The following text is from Lilliam Rivera’s 2020 novel Never Look Back. The text describes the narrator arriving at his father’s apartment.
“Pops, I’m here!” I drop my bag and set my guitar case against a wall. I place my keys on the bowl right next to the ceramic elephant Pops got me on one of his trips to Santo Domingo when I was a little kid.
©2020 by Lilliam Rivera

Gertrude Ederle, who was the first woman to swim across the English Channel, and Wanda Rutkiewicz, who was the first woman to summit K2 (the second tallest mountain in the world), are ensured lasting places in our historical memory. No matter what others may do in the future, nobody can ever ______ these women as the first to accomplish these feats.

Though most hoaxes perpetrated as jokes by mischievous users of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that almost anyone can freely edit, have quickly been detected and removed, a few fictitious entries, such as those for the American punk rock band The Deadweights and the 17th-century legislator Nicholas Burkhart, persisted on the site for many years before they were finally recognized as ______ and deleted.

There are many famous examples of election pollsters making inaccurate predictions in presidential elections. But neuroscientist and election pollster Sam Wang has said that these prediction failures should not lead campaigns to ______ election polling entirely. Polling is about more than just predicting the winner; throughout campaigns, it helps strategists identify where their efforts are most likely to be effective.

The following text is adapted from Virginia Woolf’s 1919 novel Night and Day. Katharine is the granddaughter of a celebrated poet.
[Katharine’s] descent from [a celebrated poet] was no surprise to her, but matter for satisfaction, until, as the years wore on, certain drawbacks made themselves very manifest. Perhaps it is a little depressing to inherit not lands but an example of intellectual virtue; perhaps the conclusiveness of a great ancestor is a little discouraging to those who run the risk of comparison with him.

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 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.

A team of researchers discovered that Matabele ants can identify an infected wound in a member of the colony and then treat the infection by covering the wound with antimicrobial secretions that the ants produce. The team found that the mortality rate for Matabele ants with infected injuries was reduced by 90% with this treatment, and they are hopeful that this discovery could aid in the development of new antibiotics for human use.

Archaeologists have observed similarities in the tools, such as bidirectional blades, uncovered at the Neolithic-period Mesopotamian settlement of Çayönü Tepesi and those uncovered at roughly contemporaneous settlements elsewhere in Southwest Asia, including those in the South Levant, Central Anatolia, and Central Zagros. Although similarities in tools could be attributed to imitative behavior or trade, Nefize Ezgi Altınışık et al. found evidence of genetic affinity among the populations of Çayönü Tepesi, Central Anatolia, the South Levant, and—to a lesser extent—Central Zagros.

The following text is from Mark Haber’s 2022 novel Saint Sebastian’s Abyss. The narrator and Schmidt are both art critics.
When my first wife admitted to Schmidt over dinner that she didn’t find art, painting in particular, especially compelling, Schmidt winced, set down his fork, and sighed dramatically; he then excused himself, explaining an appointment he’d forgotten about had suddenly and inexplicably been remembered, while making it abundantly clear there was no appointment at all.
©2022 by Mark Haber

Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) is a painting by Frida Kahlo, dated 1928. It’s part of the full collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in Boston, Massachusetts. A digital image of it can also be found in an online collection. In a paper, a student claims that people usually spend more time viewing a work of art in a museum than they do online.

Rafael Núñez and colleagues studied how members of the Yupno, an Indigenous group in Papua New Guinea, conceptualize time in both spoken language and gestures. The researchers recorded Yupno speakers explaining certain temporal words and phrases, such as jare, a past-oriented expression that translates to “day before yesterday,” and coded each speaker’s manual gestures. Previous research has found a tendency in many cultures to make temporal distinctions along imagined linear axes: for instance, Hebrew speakers often refer to the right/left axis to describe events in time. Some researchers believe this tendency is universal, but Núñez and colleagues claim this is not the case.

Poems is an 1895 collection of poetry by Frances E.W. Harper. In one of Harper’s poems, the speaker suggests that those who mistreat people with less privilege will eventually receive divine judgment for it, saying, ______

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.

