The following text is adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel The Namesake. Gogol is an elementary school student in Massachusetts.
In art class, his favorite hour of the week, he carves his name with paper clips into the bottoms of clay cups and bowls. He pastes uncooked pasta to cardboard, and leaves his signature in fat brush strokes below paintings.
©2003 by Jhumpa Lahiri

Fossils of ancient arthropods preserved in volcanic ash in Morocco have ______ similarities between ancient arthropods and modern ones, such as spiders. Detailed 3D images of the fossils allowed scientists to see features that look like features found in arthropod species living today.

Smart watches and fitness trackers tend to rely on batteries that can’t be easily taken out and swapped for new ones. Environmental policy researcher Carl Dalhammar warns that because these gadgets can’t ______ without working batteries, once the batteries stop working, the devices are typically disposed of as trash.

Otake Chikuha’s 1902 piece Fall of the Castle is an important work of Nihonga, or traditional Japanese painting. To produce the piece, Otake used a centuries-old Japanese approach, applying ink and watercolor to a silk surface. By contrast, Saeki Yuzō ______ European methods, using oil on canvas to produce Western–style paintings.

Which container design best protects an egg from breaking when dropped? One way to explore this question is to use the scientific method. This method involves forming a hypothesis, conducting an experiment, collecting data, and drawing a conclusion. Using the scientific method helps us understand how things work and helps us answer questions, such as the one about egg container design.

Understanding juvenile sea turtles' migratory patterns is crucial for conservation efforts. While adult sea turtles are well studied, little is known about juveniles during their oceanic stage, when they spend most of their time in the open ocean. To learn about this stage, researchers tagged and released six juvenile green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) into the eastern Caribbean Sea. Their findings revealed that the majority of the turtles passively drifted with ocean currents throughout the region. However, two individuals swam against the currents, possibly in search of foraging grounds off the coast of South America.

Animals use many objects as tools to achieve goals more easily. Such goals include grooming, finding food, and protecting themselves. For a long time, people thought tool use was unique to primates. Sea otters and other animals, though, have busted the myth that tool use is limited to certain primates. Inventively, sea otters use stationary anvil stones to break open mollusk shells. Woodpecker finches also get creative. They use cactus spines to pry insects from hiding places.

In the table, the city with the lowest number of residents who often biked to work in 2016 is ______

It may seem that works of art are best experienced in person. However, in an online collection from the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, people can zoom in on a high-quality image of the painting Houses in the Hills by Gladys Mgudlandlu. A student argues that viewers usually can’t examine works of art in a museum as carefully as they can examine works in online collections.

What is a city? The answer depends on where you live! Many countries define an area as a city based on how many people live there. However, not every country uses the same numbers. Albania defines a city as an area with a population of at least 400, while Greece defines a city as having a minimum population of 10,000. Some countries even define cities using other factors, like the number of buildings in the area.

The Girl Scouts of America is an organization famous for its annual sales of several varieties of cookies, including S’Mores. A student is writing an essay on the history of the organization. The student claims that from 1992 to 1995 the organization's popularity regularly peaked among participants in a certain age range before declining among older participants as Girl Scout activities began to compete with other interests.

Cane is a 1923 novel by Jean Toomer. In the novel, Toomer mentions a road in rural Georgia called Dixie Pike and describes it as having a deep connection to a faraway place, writing, ______

Many studies have found a positive association between levels of dissolved organic carbon and mercury in bodies of fresh water undisturbed by human activity. But Stéphane Guédron, Delphine Tisserand, and colleagues did not find this correlation in an examination of freshwater bodies impacted by wastewater, leading some scientists to hypothesize that the association could be particular to undisturbed waters. However, Ida Tjerngren and colleagues carried out a study on freshwater bodies disturbed by urban development that showed similar results to the studies on undisturbed waters, suggesting that ______

Coffee farming around the world has changed greatly over time. Originally, coffee plants grew in the shade of tropical forests. Today coffee is often grown without shade cover. This is because full-sun coffee farms can produce more coffee beans. But the lack of trees on such farms means a lack of spaces for many species of birds to roost. Therefore, compared with full-sun coffee farms, shaded farms tend to ______

In a recent study, Antonia Olivia Dolan and colleagues investigated the relationship between people’s music preferences and their preferred listening volume. Participants listened to recordings—Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love,” and others—at their preferred volume and indicated their most and least favorite among the recordings. The researchers found that participants listened to recordings they liked most at a higher volume than recordings they liked least. And given that the frequencies in all the recordings were within the audible range of these participants (all of whom had clinically typical hearing), it is therefore likely that for a given participant, the ______

In 1941, college student Ann White ______ an offer to train as a codebreaker for the US military, which was preparing for World War II.

