe in North Dakota, employs a similar strategy in its own cultural center. Both centers contrast with museums that aren’t Indigenous-led; when displaying Indigenous artifacts, such museums tend to anticipate mainly non-Indigenous audiences and rely on Euro-centric strategies for designing exhibits.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a 1900 novel by L. Frank Baum. In the novel, Dorothy, who is from Kansas, finds herself in an unfamiliar place called Oz. Kansas is presented as being less appealing than Oz, as is clear when ______

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 student researches how the decline in Portugal compares to that in other countries and 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 import and export fees 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.

The Man-Made World: Or, Our Androcentric Culture is a 1911 nonfiction work by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In the text, the author emphasizes the importance of cultivating individuals rather than comparing them: ______

Zooarchaeologist Ophélie Lebrasseur and her team examined a fox skeleton discovered in 1991 at an archaeological site alongside artifacts of human habitation (like spear points) in central Argentina. Lebrasseur et al. determined that the fox was Dusicyon avus, an extinct species resembling a jackal, and radiocarbon dating placed the fox at the site at the same time as human inhabitants. (Indeed, the inhabitants may have deliberately buried the fox.) In addition, while wild foxes have a diet entirely made of meat, isotopic signatures of the skeleton’s teeth indicated that the fox’s diet, like that of the humans, was partly composed of plant material. Lebrasseur et al. therefore concluded that ______

In the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony ______ for women’s right to vote in the United States.

While conducting an interview for her book Latina Authors and Their Muses, editor Mayra Calvani asked Sarah Cortez, author of the memoir Walking Home, what ______ Cortez’s response was Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott.

Choreographers George Balanchine and Martha Graham both contributed sections to the dance piece Episodes, which premiered at New York’s City Center of Music and Drama in 1959. This cross-genre collaboration brought together the distinct features of Balanchine’s neoclassical ballet and Graham’s modern ______ the stylistic diversity and creative innovation within the dance world.

In the book A Theory of Harmony (1985), Swiss musicologist Ernst Levy argued that every chord has an opposite that can be substituted for it. For example, a pianist could replace the vi chord for the bIII chord while ______ chord is a given chord’s opposite can be determined using a music visualization tool called the circle of fifths.

In her Silueta sculpture series, the Cuban American artist Ana ______ to access what she called an “omnipresent female force,” utilized a variety of natural materials to create outlines—or silhouettes—of her own body.

As volcanologists like Tamsin Mather are apt to make clear, not all volcanoes are the same. Tendürek in Turkey, for example, is a shield volcano, a type of volcano named for its low profile, resembling a warrior’s shield lying on the ground. Opala in Russia, ______ is a caldera, a large cauldron-like hollow that forms shortly after the emptying of a magma chamber in a volcanic eruption.

The United Nations’ Trade and Development organization divides exports into five key categories: food items, agricultural materials, fuels, ores and raw metals, and manufactured goods (i.e., most nonfood goods made by machinery or by hand). In 2022, the majority (62 percent) of Belgium’s exports were manufactured goods. ______ vaccines, medicines, and cars were its top exports.

A research team led by Gal Badihi has discovered that chimpanzees communicate through exchanges of gestures occurring at a pace similar to that of human conversations. ______ chimpanzee gesture exchanges have short pauses of about 120 milliseconds between communications, comparable to the 200-millisecond average pause between turns in human speech.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Great Salt Lake in Utah is one of the world’s saltiest bodies of water.
• The northern portion of the lake has a higher concentration of salt than the southern portion.
• Crustaceans called Artemia franciscana live in the southern portion.
• Bacteria called Nodularia live in the southern portion.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Extravehicular activities (EVAs) are activities performed outside a spacecraft by astronauts in outer space.
• EVAs are also known as spacewalks.
• Richard Mastracchio is a former US astronaut who has performed 9 spacewalks.
• The total time of Mastracchio’s spacewalks was 53 hours and 4 minutes.
• Garrett Reisman is a former US astronaut who has performed 3 spacewalks.
• The total time of Reisman’s spacewalks was 21 hours and 21 minutes.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) is a protected natural area in California.
• It encompasses 1,023 acres.
• The Tijuana Slough NWR was established to safeguard the habitat of the light-footed clapper rail, an endangered species.
• The Tijuana Slough NWR is managed by the US Fish & Wildlife Service.
• The US Fish & Wildlife Service limits human activities in the area.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The cuneiform script is the earliest known set of symbols used for writing.
• Sumerian was one of the first languages to be written using the cuneiform script.
• Sumerian was a language in ancient Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq).
• Clay tablets with Sumerian writing have been found there.
• Some of these tablets are almost 5,000 years old.

Zygomorphic (bilaterally symmetric) flowers remain open and functional on average 1.1 days longer than actinomorphic (radially symmetric) flowers do. Ruby E. Stephens and colleagues claim that this extended period could be ______ the relatively small pool of potential pollinators available to zygomorphic flowers and the greater chance at successful pollination that remaining open affords them.

