During his career, Cuban composer and pianist Ernesto Lecuona produced hundreds of compositions. Especially impressive is how ______ his body of work is: Lecuona showcased a diverse range of musical talents in different areas, from orchestral pieces and operas to popular film scores.

As with other river deltas, the Indus 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 Arabian Sea.

The following text is from Amy Tan's 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. The narrator describes practicing the piano when she was a child.
For the talent show, I was to play a piece called “Pleading Child” from Schumann's Scenes from Childhood. It was a simple, moody piece that sounded more difficult than it was. I was supposed to memorize the whole thing, playing the repeat parts twice to make the piece sound longer. But I dawdled over it, playing a few bars and then cheating, looking up to see what notes followed. I never really listened to what I was playing. I daydreamed about being somewhere else, about being someone else.
©1989 by Amy Tan

The following text is from Bram Stoker's 1911 novel The Lair of the White Worm. Adam is meeting his great-uncle Richard at a port.
The meeting so auspiciously begun proceeded well. Adam, seeing that the old man was interested in the novelty of the ship, suggested that he should stay the night on board, and that he would himself be ready to start at any hour and go anywhere that the other suggested. This affectionate willingness to fall in with his own plans quite won the old man's heart. He warmly accepted the invitation, and at once they became not only on terms of affectionate relationship, but almost like old friends.

Vertical gene transfer involves the transmission of genetic material from a parent to offspring; horizontal gene transfer, on the other hand, involves the exchange of genetic material between organisms not in a parent-offspring relationship. While horizontal gene transfer is common among prokaryotes—single-celled organisms such as the bacteria Carnobacterium viridans and Moraxella caviae—it has rarely been observed among eukaryotes (typically multicellular organisms). However, new studies suggest that horizontal gene transfer is more common in eukaryotes than originally thought.

Though John Crowley, author of Endless Things, is perhaps not as well known as the most widely read American writers of the past fifty years, influential figures have championed his work, including the poet James Merrill and the literary critic Harold Bloom. In his afterword to Crowley's book Little, Big, Bloom praises the novel's adroit blend of what playwright Friedrich Schiller termed the naive and sentimental modes—while Schiller thought works could be classified as either naive (seeking to describe reality) or sentimental (seeking to develop ideas), Little, Big demonstrates that a work can be both.

The following text is from a translation of Maria Duefias’s 2009 novel The Time in Between. The narrator has just rented an apartment and is entering it for the first time.
Over the years there have been many times when my destiny has delivered me unexpected moments, unforeseen twists and turns that I've had to handle on the fly as they appeared. Occasionally I was ready for them; very often I wasn't. Never, however, was I so aware of entering a new stage as I was that afternoon in October when I finally dared to cross the threshold and my steps sounded hollowly in the unfurnished apartment. Behind me was a complicated past, and in front of me, like an omen, I could see a space opening out, a great empty space that time would take care of filling up.
©2009 by Maria Duefias. Translation ©2011 by Haniel Haha.

The soil on Mars can make missions to explore the planet challenging, as the sand and dust are known to clog filters and lock moving parts on robotic rovers and other exploration devices. Using simulants, which are materials designed to simulate different planetary surfaces, scientists are able to study the characteristics of Mars’s surface. Simulants like the Mars Mojave simulant—which was developed using lava deposits from California's Mojave Desert—help scientists evaluate how well their devices will handle the surface when operated on Mars.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a 1900 novel by L. Frank B-aum. In the novel, the narrator describes a character's house as having become very faded in appearance over time: ______

As the second-most populous continent in the world, Africa was home to an estimated 1.186 billion people in 2015. In a paper for a social studies class, a student nonetheless notes that countries with very large populations may be less densely populated than are countries with much smaller populations, as can be seen by comparing ______

To measure whether countries in free trade agreements (FTAs)—agreements among nations to reduce tariffs, duties, and other trade barriers—experience changes in total agricultural exports, economist Kayode Ajewole and colleagues calculated average export growth rates for several countries over the five years before and the five years after entering an FTA with the United States. The graph shows the results for three countries in the study. Consulting the graph, a student claims that joining an FTA increases the rate of growth of a country's total agricultural exports.