Few stories in art history rival the gilded drama of James McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room. This sumptuous dining space became the setting of a spectacular falling-out between Whistler, who transformed the somber room into a golden aviary, and shipping magnate Frederick Leyland, who commissioned the work but refused to pay for what he ______ as a tasteless, gaudy design.

When, on January 9, 1987, Kay A. Orr ______ serving as the governor of Nebraska, she became the state’s first female chief executive.

Skeletal muscles are attached to bones. One bone, the humerus, has a skeletal muscle attached to ______ called the brachialis.

Many ranching terms come from Spanish. For example, the word “mustang” (a wild horse) comes from the Spanish word mestierías, and “cinch” (a belt) ______ from cincho. This is because the first Anglo, African, and Native American cattle ranchers in the southwestern US learned the trade from Spanish–speaking Mexican vaqueros, or cowboys.

The impala (Aepyceros melampus) has a species population of about 2,000,000 ______ less than that of the water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), which has a species population of roughly 172,000,000.

Unlike the sprawling, permanent mural installations of Diego Rivera and other contemporaries of the Muralismo Mexicano movement, the easily reproducible block print posters that Reynaldo Olivares and Elizabeth Catlett created as part of the printmaking collective Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) were highly portable. ______ the prints were a boon to the TGP’s goal of spreading their artwork throughout Mexico and the world beyond.

According to Portuguese researcher Isabel C.F.R. Ferreira, the cinnamic acid found in button mushrooms can protect human cells from damage. ______ the acid combats free radicals, a type of unstable molecule that can harm healthy cells in the human body.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Zambezi River is 1,703 kilometers long.
• It is in Africa.
• It ranks No. 32 among the longest rivers in the world.
• The Vistula River is 754 kilometers long.
• It is in Europe.
• It ranks No. 133 among the longest rivers in the world.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Eloxochitlán is a municipality in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico.
• It had a population of 2,593 in 2020.
• Singuilucan is a municipality in Hidalgo.
• It had a population of 15,142 in 2020.
• Municipalities are governmental regions responsible for providing many public services to their residents.
• Hidalgo is divided into 84 municipalities.

• The Smolensk Planetarium in Smolensk, Russia, is home to a Foucault pendulum.
• The pendulum consists of a weighted ball that swings at the end of a roughly 12-meter-long cable.
• Like all Foucault pendulums, it dangles from a fixed point that ensures the swing path of the pendulum doesn’t change.
• To an observer, the swing path of a Foucault pendulum appears to change over time because Earth rotates beneath it.
• Foucault pendulums are used as a simple way to provide evidence of Earth’s rotation.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Neon is a chemical element.
• When the electrons of a chemical element change energy states, certain wavelengths of light are released.
• This unique collection of wavelengths is known as the emission spectrum of the element.
• Neon’s emission spectrum includes the 692.9 nanometer (nm) wavelength of light.
• Wavelengths of 620–750 nm make up the red portion of the visible spectrum.

The Yupno people of the remote Finisterre Range of Papua New Guinea do not measure age and have no artificial means (e.g., clocks) of tracking time, but this does not imply that the Yupno are ______ time. As Rafael Núñez and colleagues have recently shown, the Yupno language contains many temporal expressions, such as usa-don sonda, which translates to “next week.”

Exposed to harsh environmental conditions for centuries, lighthouses such as La Jument lighthouse off the coast of Brittany, France, exemplify the ______ between marine structures and ocean forces: the continuous impact of breaking waves necessitates periodic reinforcements to or redesigns of the structures that in turn may alter local wave patterns.