The following text is from Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel Great Expectations. The narrator is taking a walk near his home on a damp morning.
On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy, and the marsh mist was so thick, that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village—a direction which they never accepted, for they never came there—was invisible to me until I was quite close under it.

Analysis of preserved plants cataloged in the United States Virtual Herbarium indicates that rising temperatures correlate with earlier leaf production, but such specimens represent only brief moments in plants’ overall development. ______ this research with studies involving live plants would enable a fuller understanding of how these observed changes affect plant fitness.

Although Mistress and Maid, which depicts two women perusing a letter, is atypical of Johannes Vermeer’s genre paintings (scenes of everyday life) in that its subjects are set against a plain background instead of—as in Woman with a Pearl Necklace—a richly detailed one, the painting nonetheless ______ many signature traits of Vermeer’s art, including realistic rendering of natural light.

Technological advances have prompted companies to increasingly rely on automation to streamline production. Armin Granulo and colleagues, however, found that for products with higher symbolic value (those viewed as contributing to individual self-expression), consumers prefer products made by humans rather than by robots, likely because human-made products are more strongly associated with uniqueness. When considering automation, therefore, companies—especially those specializing in products of symbolic value—should weigh trade-offs between efficiency gains and consumer preferences.

Text 1
To many artists in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, the American wilderness symbolized innocence and untouched beauty. So George Inness’s decision to foreground a railroad in his 1855 painting The Lackawanna Valley is notable, since images of railroads often alluded to the destruction of wilderness in the name of progress. In fact, art historian Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. argues that Inness glorifies the subject of the railroad by painting a scene that suggests hopefulness rather than devastation.
Text 2
It is impossible to deduce anything about George Inness’s attitude toward his subject in the painting The Lackawanna Valley, primarily because it is a commissioned work. Inness was restricted in how he could portray the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Company: his client was the company’s first president, who had requested the painting possibly as a way to promote the company’s rail network.

The prints in Images of Autonomous Matter, part of a traveling exhibition of innovative Japanese art from the 1960s and 1970s, exemplify the interest in creating minimalist images of stark materials, such as steel, that first emerged among Japanese printmakers in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Mitsuo Kano’s close-up of a serrated metal fragment, Soldered Blue, and Tatsuo Kawaguchi’s image of a single corroded staple, which belongs to his Relation-Quality series, are two such works in the exhibit. In their emphasis on the innate qualities of manufactured materials, both prints push traditional boundaries for figurative art.

Arturo Casadevall et al. have confirmed that twenty mushroom species (including Marasmius capillaris and species from the genus Russula) maintain subambient temperatures in both their fruited bodies and their mycelium (the root-like hyphae from which the fruited bodies grow), though the benefits of this hypothermic behavior are unclear. Noting that relative coldness was more pronounced in fruiting than in nonfruiting sites of the mycelium—a difference that persisted even after fruited bodies were detached—the researchers speculate that thermoregulation in the mycelium may influence reproductive success.

The following text is from William Carlos Williams’s 1925 creative nonfiction book In the American Grain. Williams is discussing how works by nineteenth-century US poet and fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe were received by American readers.
Poe must suffer by his originality. Invent that which is new, even if it be made of pine from your own yard, and there’s none to know what you have done. It is because there’s no name. This is the cause of Poe’s lack of recognition. He was American. He was the astounding, inconceivable growth of his locality. Gape at him they did, and he at them in amazement. Afterward with mutual hatred; he in disgust, they in mistrust. It is only that which is under your nose which seems inexplicable.

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 ______

The 2002 production of I’m Not Rappaport was the first Broadway show for which Teresa Snider-Stein was credited as a costume designer. Snider-Stein was among the Broadway costume designers interviewed by Sara Jablon-Roberts and Eulanda A. Sanders for their study of historical accuracy in costume design. They argue that aesthetics often outweigh fidelity to the past among designers for shows with historical settings. In a paper for a theater class, a student claims that the costume design for a modern production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (set in ancient Greece) exemplifies this tendency.

The percent of cities and towns in a given period that persist from a prior period (backward continuity) and the percent that persist into a later period (forward continuity) are known to correlate positively with economic and political stability in a region. Researchers studying demographic trends in the Indigenous societies of ancient Mexico determined both continuity measures for the Yautepec Valley, which lay within the macroregional hegemony of the city-state of Teotihuacan from roughly 100 BCE until roughly 450 CE, after which point Teotihuacan declined. The team concluded that ______

In 2004, the US state of North Dakota enacted rate stability regulations (RSRs), constraining insurance companies’ latitude to raise premiums (the periodic fees policyholders pay to maintain insurance policies) after policies are in effect. RSRs are effective at protecting existing policyholders from price volatility, but Naoki Aizawa and Ami Ko note that since dynamic pricing of premiums is an important risk-mitigation tool for insurers, RSRs may lead some insurers to scale back or entirely cease selling new policies in the affected market, thereby reducing the competitive pressure that typically restrains premium prices for new policies. Thus, North Dakota’s RSRs may ______