Born in Chile in 1917, artist and ethnomusicologist Violeta Parra was a pioneer in the nueva canción chilena (Chilean New Song) movement that emerged in the late 1950s and then spread throughout Latin America, Portugal, and Spain as nueva canción. Parra traveled all over Chile compiling extensive records of authentic folk music as well as recipes, proverbs, and other facets of cultural history. These records formed the foundation for the early movement’s revival of traditional Chilean folk forms in new songs that represented modern realities of the working class and strongly advocated for social change. As the movement spread beyond Chile, the breadth of musical traditions incorporated into its foundation also expanded.

An emulsifier is a type of compound that serves to stabilize an emulsion—a mixture of two or more liquids that otherwise would not easily blend together. In the cosmetics industry, emulsifiers such as cetyl hydroxyethylcellulose ______ to blend oil and water into homogeneous formulations, like lotions and perfumes.

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

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 Olympics of Kizomba competition held in Paris, France, becoming the first ever Asian winners.

While some computer scientists, such as Michael Running Wolf, are optimistic about the use of large language models (LLMs) to preserve endangered Indigenous languages, researchers like Aliya Bhatia of the Center for Democracy and Technology ______ that from an archival standpoint, English-based LLMs may do more harm than good, given their propensity for error.

As a leader of the National Woman Suffrage Association in the late 1800s, Olympia Brown of ______ an important role in the campaign to secure voting rights for US women.

Proto-Nilotic is a hypothesized ancestor of the Nilotic family of languages, and, as such, its theoretical linguistic properties ______ those traits common among its fifty-five Nilotic descendants, traits identified and compiled by way of comparative analyses.

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.

A team led by Portuguese researcher Isabel C.F.R. Ferreira found that many species of mushrooms contain chemicals called phenolic compounds, such as protocatechuic acid and biochanin. ______ Ferreira detected protocatechuic acid in Agaricus bisporus mushrooms and biochanin in Ganoderma lucidum mushrooms.

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 relevant to the history of the Choctaw people.
• It features household items, including a cup (isht ishko in Choctaw) made from clay.
• The cup was made in 1891.
• 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:
• 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.
• Clermontia kakeana, a flowering shrub, was one of fifteen native species catalogued.
• Ardisia elliptica, a 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.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Gianpaolo Bellini is an Italian particle physicist.
• Particle physicists study subatomic particles.
• Neutrinos are some of the least understood subatomic particles.
• Neutrinos were first discovered in the mid-twentieth century.
• Bellini is known for his research on solar and geoneutrinos.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Felipe Posada (pseudonym The Invisible Realm) is a New York City-based artist who specializes in the form of art known as surrealist collage.
• Manifestation of the unconscious mind is a central aspect of surrealist collage.
• Irrational juxtaposition of disparate elements is a central aspect of surrealist collage.
• Posada’s Vagabonds irrationally juxtaposes images of a young couple, a boat made of leaves, and a vast celestial space.
• Posada: “My art is a journey through the invisible realm—a space where intuition, memories, visions, and dreams are free to take visual form.”

Text corpora such as the Brown Corpus are enormous collections of electronically stored texts that can be used for empirical testing of hypotheses regarding the frequency of typical word usage. For example, a linguist who assumes that the word “know” appears quite often in written English could ______ that assumption with data from a corpus: “know” is the eighth most commonly used verb.

One way to evaluate the importance of a scholar’s research is to ______ other scholars’ references to that research. For example, a count of other scholars’ citations shows that Yale University economist Xiaohong Chen, who studies statistical methods in economics, is referenced frequently, indicating that her work has been significant in the field.

Urban green spaces can improve air quality, as vegetation absorbs pollutants and also dilutes pollutant concentrations through ventilation. However, data from air-quality monitoring stations in locations throughout Romania suggest that this often-cited benefit of vegetation is not always ______: researchers found that when there are many trees along a busy street, ventilation has minimal effect on the air quality.

Analyzing data on Hemitriccus diops and 378 other bird species from the Tyranni suborder, W. Alice Boyle and Courtney J. Conway found that group foragers are much less likely to seasonally migrate in search of food than solitary foragers are, suggesting that seasonal resource scarcity can be ______ the greater foraging efficiency that group foraging confers.