Bing Xie and her team have discovered that plains zebras make at least four types of vocalizations: "snorts," "soft snorts," "squeals," and "quagga quagga" calls. The researchers used machine-learning algorithms to ______ recorded vocalizations according to type, finding that snorts vary across individual zebras, while squeals are more uniform across zebra populations.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute’s innovative multisensory exhibit of garments and accessories spanning four centuries, an emphasis on the ______ of fashion was conveyed both by the exhibit’s theme of perpetual renewal in nature and, more subtly, by its scientific recreations of ephemeral elements (like a fragrance worn with a dress more than a century ago).

The following text is from Robert Lowell’s 1964 poem "For the Union Dead." The South Boston Aquarium closed permanently in 1954.
The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now.
Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
©2003 by Robert Lowell

The synthesis of novel superheavy elements, such as meitnerium (Mt), has led theorists to consider the feasibility of synthesizing all possible chemical compounds. In 2022, Guillermo Restrepo calculated the historical rates at which newly discovered compounds have entered the scientific literature, expanding the “chemical space.” Using a conservative estimate of the number of viable compounds and assuming a doubling of the historical pace of discovery, Restrepo found that under these hypothetical conditions, all potential compounds could be synthesized and documented by 2050.

Typically, synthetic leather is petroleum based, but materials scientists searching for an ecologically sustainable alternative have used various bacteria that secrete linear chains of glucose, forming a dense mesh of cellulose called a pellicle, which is leatherlike except in color. The standard process for dyeing leather generates substantial wastewater and other undesirable byproducts, so adopting such a regimen would run counter to the ecological promise of the pellicle approach. To address this, Kenneth T. Walker and colleagues worked to modify Komagataeibacter rhaeticus bacteria to produce a pellicle with embedded pigmentation cells, thereby allowing the pellicle to "dye" itself from the inside.

In a section of a 1976 essay discussing cinema of the United States, James Baldwin observed that Lady Sings the Blues (1972), a biographical film about jazz singer Billie Holiday, can be said to reflect Holiday’s life and the experiences of Black Americans only “by courtesy.” According to Baldwin, the failure of this film to authentically represent its subject matter is indicative of a larger trend in films of the era: rather than leveraging the medium’s potential to confront difficult truths, filmmakers and studios often resorted to platitudes about contemporary US society.

Stores often play background music to create a pleasant shopping experience. Based on a survey, Amir Manzoor found that such music was linked to reduced enjoyment among customers. Manzoor thinks that one explanation for this result is that the surveyed customers may have wanted to finish their shopping as quickly as possible. They therefore weren’t focused on enjoying the experience. It’s possible that background music could improve the experience of other customers whose main goal is to have a good time while they shop.

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.

Esther Sanyé-Mengual, Kathrin Specht, and their team surveyed three groups of people in Bologna, Italy—leaders of urban agriculture projects, stakeholders in urban agriculture (e.g., food researchers and urban farming associations), and the general public—to compare their views about the extent to which urban agriculture contributes to 25 social or ecological services that the team identified. The researchers used these ratings to rank the services for each group, with a ranking of 1 indicating that a group perceives that urban agriculture benefits that service the most. Using only the rankings shown in the table, a city planner in Bologna who is promoting a new urban agriculture project concludes that advertisements aimed at project leaders should emphasize the project's benefit to the enhancement of pollination.

Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge is an 1838 historical account by Elleanor Eldridge and Frances Harriet Whipple Green. In the book, the authors caution against inquiring into the private life of the book’s subject beyond what is presented in the text, writing, ______

Richard II is a play from the 1590s by William Shakespeare. Although King Richard has been vanquished by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, he intimates that he is not entirely ready to show subservience to his cousin, saying, ______

While mammals collectively exhibit the highest ratio of brain size to body size among vertebrates, a team led by paleontologist Ornella Bertrand demonstrates that for ten million years following the extinction of dinosaurs, that ratio in fact shrank for mammals as they evolved to fill newly vacated ecological niches and their bodies increased in size more rapidly than their brains. Competition for resources tends to favor intelligence and thus large, complex brains, but during this period, the abundance of resources relative to mammalian population numbers likely moderated competition and facilitated an increase in body size. Bertrand and her team reason that as population numbers swelled, competition intensified, creating conditions that ______

