In some of his sculptures, Allan Houser uses abstract geometric shapes to depict his subjects rather than portraying them in realistic detail. For instance, his 1989 work Embrace is highly abstract and therefore differs strikingly from some of his other pieces in which the viewer can easily ______ familiar objects.

During film's early years, those who worked in the industry had a vested interest in convincing the public to embrace the new medium. As Sumiko Higashi argues, some filmmakers relied on film critics to influence the public's ______ the world of cinema. Critics who drew similarities between film and traditional art forms, like drama, could help legitimize film as an art form.

The dinosaur displays at museums such as the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago (which has a mounted Apatosaurus skeleton among its holdings) are notable for the ______ of the research behind them—the museum staff consulted numerous sources to ensure the accuracy of the displays.

The presence of Belarus's Mir Castle Complex on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's World Heritage List indicates that the organization has ______ the site's “outstanding universal value,” and that UNESCO is therefore championing its preservation and protection.

Today's theater stages are frequently filled with props and scenery to immerse the audience in a play's world. Because theatergoers have grown used to carefully designed sets, plays with few visual elements can surprise audiences. But simple, unadorned stages were likely ______ audiences in the very distant past: highly decorated and detailed sets were not common until the 1600s.

The following text is from Yung Wing’s 1909 memoir My Life in China and America. Yung Wing was the first person from China to graduate from a US university.
Little did I realize when in 1845 I wrote, while in the Morrison School, a composition on “An Imaginary Voyage to New York and up the Hudson,” that I was to see New York in reality. This incident leads me to the reflection that sometimes our imagination foreshadows what lies uppermost in our minds and brings possibilities within the sphere of realities.

Text 1
Chemically analyzing bulk rock-core samples from Australia's Mount McRae Shale, Ariel Anbar et al. found a transient but significant increase in molybdenum (Mo) at a point corresponding to roughly 2.5 billion years ago (Ga). On Earth, Mo is released mainly through oxidative weathering of minerals; Anbar et al. therefore concluded that atmospheric oxygen briefly increased 2.5 Ga, then returned to its earlier negligible level.
Text 2
Sarah Slotznick et al. reexamined the Mount McRae Shale core. Since chemically analyzing bulk samples can occlude contextual details, Slotznick et al. also employed high-resolution microscopy, which revealed volcanic debris—a known Mo host—around 2.5 Ga and microfractures in the surrounding matrix. The researchers assert that fluid could have reached the debris through the microfractures and initiated oxidative weathering long after debris deposition.

Elio Sucena 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, Patricia J. Wittkopp 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.

Founded in 1991, the Museo de Las Americas showcases art from Latin America, including the art of Indigenous peoples. It is located in Denver and has more than 4,800 objects in its collection. Since 2000, a number of other institutions devoted to Latino cultures have opened in the United States. A notable example is LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles. It opened in 2011 and focuses on Mexican American art and culture.

In Brazil, use of solid fuel (e.g., coal, wood) as a share of total household fuel use fell by around 70 percent between 2000 and 2019; such shifts are typically explained by appeal to the energy ladder, a model holding that fuel choice is mediated mainly by household income (specifically, high-technology fuels displace solid fuels as incomes rise). Alemu Mekonnen and Gunnar Köhlin’s study of fuel use in Ethiopia shows this model to be reductive, however: household fuel use was heterogeneous, flexible, and influenced by several factors, including households’ cooking habits.

“The Monster” is an 1898 story by Stephen Crane. In the story, whenever Jimmie, a young boy, has been scolded by his father for misbehavior, he seeks comfort from Henry Johnson, the man responsible for the care of Jimmie's father's horses. However, Henry does not always provide such comfort; Crane suggests this by writing, ______

“Aunt Sue's Stories” is a 1926 poem by Langston Hughes. In the poem, the speaker indicates that the stories Aunt Sue tells are based on Aunt Sue's personal experiences, saying that ______

Researchers investigated how enjoyment of a story is affected when it has been spoiled (when the reader has foreknowledge of an important plot development). As part of the study, participants rated their enjoyment of one story that was spoiled before they read it and one story that was unspoiled. For each story, participants who had been given a spoiler reported greater enjoyment than did those who hadn't received a spoiler. But the degree of this difference varied across the stories, as is best illustrated by the enjoyment ratings for ______

Although Eastern North Pacific (ENP) gray whales generally migrate between their wintering waters along the coast of Mexico and their foraging waters in the Arctic, a subset of this population—known as the Pacific Coast Feeding Group (PCFG)—forages along the coastlines of Northern California (USA) and British Columbia (Canada) instead. Interestingly, individuals in this subset reach smaller maximum sizes than other ENP whales do, despite having similar pre-maximum growth rates. Researchers hypothesize that this difference may be an adaptation to distinct resource opportunities in the PCFG foraging range.

Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is regularly described as autobiographical. That characterization is apt—there are many parallels between the experiences of the novel's character of Little Dog and those of Vuong—but it should not be taken to mean that all the people and events depicted in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous are based on actual people and events. The novel is largely pure invention, and readers who neglect this fact and instead try to identify more and more real-life analogues thus risk ______

The first modern public zoo opened at the height of the French Revolution in 1793. Located in downtown Paris, the zoo was called the Menagerie du Jardin des Plantes. It was filled with living animals that had been confiscated ______ the private collections of French aristocrats.

Museo de Recursos Históricos de Lares, a history museum in Lares, Puerto Rico, is one of more than eighty museums in the US territory. Puerto Rico's museums ______ visitors about everything from the territory's history to its architecture to its coffee.

In May of 1959, the song “Danny Boy” was a top-ten hit. Having climbed the charts for ten weeks, ______ ranked No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 list of most popular songs.

A worker cooperative is a business that is owned and operated by its workers. This model stands in contrast to traditional models in which a smaller group of owners controls a company. Because the profits made by a cooperative are shared by all workers—who are also owners—the workers ______ directly from its success.

With an average summer temperature of 61 degrees Fahrenheit, Moscow is one European ______ many travelers recommend, especially from June to September.

Generally, sleek vehicles are more aerodynamic than bulkier ones. For example, the streamlined nose of the T-38 Talon jet helps it glide through wind with relative ease. ______ a boxy semitruck encounters more wind resistance, making it less aerodynamic.

Contemplating the beauty of a natural landscape, the serene speaker of William Wordsworth’s poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798) seems wholly insulated from society. As scholars have argued, however, Wordsworth’s retreat to nature was an aesthetic response to—and implicit critique of—England’s rapid industrialization and urbanization at that time. ______ despite its idyllic quality, the poem bears the imprint of the dramatic changes affecting English life.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Arabic word “dinar” comes from the Latin word “denarius.”
• Today, nearly a dozen different national currencies are referred to as “dinars.”
• Bahrain's currency is known as the Bahraini dinar.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Documentary TV programs in the slow TV genre consist of uninterrupted broadcasts of ordinary events in real time.
• MORA: Zeichner is a German slow TV program.
• The 45-minute-long program documented an artist making a pencil drawing during a train journey.
• It first aired in 2016.
• Slow TV has been called “the world's most boring television.”
• American journalist Nathan Heller praises it, writing that “it affords a visceral kind of armchair tourism.”

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• A supercontinent is a single landmass made up of most or all of Earth's continents.
• Over time, continents merge together to form supercontinents, which then break apart.
• This process is believed to take hundreds of millions of years and is known as the supercontinent cycle.
• Ur was a supercontinent that formed about 3.1 billion years ago.
• Pangaea was a supercontinent that formed about 300 million years ago.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Dinosaur fossil specimens can be found at science museums all over the world.
• Many dinosaur fossil specimens are given nicknames.
• The Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Denver, Colorado, houses a dinosaur fossil specimen nicknamed Pops.
• Pops lived in the Late Cretaceous period, which ended more than 65 million years ago.
• It is a member of the genus Triceratops.

• In a 2003 study, Alexander and Schrag tested the effect of plant litter on seedling emergence in a grassland setting.
• The test site was a mesic grassland in a dry midlatitude climate in the United States.
• The researchers found that in these environmental conditions the presence of plant litter had a positive effect on seedling emergence.
• Seedling emergence is when a seedling sprouts above ground and begins photosynthesis.

As with other river deltas, the Shatt al-Arab River delta is ______: it is a constantly evolving network of channels and strips of land that change in size and shape as the river deposits new sedimentary particles where the river meets the waters of the Persian Gulf.

Lucian of Samosata (modern-day Turkey) was a second-century satirist who mostly published critiques of philosophers of the time. His work True History, however, is ______: featuring tropes that are hallmarks of present-day science fiction (e.g., space travel, interplanetary conflict), it is regarded by some scholars as the earliest known work in the genre.

The familial structure of the black swan (Cygnus atratus) shows tremendous ______: breeding pairs with demonstrated success in rearing cygnets (young swans) have been observed to foster those of less successful pairs, and while rearing by female-male pairs is most common, male-male pairs sometimes rear cygnets too, achieving a significantly higher rate of survival to adulthood than female-male pairs.

