Scholars of Mexican literature have focused their attention on writers of the fertile period following the Mexican Revolution (which lasted from 1910–1920), such as Laura Esquivel. These writers are often considered the leading figures of the Mexican literary canon, but nineteenth-century writers like Antonio Menendez de la Peña are just as ______ Mexican literature.

The ______ of horse populations across Eurasia today reflects the competitive advantages of the highly mobile DOM2 breed that emerged through domestication and selective breeding in the 3rd millennium BCE. DOM2 spread quickly and extensively, completely supplanting other horse breeds in places like El Acequión, Spain, and Hohler Stein bei Schwabthal, Germany, by the end of the 2nd millennium BCE.

City planners need accurate maps of their city’s sidewalks to properly maintain them, but mapping manually is slow. Maryam Hosseini and her team addressed this by training a computer program to identify sidewalks in aerial images of Boston. When they used the program on aerial images of Brooklyn, it accurately ______ sidewalks and could even distinguish between concrete and brick.

The following text is adapted from Kenneth Grahame's 1908 novel The Wind in the Willows. The Mole is dazed after briefly meeting a stranger while traveling with a friend.
[The] Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can re-capture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn.

The synthesis of novel superheavy elements, such as nihonium (Nh), 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.

The fecal-steroidal profile of pronghorn is clearly distinct from those of other ungulates. By contrast, bison dung cannot be distinguished from elk dung based solely on their fecal-steroidal profiles, as both contain similar levels of beta-sitosterol and cholestanone, among other sterols. The relative levels of fecal zoostanols (steroids with animal origins), such as coprostanol and epi-coprostanol, in layers of lake bed sediments at Buffalo Ford Lake in Yellowstone National Park show that bison, elk, or both have been the dominant ungulate species in the lake’s watershed for at least the last 2,000 years.

The following text is from Rachel Heng’s 2023 novel The Great Reclamation. Ah Boon is fishing off the coast of Singapore.
When he pulled up the nets, they contained only one kind of fish—black pomfrets, the flat diamonds of their bodies slick in the morning light. This uniformity did not surprise him; over the years, he’d learned that the waters here were temperamental. They could be relied upon for a good catch, but from time to time threw up only prawns or squid, and other times colorful varieties of fish that weren’t even supposed to be found in this region. He’d grown to accept the unpredictability, embracing it as a game to be played, like the reading of tea leaves or the grooves of a palm.
©2023 by Rachel Heng

The RMS Rhone 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 Moseley 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.

Harold Newton’s Yellow Day, a wetland landscape with palm trees and lush greenery set against the pastel yellows and pinks of the sky and water, is typical of paintings by the mid-twentieth-century landscape artists now known as the Florida Highwaymen. Even though Florida was rapidly being developed at that time, tourists in particular held the idea that its distinctive tropical and coastal environments represented a pristine natural world, untouched by modernity. As with many Highwaymen paintings, the appeal of Yellow Day derived from its ability to capture this sentiment.

Online surveys are a common tool researchers use to collect information. These surveys are usually designed for use on personal computers (PCs), but more people are using smartphones to complete them than they are PCs. This shift in device usage may change how participants interact with online surveys. When researchers Jean Philippe Décieux and Philipp E. Sischka investigated, they found that PC users were more likely to multitask while taking surveys than smartphone users were, but PC users were also more likely to complete the surveys.

Installing a new high-speed rail (HSR) hub in an area has the potential to boost residential development nearby, though the amount and type of development vary considerably by location. This potential is greatest when HSR hubs are established in areas far away from city centers, as these locations tend to have more available land for redevelopment into residential areas.

Andrea Sommese, Andrea Temesi, and team investigated head-tilting behavior in a group of forty dogs, which included thirty-four typical dogs from five different breeds (including Benhur, a kelpie) and six dogs that had previously demonstrated giftedness at learning words, all of which were border collies. The researchers recorded the dogs’ head-tilting behavior in response to requests to fetch a toy that had been introduced early in the study. They found that all six gifted dogs tilted their heads at least some of the time when asked to retrieve the toy by name, while the typical dogs almost never tilted their heads. After reviewing the study, a student concludes that a tendency to tilt their heads is a characteristic trait of all border collies.