Run by researchers in multiple countries, the Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE) is an examination of ageing that has attempted to track approximately 66,000 people for several years. Long-running studies like this need a lot of participants not merely for statistical robustness but also because of ______: over such a length of time, a substantial number of participants will withdraw or fall out of contact with the researchers.

Spoken in Northern California, Karuk is an isolate, or a language that has no demonstrated relationship to other documented languages. The Haida language in Alaska is an isolate as well. However, most Native languages belong to language families, or groups of languages whose similarities can be attributed to shared descent from a single language spoken thousands of years ago. Curiously, isolates are more prevalent in regions where numerous nonisolates are also spoken. Thus, the geographical circumstances that favor the development of isolates may also drive diversification within language families.

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

Text 1
In a seminal 1979 study, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky presented students and college faculty from Israel, Sweden, and the United States with hypothetical questions involving financial decisions. Finding that participants’ responses indicated that losses have a greater psychological impact than equivalent gains do, the researchers formulated the concept of loss aversion, which has since informed research in fields ranging from marketing to law.
Text 2
Dana Zeif and Eldad Yechiam conducted an experiment in which study participants from five countries were exposed to financial choices that involved potential losses of either relatively minor sums of money, such as 20 US dollars (low-stakes contexts), or more substantial sums, such as 100 US dollars (high-stakes contexts). The researchers concluded that only the latter contexts were associated with loss aversion.

Many artists associated with hyperpop, a movement in electronic music that emerged in the 2010s, conform to the model perfected by the American duo 100 gecs: bold synthesizer arrangements, propulsive beats, and electronically manipulated vocals. Yet the movement is hardly uniform: Swedish recording artist Namasenda incorporates hip-hop rhythms into the hyperpop sound, for example. Such stylistic diversity is encouraged in part by the music-streaming app Spotify, whose curated playlist of hyperpop songs balances cohesion with variety.

Studies of the population density of cougars (Puma concolor) have yielded a range of results, which may in part reflect differences in the effectiveness of the methods that researchers have used in their studies. For example, the difference between the maximum population density reported by Ross Clarke and that reported by David M. Choate et al. might be artificially large if the use of ______

The bird species Malacoptila fusca (the white-chested puffbird) practices a foraging strategy known as sallying (catching insects in flight and returning to a perch to eat them), enabling it to scan for prey and predators simultaneously. Conversely, Myrmotherula guttata (the rufous-bellied antwren), with which M. fusca shares territory in French Guiana, practices foliage gleaning (picking insects off leaves), substantially limiting the bird’s field of vision while foraging. Biologist Ari Martinez and colleagues hypothesized that the greater vulnerability inherent in the latter strategy is reflected in greater sensitivity to predator warning signals from neighboring species.

In medieval England, singers and minstrels made livings as traveling performers, but the pieces they performed have been a mystery, thought to be lost or never committed to paper at all. Recently, however, James Wade has argued that a manuscript collection compiled in the fifteenth century by Richard Heege contains three pieces likely copied from a repertoire book belonging to a minstrel working in the area around Heege’s home. Wade cites features of the texts indicative of live performance, such as chastising the audience, extensive use of simple structures (allowing for easy memorization), and requests for tips (payment) from listeners.

A student is writing a research paper on the history of irrigation in the United States, situating the development of the Bear River Reservoir (created in Amador County, California, in 1900) in a larger historical context. The student claims that innovation in irrigation practices throughout the United States has led to designs with increased efficiency.

A soil’s microbial community (the microbial taxa present in their relative abundances) is known to affect plants’ nutrient acquisition. Corrine Walsh and colleagues hypothesized that microbial communities could also affect plants’ flavor chemistry, including volatiles and secondary metabolites like glucosinolates. Recognizing that soil moisture varies by location in the wild and could influence plants’ chemistry, Walsh et al. introduced distinct microbial communities to individually potted mustard plants (Brassica juncea) growing in a controlled environment, then measured the plants’ glucosinolates, like 3-methylthiopropyl and allyl (the most prominent), that create the spicy and bitter flavors in mustard. This method thus enabled the researchers to ______