In an analysis of medieval urbanization in York, Bautzen, and other European settlements, researchers drew on modern urban scaling theory, which posits that population density in core urban areas increases as a city grows larger. Hypothesizing that this typical relationship would have differed in medieval settlements because of the constraining influence of strong hierarchical social structures (which are much less pronounced in modern cities) on social networking and economic integration—drivers of urban agglomeration—the team created a model that accounted for the presence of restrictive institutions. They found that the typically expected density–size relationship held for each of the 173 medieval settlements whose growth they analyzed, suggesting that ______

Painter Georgette ______ for incorporating everyday objects from her Singaporean environment—such as lanterns, mooncakes, and tropical fruits—into her still-life compositions, was a pivotal figure in the mid-twentieth-century Nanyang art movement, which sought to blend European painting traditions (including still life) with elements of Southeast Asian cultures and art.

“Streetwide and bitter as hope / strewn between El Salvador and San Francisco.” These lines are from a poem by Chicano ______ whose early career as a campesino informs the dialogue on Mexican American politics and identity that unfolds in his work.

Los Angeles–based artist Henry Taylor’s large, vibrant paintings of prominent Black figures such as Olympian Alice Coachman (See Alice Jump, 2011) and artist David Hammons (Hammons meets a hyena on holiday, ______ celebrated by admirers of twenty-first-century portraiture, attracted legions of new fans in 2024 when they were included in a popular Taylor retrospective at the Whitney Museum.

Among the small magazines animating London’s vibrant literary scene in the early twentieth century was ______ by Wyndham Lewis and featuring artwork by Edward Wadsworth, Frederick Etchells, and Jacob Epstein; fiction by Rebecca West and Ford Madox Ford; and a manifesto penned by Lewis, this magazine publicized the work of influential avant-garde writers and artists of the day.

Reena Esmail’s classical composition “Summitless Mountains” incorporates a raag, a melodic framework used in Hindustani classical music, called Raag Chandrakouns. Often, interplay between the raag’s designated vadi and samvadi (the first- and second-most important notes, respectively) and its prescribed melodic sequences ______ an unsettled mood.

Archived within the storied libraries of Timbuktu, a West African city prominent during the Songhai Empire, is The Pearls Leading to Accepted Guidance, one of the city’s hundreds of thousands of historical manuscripts, each of which ______ researchers insight into Timbuktu’s tenure as a center of trade and education.

As anthropologist Cristina Grasseni explains, many artisanal cheeses in Italy, such as Castelmagno from Piedmont and Quartirolo Lombardo from Lombardy, are highly valued for their regional authenticity; ______ they are prized for being made using local ingredients and methods typical of their respective geographic regions.

The moon Valetudo orbits Jupiter in the same direction that the planet rotates. ______ Valetudo’s orbit is described as prograde. Mneme, another of Jupiter’s moons, orbits in the opposite direction, so its orbit is described with the opposite term: retrograde.

For several centuries after the birth of opera in sixteenth-century Florence, Italian remained the default language in which most opera scores were written. ______ opera singers today, such as the soprano Amira Selim, encounter a wide range of Italian terms—from affettuoso (with feeling) to accelerando (at an accelerating tempo)—when following many eighteenth-century opera scores.

The Rajahnate of Butuan, a sea power based on Mindanao island in the Philippines that reached the height of its influence around 1100 CE, is classified as a thalassocracy. Thalassocracies are generally considered distinct from tellurocracies, or land-based powers. ______ the British Empire (1600s–1900s CE) notably extended its hegemony across both land and sea.

According to climate envelope models, individual organisms that inhabit the coolest areas of their species’ geographic distribution are expected to benefit from a warming climate, while individuals in the warmest areas will struggle. A 2024 University of Arizona study, ______ found that warmer-than-average temperatures resulted in a decrease in growth across all areas of the common piñon tree’s distribution range.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Birthday Party is a 1957 black-and-white linocut print by Black American artist Margaret Burroughs.
• It depicts a tranquil, everyday scene (a group of children celebrating).
• Amanzi Amthatha (“The cold water takes him”) is a 2001 black-and-white linocut print by South African artist Nomathemba Tana.
• It features a scene with an explicitly political point of view (a Xhosa warrior fighting British colonial rule).
• Relief printing is a technique in which an image is carved onto a printing block, covered in ink or paint, and stamped onto paper.
• Lino cutting is a type of relief printing that uses linoleum tile as the printing block.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Researchers Gwangsu Kim et al. sought to explore the relationship between the brain’s ability to process natural sounds and its ability to process music.
• They used an artificial deep neural network (DNN) that models how the brain processes auditory information.
• The DNN had been trained to detect natural sounds (excluding music).
• Finding: The DNN spontaneously developed neurons that responded to music but not to other auditory stimuli.
• Conclusion: The brain’s ability to process music may arise as a by-product of natural sound processing.