Mariana Lopes Barata and Pedro Simões Coelho collected data from 324 music-streaming service users to identify factors that influence users to opt for paid (premium) versions of music streaming services, like Apple Music. They found that performance expectancy (how much the use of a service is perceived to benefit the consumer) is positively correlated with users’ intentions to adopt premium versions. They also found that users’ intentions to purchase a premium service positively influence their intentions to recommend the premium service to others, which suggests that ______

Indigenous songs are an important resource for ecological information. Songs of the Kwakwaka’wakw people in British Columbia, Canada, share vital information about clam gardens, and the songs of the Karen (hta) Hin Lad Nai people in Thailand offer detailed information about bees. There have been efforts made to preserve Indigenous languages over the years—e.g., the United Nations’ International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032). However, such attempts have typically focused on spoken language despite the fact that some expressions in these languages appear only in songs. Therefore, if those involved in such efforts want to ensure that a comprehensive range of information is secured, they must ______

Neuroscientist Artin Arshamian and his team sought to determine what affects a person’s perception of an odor as pleasant: is it culture, personal taste, or aspects of human anatomy? The team assessed odor preferences in ten groups of people with different modes of living (urban, agricultural, and hunter-gatherer) including the Mah Meri people from a small community in the Malay Peninsula and the Imbabura Quichua people from a small community in Ecuador. The team observed little cross-cultural variation in the relative ratings of odors such as linalool, which smells like citrus, and mushroom alcohol, which smells like fungus, suggesting that ______

Following the swing era of the 1930s, cool jazz emerged as yet another innovative style in jazz ______ larger ensembles than those of their predecessors, cool jazz composers like Chico Hamilton emphasized smooth melodies in their works.

In Puerto Rico, it’s not unusual for a city or town to be known by a nickname that corresponds to one of its notable features, like landscape, ______ or chief exports. For example, the Puerto Rican municipality of Corozal has also been called “the Cradle of Volleyball,” a nickname that alludes to what the area is well known for: being a longtime volleyball powerhouse.

Many places in the United States share a name with a foreign city or country. When founding the city of Warsaw, Indiana, residents decided to name ______ after the Polish city of Warsaw.

New Mexico governor ______ the first woman to serve in that role in the state's history—took office on January 1, 2011.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who produced more than two thousand ______ His work Self-Portrait was completed in 1981 and sold at auction in 2016 for $4.7 million.

At the Ruskin School of Acting in Santa Monica, California, students can learn the world-famous Meisner technique. ______ by acting teacher Sanford Meisner, this technique trains actors to react naturally to the other performers in a scene.

Fulfilling their myriad duties with grace and goodwill, ______ in 2019.

Formerly known as the Indiana Territory, Indiana was granted statehood by a vote of the US Congress on December 11, 1816, making Indiana the 19th US state. By comparison, as one of the nation's original thirteen colonies, Connecticut became a state when it ratified the US Constitution on January 9, 1788. ______ New York attained statehood by ratifying the Constitution, becoming the 11th US state on July 26, 1788.

From mountains to monuments, deserts to rainforests, and isolated islands to teeming cities, the sites on UNESCO's World Heritage List are chosen because they hold cultural or natural value that the organization wishes to preserve for future generations. ______ in 2008, UNESCO recognized the importance of France's Lagoons of New Caledonia, making up one of the largest reef systems in the world, by adding them to the list as a natural heritage site.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Kōichirō Nishikawa is a Japanese 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.
• Nishikawa is known for his research on neutrino oscillations.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Carnegie Prize is an international art competition.
• It is administered by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• One Carnegie Prize gold medal winner is Cecilia Beaux of the US.
• Beaux's painting Mother and Daughter was honored in 1899.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Tlahuellipan is a municipality in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico.
• Municipalities are governmental regions responsible for providing many public services to their residents.
• Tlahuellipan's population was 17,153 in 2010.
• Its population was 19,067 in 2020.
• Hidalgo is divided into 84 municipalities.

Several scholars of children's literature recently ______ to discuss the work of Sharon Bell Mathis, author of such lauded books as Ray Charles. Once together, they talked about her style, influences, and themes.

Whereas researchers long thought the Congo rainforest constrained the initial expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples (which today include the Kuria in Tanzania and the Shona in Zimbabwe) across subequatorial Africa, recent studies indicate that early Bantu communities managed to ______ the rainforest, a feat facilitated by drier conditions that opened up viable corridors through the vegetation.

The extensive use of the costly pigment ultramarine in the paintings of Johannes Vermeer—creator of masterpieces such as Woman with a Lute (ca. 1662–1663)—was likely ______ as much by the pigment’s chemical durability as by its exclusiveness and vivid blue hue: relative to indigo and other blue pigments employed by Vermeer and his contemporaries, ultramarine is less susceptible to degradation.

The financial situation of playwrights in Elizabethan theater was often ______, but being as commercially successful as he was early in his career likely granted William Shakespeare security that contributed to his ability to later create Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, and other works still revered today.

With its mournful subject matter and haunting tune, “Silver Dagger” is one of the most celebrated folk ballads of the southern Appalachian Mountains. Dolly Parton, who was born and raised in the region, was deeply influenced by these traditional ballads, as can be heard in the songs she wrote in the first decade of her career. “My Blue Tears,” a song from her 1971 album Coat of Many Colors, echoes Appalachian ballads both in theme and word choice.