In September of 1989, Indonesia liberalized its stock market, meaning that it began allowing foreign individuals and businesses to invest money in Indonesian companies. This was part of a wave of stock market liberalizations around the world—Jamaica in 1991, Nigeria in 1995, and so on. The standard view among economists at the time was that liberalization would make it easier for companies to raise money from investors. Economist Peter Blair Henry examined the economies of 11 countries that were part of the liberalization wave and found that, on average, companies based in those countries received significant increases in investment in the three years following liberalization, suggesting that ______

Researchers who study olfaction—the sense of smell—define valence as a person’s perception of how pleasant an odor is. Conventional wisdom holds that valence is culturally mediated. A team of scientists led by Artin Arshamian evaluated this view by testing how people from ten different places—including the Semelai people from a small community in the Malay Peninsula and the Chachi people from a small community in Ecuador—ranked ten odors from most pleasant to least pleasant. In general, respondents ranked scents similarly regardless of where they lived, overwhelmingly choosing the odorant eugenol as more pleasant than caprylic acid. These results show that ______

The Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, whose residents mainly spoke Komi, was one of many nominally autonomous Soviet ______ by giving these restive republics the right to assert their prerogatives, President Mikhail Gorbachev likely hastened the Soviet Union’s breakup.

Despite being one of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO’s) newer members, Latvia, which joined the alliance in 2004, is just as protected—and just as bound—by NATO’s principle of collective defense as its founding ______

In ancient Mesoamerica, cotton was used as a commodity currency. By using specific goods like cotton as common units of exchange, commodity currency economies streamline trade, which is why they often replaced barter economies. Barter economies eschew ______ that requires what economist W.S. Jevons deems a "double coincidence of wants"—in other words, each trading party must want precisely what the other has.

In recent years, the English writer Ann Yearsley (1753–1806), whose poetry was widely read during her lifetime, has been rediscovered by contemporary audiences—a resurgence of interest that is largely due to literary scholars such as Stacey McDowell, whose work ______ the richness of Yearsley’s poems and the poet’s historical importance to the Romantic literary movement encourages a broader rethinking of British Romanticism itself.

Not all plants benefit equally or from the same kind of ______ sweet gum and carrot, for example, benefit from endomycorrhizal associations; many tree species, such as pine and oak, benefit from ectomycorrhizal associations; and plants in the Ericaceae family, such as cranberry, don't benefit from mycorrhizae at all.

Kho kho, a tag-like sport that originated in India, was not a medal sport at the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympic Games. ______ kho kho was featured at the Games as a demonstration sport. Demonstration sports have been featured at past Olympics to showcase lesser-known or regionally significant sports.

The names of geological eras uniformly describe phases in Earth's evolutionary history (e.g., Cenozoic means “new life”). Names given to geological periods, ______ are of diverse origins. The Silurian period is named after the Celtic tribe the Silures, for example, while the Permian period takes its name from the historical region of Perm in Russia.

Connecticut lawyer and statesman Roger Sherman strategically adopted the pen name “A Citizen of New Haven” when voicing support for the ratification of the US Constitution in the New-Haven Gazette. Publishing pseudonymously offered a number of advantages, such as shielding a writer from criticism and controversy. ______ by removing a potential source of bias (the writer’s name), it encouraged readers to focus on an essay’s arguments.

As technology has advanced, many countries have sought to gain an advantage in, or even control parts of, space and its celestial bodies. ______ it is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty—signed by Austria, Finland, and over 100 other nations—that curtails these ambitions and ensures that space remains a neutral place for the international community.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• In botany, strawberries (Fragaria ananassa) are classified as fruits.
• In botany, green beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) are classified as fruits.
• Green beans are commonly considered vegetables because they taste savory.
• Strawberries are commonly considered fruits because they taste sweet.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The United States has designated more than 500 areas National Wildlife Refuges (NWRs).
• Some NWRs were established specifically to protect endangered species.
• The Bear Valley NWR is a 4,200-acre area in Oregon.
• It was established to protect the endangered bald eagle.
• The Ellicott Slough NWR is a 139-acre area in California.
• It was established to protect the endangered Santa Cruz long-toed salamander.