Founded in Long Beach, California, in 1996, the Museum of Latin American Art is dedicated to modern and contemporary art by Latin American artists and Latino artists in the United States. Since its founding, it has acquired more than 1,300 objects for its permanent collection. More recently founded US-based institutions devoted to Latino cultures include the National Hispanic Cultural Center. Located in Albuquerque, it focuses on the literature, art, and cultures of Latin America as well as of Latino communities in the United States.

Paintings by the Florida Highwaymen—an informal collective of prolific landscape artists active in Florida during the 1950s and '60s—are recognizable by their reiteration of the same general compositional structures and subjects: breaking waves and backcountry pines, to name two. But there was room for individuation: Sam Newton's Tangerine Sky, for example, may resemble other Highwaymen paintings at first glance, but his works stand out for their more realistic and less impressionistic qualities.

Text 1
Hycean planets are a class of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) with oceans of liquid water—critical to supporting life—and atmospheres rich in hydrogen. Computer models have determined that for potential hycean planets, the range of the habitable zone (HZ), the distance from a star that allows a planet to retain liquid water on its surface, begins at about 1 astronomical unit (AU). In 2021, Nikku Madhusudhan et al. identified K2-18 b as a hycean candidate, noting that the planet is located right on the inner edge of the HZ.
Text 2
In a 2023 paper, Shang-Min Tsai et al. claimed that the hydrogen-rich atmospheres of K2-18 b and other hycean candidates admit wavelengths of light that cause elevated surface temperatures and increased water evaporation. Unlike earlier assessments, Tsai et al.’s calculations therefore placed the inner edge for these planets’ HZ as far out as 3.85 AU.

Mexican architect Luis Barragán’s prolific career, which spanned the 1920s to the 1980s, evolved through distinct phases. After traveling to the United States and Europe in the early 1930s and immersing himself in a broader architectural discourse, Barragán began incorporating principles derived from functionalism and modernism in his work, as seen in the Pizarro Suárez House, whose unadorned geometric forms contrast with his earlier projects in Guadalajara, such as the house in Calle Pedro Loza, which evince the aesthetics of traditional Mediterranean and Mexican styles.

Norfolk, Virginia, has installed engineered structures along 56% of its shoreline to protect infrastructure from wave erosion and other hazards, a practice known as shoreline hardening. To evaluate the responses of waterbirds to two types of hardening structures—riprap and bulkheads—Diann Prosser et al. surveyed waterbird communities consisting of the osprey, the common tern, and 62 other species at different sites in the Chesapeake Bay on the US East Coast. Utilizing the Index of Waterbird Community Integrity (IWCI), on which a high score corresponds to high community integrity, the researchers found that bulkheads are more strongly negatively correlated with waterbird community integrity than is riprap.

Chesapeake Bay seagrass meadows constitute crucial habitats for many aquatic species. Historically, eelgrass has been predominant, but widgeon grass is proving better suited to recent increases in sea temperature, tolerating heat better and growing faster than eelgrass does. Although the increase in widgeon grass has been associated with a substantial increase in total seagrass coverage in the bay, researchers caution that the latter change does not necessarily make the seagrass ecosystem as a whole more resilient to environmental shocks.

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 ______

Piezoelectric harvesters convert kinetic energy (resonance) to electrical energy, precluding the need for external electrical sources. The vibration of a spacecraft, for example, can provide sufficient energy to power many of its sensors piezoelectrically. A newly designed piezoelectric harvester incorporating a highly conductive carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) electrode has been shown to provide steady energy loads during resonance, an absolute prerequisite for wireless communication devices to be powered piezoelectrically.

Consumers increasingly expect that goods they purchase online will be delivered rapidly, even as soon as the day of purchase. Although efficiencies in long-distance transport of parcels have greatly improved delivery times, last-mile logistics (the final step in delivery to consumers) present a bottleneck for delivery companies. Time pressure resulting from consumer expectations is not the only challenge; other obstacles, such as the increasing congestion of roadways, persist. While innovations to mitigate these challenges have been emerging—the use of aerial drones, for instance—success has been constrained due to the additional complications that arise (e.g., a lack of suitable drone landing sites in residential areas). Consequently, ______

Scientists looking for signs of ancient life in Asia have found many examples of fossilized hominins, including in a geological formation at the Minatogawa Limestone Quarry. However, to find even older specimens like early multicellular organisms from the Ediacaran period, scientists must look elsewhere, such as in the Ediacaran geological formation at Mistaken Point in North America, because ______

Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) capitalize on the ability of some species of bacteria to metabolize metal, liberating electrons. The bacteria form a dense biofilm on the surface of an electron-collecting anode, but moving the electrons from the bacterial cytoplasm to an external electrode requires that the electrons pass through a series of inefficient oxidation-reduction (redox) reactions. Accordingly, MFC power output rarely exceeds a density of 0.30 milliwatts per square centimeter (mW/cm²). In an experiment, researchers added silver nanoparticles to carbon paper covering the anode in an MFC. The resulting power density was 0.66 mW/cm². Since metals such as silver exhibit high electrical conductivity, the researchers hypothesized that ______