If a planet orbits in close proximity to a star and lacks an atmosphere, the planet can become so hot that magma oceans form on its surface. For three planets that could plausibly harbor magma oceans, the table shows mass, density (expressed as the ratio of the material's volume at its current density to its maximum possible density, with higher numbers indicating lower densities), and surface temperature according to a model that assumes the absence of atmosphere.

Michelle Pereira et al. hypothesized that introducing health improvements into workplaces would increase productivity by reducing absenteeism (sick employees not working) and presenteeism (sick workers working less productively due to illness). Pereira's team enrolled groups of Australian workers in two programs; one that gave employees exercise training (EET) and one that enrolled employees in health promotion seminars (EHP). They then calculated the productivity loss of those groups at 12 weeks and 12 months after the programs began (based on the 28 days preceding each point). They concluded that exercise training was more effective at restraining productivity loss than health promotion seminars were, though this result took time to become apparent.

Ningyo joruri is a form of theater that was popular in eighteenth-century Japan and that unites puppetry with playing of the shamisen, a stringed musical instrument. The popularity of ningyo joruri was due to a puppetry method called sannin zukai, in which three puppeteers operated a single puppet that was large, detailed, and capable of extensive movement and nuanced emotional expression. Over the ensuing centuries, audience interest in ningyo joruri began to decline and sannin zukai became prohibitively expensive to mount, so that sannin zukai puppeteers could no longer make the profession a full-time career. Eventually, ningyo joruri productions resorted to cheaper forms of puppetry, such as kuruma ningyo, which involves only one puppeteer.

Both Pontianak, Indonesia, and Manta, Ecuador, are located at less than one degree latitude. In other words, ______ cities basically sit right on the equator!

An upcoming exhibition will showcase Vincent van Gogh's drawing Sale of Building Scrap, which Van Gogh ______ in the city of Nuenen nearly 150 years ago.

The rough frog is a species of amphibian native to Australia. Currently, the frog's range ______ parts of northern New South Wales and southeastern Queensland.

When attempting to determine a fault's seismic history, geophysicists like Dr. Estella Atekwana at the University of Delaware rely in part on data about the fault's physical dimensions and geological features. For the Ione Valley fault in Lander County, Nevada, the US Geological Survey compiles such data in several ______ exchanging information with state geological surveys, by linking maps of the fault with sources that offer detailed descriptions of it, and by maintaining a database of quantitative data such as the fault's length (76 km).

A pet rabbit is held by its owner on a beach in Boo and His Rabbit, a photograph by British ______ Chris Killip.

In his 2011 book, historian Sebouh David Aslanian quantifies the reading patterns of early modern Armenian merchants from New Julfa. Aslanian's macroanalysis ______ nearly 1,000 book titles published between 1512 and 1800 shows not only the steady popularity of religious texts but also a broadening interest in secular books, especially those on history and geography.

In 1920, the US Geological Survey determined the geographic center of Tennessee using only a cardboard cutout of the state and a piece of string. ______ this apparently crude technique yielded a relatively close approximation: when the 1920 center was compared to a center determined by a computer program nearly a hundred years later, the two diverged by just a few miles.

In astrophysics, a ring of debris orbiting a larger object within the object's Roche limit is expected to persist as a ring, whereas a ring of debris orbiting outside this limit would likely accrete into a satellite (e.g., a moon). Bruno Morgado and colleagues, ______ detected a dense ring of material orbiting the trans-Neptunian object Quaoar at a distance of 2,500 miles, well outside the calculated Roche limit of 1,100 miles, that has remained intact.

While most animals prefer the safety of nighttime migration, many poisonous amphibians—a category that includes the Panamanian golden frog and the cane toad—safely engage in migratory behavior during the day. ______ with the sun in the sky, the amphibians' striking color patterns deter visually oriented daytime predators by serving as a warning of toxicity.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Niger River is the third longest river in Africa.
• It ranks No. 14 among the longest rivers in the world.
• It is 4,200 kilometers long.
• The Indus River is the ninth longest river in Asia.
• It ranks No. 19 among the longest rivers in the world.
• It is 3,610 kilometers long.