Pablo Picasso famously subverted the norms of traditional painting: in his cubist paintings he refused to let his expression be constrained, fragmenting objects and figures to present multiple perspectives simultaneously. Though less widely known, Picasso—who once lamented that writers of his time had “limited themselves to moving around words somewhat while respecting the syntax”—also wrote poetry that defied conventional grammar, semantic relationships, and text structure. Thus, the paintings and poems are linked in that ______

Outi Tervo and team studied the effect of human-caused noise on narwhals (Monodon monoceros), arctic marine mammals that are sensitive to acoustic changes in their environment. Hypothesizing that elevated sound levels affect foraging among narwhals, Tervo’s team compared narwhal diving behaviors in natural sound conditions with those behaviors in two human-caused sound exposure conditions—ship sounds and ship sounds coupled with sonic pulses. Both exposure conditions resulted in significant decreases in the number and target depth of deep dives (associated with foraging) relative to natural conditions. However, differences between diving behaviors in the two exposure types were negligible, a finding that could be attributed to the fact that ______

As jazz singer Sarah Vaughan honed her vocal abilities—acquiring a sophisticated timbre and precise control over pitch, dynamics, and ______ she earned comparisons to opera icon Leontyne Price, one of her personal heroes. The comparisons highlight how Vaughan, a jazz star, had transcended genre boundaries with her singing prowess.

Museo Casa Canales, a history museum in Jayuya, Puerto Rico, is one of more than eighty museums in the US territory. These museums present a wide range of information about Puerto Rico, showcasing everything from the territory’s history to ______ architecture to its coffee.

Dating to around 1500, the Unicorn Tapestries are seven large tapestries depicting a unicorn hunt that hang in The Cloisters, a museum of medieval art in New York City. Attempting to explain the tapestries’ symbolism, art historian and former Cloisters head curator Margaret B. ______ that while some have interpreted the tapestries as a Christian allegory, unicorns in that era were typically featured in secular rather than religious contexts.

While some biologists cite the general lineage species concept (Queiroz 1998), others adhere to the biological species concept (Coyne and Orr 2004), with at least fourteen other concepts used across the field. Such lack of consensus, however, isn’t necessarily cause for alarm. Scholars supporting a pluralist approach—in place of a single, monistic concept—to defining a species ______ that a diversity of species concepts fits their equally diverse applications throughout the discipline.

Because of its bulky body, the world’s first airplane, the 1903 Wright Flyer, was not very aerodynamic. Modern planes, like the Northrop F-5 jet, have much sleeker, more streamlined bodies. ______ they are much more aerodynamic.

KCUW-LP is a Native-run radio station broadcasting from the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon. In 2004, Loris Taylor wanted to make sure that stations like KCUW-LP continued to thrive. ______ she founded Native Public Media, a support system for Native radio stations that now includes around sixty stations.

In 1845, the United States District Court for the state of Iowa was established. Initially, the court’s jurisdiction was a single district that encompassed the entire state, but as Iowa’s population grew, this single district began to struggle to serve the needs of everyone in the state. ______ the court’s jurisdiction was subdivided into two districts, each with its own district court.

Though its onboard laboratory allowed it to analyze rock samples on site, the 2011 Mars Curiosity rover was unable to preserve samples for future analysis. ______ when creating the 2020 Mars Perseverance rover, electrical engineer Dania Lazo and other members of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sought to implement a mechanism that could do exactly that.

Charles Demuth's 1931 painting Chimney and Water Tower is a classic Precisionist work. The Precisionists strove for cold, machine-like perfection, with crisp lines, geometric shapes, and smooth, brushstroke-free surfaces. ______ Precisionist works often feature skyscrapers, bridges, and factories, highlighting these angular structures' engineered symmetry.

• The Highpointers Club is a hiking club.
• One of the main goals among club members is to reach the highest points in all fifty US states.
• Those who achieve this are called 50 Completers.
• In Suk Han became a 50 Completer on November 15, 2013.
• The highest point in Wisconsin is Timms Hill, at 1,951 ft.
• The highest point in Wyoming is Gannett Peak, at 13,809 ft.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Incarnations (2015) is an epistolary novel by English author Susan Barker.
• Epistolary novels are novels written primarily as a series of fictional documents.
• These documents can be letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings, and more.
• The Incarnations consists primarily of letters.
• The letters are sent between a taxi driver named Wang Jun and a mysterious woman.