The ratio of methane to other atmospheric constituents—represented by a measure called the methane mole fraction—influences a variety of meteorological phenomena, notably precipitation and humidity. For Titan, Saturn's largest moon, the observational data that exist are too sparse and discrepant to fully constrain the range of the methane mole fraction at various atmospheric levels. Juan Lora and colleagues point out that outputs of the IPSL atmospheric model of Titan, which track closely to observations in some respects, reflect how the model's developers responded to this challenge: by prescribing a uniform methane mole fraction for the lowest level of the atmosphere. It is therefore important to note that ______

Epic poetry is a literary genre characterized by lengthy narratives that emphasize the heroic or divine. The Argonautica, an epic poem of Greek origin, dates back to the ______ the poem's heroic narrative still captivates modern readers.

Kizomba, a genre of dance that originated in Angola, has become an international ______ 2022, the Indian dance duo known as Elvis and Namrata defeated performers from around the world to win the annual Olympiads of Kizomba competition held in Paris, France, becoming the first ever Asian winners.

The Austronesian language family comprises some 1,200 languages—including the ______ Tetum and Fijian, which are spoken by 800,000 and 640,000 speakers, respectively—and accounts for one-fifth of the world’s languages, making it of keen interest to linguists like Diane Massam.

In addition to being a celebrated writer, musician, and educator, Zitkála-Šá (Yankton Dakota) was the cofounder of the National Council of American ______ advocated for Native American civil rights throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Mitochondrial genomes reproduce asexually, which should over time result in an accumulation of harmful mutations and a decline in mitochondrial functionality. However, nuclear genes are hypothesized to coevolve with the rate of mitochondrial decline, eliminating mutational erosion. Such a compensatory measure ______ the organelle’s decline, unlike enzyme-stabilizing accessory proteins, offers an evolutionary explanation of mitochondrial reproduction.

In a US national election, one might expect major-party campaigns to focus on the most populous states. However, if polls and past voting data suggest that the outcome in a given state is a foregone conclusion, a campaign will not invest its resources there. Ultimately, a state's voting record and polling data, not its population size, ______ its importance to campaigns.

In an ekphrastic poem, a poet explores a work of visual art, such as a drawing, sculpture, or painting. Robert Hayden’s 1994 poem “Monet’s Waterlilies,” for example, meditates on Claude Monet’s 1899 painting Water Lilies; Sasha Pimentel’s 2017 poem “The Kiss,” ______ takes a painting as its subject: Gustav Klimt’s 1908 work The Kiss.

Soil polluted with iron (a heavy metal) is harmful to many plants and animals, but the plant species Limnocharis flava, or yellow velvetleaf, not only thrives in such conditions but also helps remediate them. As a metal hyperaccumulator, Limnocharis flava absorbs a large amount of iron and stores it safely in its roots and shoots; ______ iron concentrations in the soil decrease.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The English word “dollar” comes from the German word “thaler.”
• Today, more than twenty different national currencies are referred to as “dollars.”
• Kiribati's currency is known as the Kiribati dollar.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Stylistic analysis and historical analysis are two approaches to art criticism.
• Stylistic analysis examines how an artwork’s visual features contribute to its overall style.
• Such an analysis of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies might consider how the painting’s loose brushwork represents an impressionist style.
• Historical analysis considers the historical context in which a work was created.
• Such an analysis of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas might consider how the painting’s depiction of the artist with King Philip IV symbolizes art’s historical ties to power.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Carbon can exist in several distinct structural forms called allotropes.
• Graphite is a carbon allotrope.
• Graphite is composed of stacked graphene sheets.
• Each graphene sheet is composed of carbon atoms arranged in a flat honeycomb pattern.
• Carbon nanotubes are carbon allotropes.
• They are composed of one or more graphene sheets wrapped into a cylindrical shape.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• In a 2004 study, researchers Jorge E. López and C. Vaughan wanted to explore the effects of ingestion by bats on the germination of Piper sancti-felicis seeds in Costa Rica.
• The team of researchers tested 125 Piper sancti-felicis seeds that had been ingested by chestnut short-tailed bats.
• Of these, 82 seeds (66%) germinated.
• As a control, J.E. López and C. Vaughan tested 125 Piper sancti-felicis seeds that had not been ingested by chestnut short-tailed bats.
• Of these, 88 seeds (70%) germinated.