• The Mauritius Trade Union Congress (MTUC) is a national union federation for the African nation of Mauritius.
• It helps improve conditions for workers in that nation.
• ITUC-Africa is a regional union federation that represents national union federations across Africa.
• It represents the MTUC.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Tepeapulco is a municipality in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico.
• Municipalities are governmental regions responsible for providing many public services to their residents.
• One service they provide is water treatment.
• Tepeapulco covers an area of roughly 243 km².
• Hidalgo is divided into 84 municipalities.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Most of the plant and bird species in Oahu, Hawaii, are non-native.
• In a 2019 study, researchers wanted to know what role non-native birds play in dispersing plant seeds in Oahu.
• Researchers catalogued plant seeds found in fecal samples from non-native birds.
• Pipturus albidus, a flowering shrub, was one of fifteen native species catalogued.
• Psidium cattleyanum, a fruit tree, was one of twenty-nine non native species catalogued.
• Researchers concluded that non-native birds play a vital role in dispersing the seeds of native and non-native plants.

Literary scholars often encourage those studying authors and their literary movements to understand how certain qualities of an author's writings were perceived by his or her immediate audience. While most would not consider the works of Miguel de Unamuno to be especially controversial today, one should consider whether there are aspects of his work that may have been seen as ______ to some readers of his time.

The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction is a crowdsourced project started in 2001 by lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower to record terms that originated in science fiction. Volunteers share digitized excerpts from personal collections of sci-fi magazines not typically preserved in libraries—______that allow the earliest uses of phrases such as "warp speed" (1952) to be identified and added to the dictionary.

Despite stated claims of global relevance, much major research on income inequality performed in the 2010s suffered from a myopic focus on a few countries in North America and Western Europe, partly due to limited data availability. Researchers would later ______ this shortcoming after gaining new access to administrative records located in nations in Asia, such as India, and Eastern Europe, such as Hungary.

During the 2007-2010 financial crisis, the United States furnished billions of dollars to selected countries' central banks via mechanisms called swap lines. Aditi Sahasrabuddhe found that countries' policy environments seem to have been ______ swap line decisions; the probability that banks would be granted swap lines was 0.20 in countries open to foreign-capital inflows and 0.03 in countries with policies restricting such inflows.

The Lartington is just one of approximately three million known historical shipwrecks spread throughout the world's oceans, and their impact on sea life and underwater ecosystems is of great interest to researchers. Rachel Mugge and colleagues were particularly curious about the effects of wooden shipwrecks on seafloor microbial communities. The researchers studied two wooden shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico by placing pieces of pine and oak between zero and 200 meters away from each shipwreck to collect samples of three kinds of microbes: bacteria, archaea, and fungi. They found that across the three microbial communities, peak diversity and richness was observed on pine and oak samples placed approximately 125 meters from the shipwrecks.

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 idea 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.

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 work, 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 houses in Avenida Parque Mexico, whose unadorned geometric forms contrast with his earlier projects in Guadalajara, such as the house in Calle Liceo, which evince the aesthetics of traditional Mediterranean and Mexican styles.

Some scientists have suggested that as ocean temperatures rise, many fish and corals found in the shallow zone (less than 30 meters below the surface) could take refuge in the cooler, darker mesophotic zone (30 to 150 meters below the surface). However, it isn't clear that such species will be able to tolerate mesophotic conditions. In 2018, Luiz Rocha and colleagues studied stony corals in the two zones in Caribbean and Indo-Pacific waters. Based on the depths at which those corals are now found, the species that seems least suited to a full migration to the mesophotic zone is ______

Adelaide, Australia, has installed engineered structures along 53% 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 brown pelican, the red knot, 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.

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.

A student is writing a research paper on the global rise of the home video game industry during the 1970s and 1980s. The student is surprised by differences in the number of units sold by some systems compared to those sold by others. Most remarkably, the ______

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 delivering goods to consumers) present a bottleneck for delivery companies. Time pressure resulting from consumer expectations is not the only challenge; other obstacles, such as complex and inefficient delivery routes, persist. While innovations to mitigate these challenges have been emerging—the use of autonomous delivery robots, for instance—success has been constrained due to the additional complications that arise (e.g., robots travel relatively slowly since they must navigate many ground-level obstacles). Consequently, ______

Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) capitalize on the ability of some species of bacteria to metabolize metal, liberating electrons. The bacteria form a 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 ______

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 ______

The ratio of methane to other atmosphere 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 ______

Cy Twombly, a US painter and sculptor, created many large-scale abstract works, such as his 10-painting series Fifty Days at Iliam. In these works, Twombly's artistic style is exemplified by his use of graffiti-like ______ often incorporate words or phrases from poetry and mythology.

The Proto-Atlantic-Congo language, common ancestor of 1,453 African languages with similar linguistic properties, ______ like all protolanguages, hypothetical; there's no direct evidence these ancestral languages actually existed.

The 2020 documentary Without a Whisper—Konnon: Kwe was directed by Katsitsionni Fox. It explores how Indigenous Haudenosaunee culture shaped the woman suffrage movement in the early nineteenth ______ how the personal and political authority Haudenosaunee women had in their communities influenced the first suffragists in the US.

Although 39P/Oterma and 83982 Crantor are both classified as centaur object—outer solar system bodies in unstable orbits—they exhibit striking differences in ______ object 39P/Oterma is considered an active centaur, showing sporadic comet-like activity (such as clouds of dust and gas on its surface), 83982 Crantor, showing no such activity, is considered dormant.

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 a unique explanation of mitochondrial reproduction.

In the list “Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster” from Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, the author delights in a cloudy mirror, rain on a window, and scented robes. So shrewd an observer is Shonagon, a lady-in-waiting to Empress Teishi, that her book's musings on tenth-century Japanese courtly life ______ readers a thousand years later.

To notice subtle variations in the progression of the still life painting genre in Europe, first consider Tomás Hiepes's “Still Life with Birds and Hares” from 1643; ______ compare it to Adolphe-Félix Cals's “Still Life with Vegetables, Partridge, and a Jug” from 1858.

As an anti-federalist, Pennsylvania politician and writer Samuel Bryan objected to the US Constitution's provisions for a powerful centralized government and opposed the document's ratification; ______ essays he published in the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer in October 1787 under the pseudonym "Centinel" disparaged the arguments of the federalists, who supported the Constitution's adoption.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Hina Hanta is an online archive curated by the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
• It features images of cultural artifacts related to the history of the Choctaw people.
• It features household items, including a stamp (isht inchurwa in Choctaw) made from rubber.
• The stamp was made in the 1800s.
• Hina Hanta features sports apparel, including a stickball collar (innuchi) made from horsehair.
• The stickball collar was made in 2016.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Modularity of mind is the notion that the mind is at least partly composed of innate neural structures (modules) that perform fast, necessary tasks.
• 1983: cognitive scientist Jerry A. Fodor hypothesized that low-level cognitive systems (e.g., perception, language) are modular.
• In Fodorian modularity, high-level systems (e.g., reasoning) are not modular.
• 2003: cognitive scientist Peter Carruthers proposed the massive modularity hypothesis (MMH).
• MMH expands modularity to include all cognitive systems.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Digital Light synthesis (DLS) is a form of additive manufacturing that utilizes light to rapidly cure liquid resin into high-quality, 3D objects.
• Step 1: Ultraviolet (UV) light images are projected up into a pool of liquid resin, where the object's first layer takes shape.
• Step 2: The partially cured resin object is raised, creating a thin space (a “dead zone”) beneath it for oxygen and liquid resin to flow through.
• Step 3: The UV light passes through the dead zone—maintaining the flow of resin—and partially cures additional layers of the object.
• Step 4: When the resin object is complete, it is baked in an oven to complete the curing.