Text 1
Economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has a more rigorous structure than its sequel, Capital and Ideology. While the first book’s chapters all contribute to bolstering a clear, coherent argument about income inequality, the second book’s digressions on subjects such as the authorship of the Sanskrit text known as the Manusmriti do not just stretch out the book needlessly but also muddy its reasoning.
Text 2
Capital and Ideology has different aims than Piketty’s earlier books. It should be judged not just in the context of Piketty’s previous work but placed next to books like Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, in which the stated theme of the varieties of melancholy is mainly an excuse for a polymath to map his own mind. Even when sections do not explicitly support the central thesis, they link to each other in intriguing ways. None of them should be considered extraneous.

Guadalupe Romero Villanueva et al. conducted radiocarbon analysis of paint used in rock art at the Patagonian archaeological site Cueva Huenul 1, revealing that images of a comb-like motif date to as early as 8,000 years ago, predating other paintings in the region by several millennia. The motif was subsequently reproduced multiple times at the site over the next 3,000 years, a period coinciding with extremely arid conditions and slightly negative population growth. The motif may therefore have functioned to help preserve cultural knowledge during a time of ecological and demographic stress.

The desirability of minimizing the use of adverbs, especially those ending in -ly (e.g., “obediently”), in prose fiction is a point of agreement among many novelists, including Graham Greene, who described adverbs as “damaging to a writer.” To investigate whether -ly adverb avoidance is associated with literary achievement, statistician Ben Blatt calculated the frequency with which such adverbs occur in the works of E.M. Forster and other prominent English-language novelists and found that there is a positive correlation between low -ly adverb frequency and novels’ perceived literary merit.

Mushrooms, including Coprinellus micaceus and species from the genus Cantharellus, are known to use the process of evapotranspiration to maintain internal temperatures below ambient temperatures. This hypothermic behavior is enhanced by the many thin gills (lamellae) on the fungi’s caps, with substantial surface area contributing to capacity for evaporation. Examining fungal thermoregulation mechanisms, Radames Corderó et al. determined that molds and yeasts also engage in evaporative cooling to facilitate hypothermia and suggest that, lacking features analogous to lamellae, these unicellular fungi aggregate into colonies to derive the benefit of greater surface area.

The following text is adapted from Daniel Defoe's 1704 nonfiction book The Storm.
If I judge right, ’tis the duty of an historian to set everything in its own light, and to convey matter of fact upon its legitimate authority, and no other: I mean thus, (for I would be as explicit as I can) that where a story is vouched to him with sufficient authority, he ought to give the world the special testimonial of its proper voucher, or else he is not just to the story: and where it comes without such sufficient authority, he ought to say so; otherwise he is not just to himself.

Pollination syndromes are suites of floral traits that have independently evolved as a result of selection pressure exerted by pollinators; psychophilous (butterfly-pollinated) flowers, for example, frequently exhibit yellow, red, or orange coloring. In a review of previous studies covering 417 plant species, Victor Rosas-Guerrero et al. concluded that the syndromes reliably predict angiosperms’ most effective pollinators. However, in a response paper, Jeff Ollerton et al. note that Rosas-Guerrero et al. may have inadvertently ignored inconsistencies in how authors of previous studies evaluated floral traits.

Memoirs of Eleanor Eldridge is an 1838 historical account by Eleanor Eldridge and Frances Harriet Whipple Green. In the book, the authors suggest that many memoirs of renowned people aren’t particularly straightforward or candid, writing, ______

Dogs and modern gray wolves share a recent wolf ancestor from which dogs were domesticated. Noting that dogs tend to have darker irises than gray wolves do, Akitsugu Konno et al. presented facial images of dogs with a range of iris colors to human participants, who rated the dogs’ personality traits and their own attitudes toward the dogs. On the basis of their findings, Konno et al. concluded that the dog-wolf iris pattern may be an effect of human selection for a positively perceived trait during domestication.

Research such as the 2015 study of fish by Kirsty Elizabeth McLaughlin and Hansjoerg P. Kunc has shown that noise from human activity, like traffic on a busy highway, has various significant effects on animals, and many governments require studies of the potential noise effects on wildlife before approving highway construction projects. For one of these projects, a group of researchers suggested that, although there are both fish and birds in the area, taking actions to reduce the effects of noise on the fish will probably protect both types of animals because noise tends to affect fish more strongly than birds. Another group of researchers indicated that, although the effects are usually greater on fish, addressing only those effects won’t reduce the potential harm to the birds in the area because ______

Blue holes, such as the Far Side Blue Hole in the Abaco Islands, are large seawater sinkholes that tend to have varying water density and irregularities in their steep walls. In 2021, researchers studied the previously unexplored Taam Ja’ Blue Hole (TJBH) in Chetumal Bay, Mexico; using echo sounder mapping, they determined its maximum depth to be about 274 meters. In the complex environments of blue holes, however, echo sounder mapping has limitations. So, in 2023, Joan A. Sánchez-Sánchez and colleagues employed a conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD) profiler to remeasure the depth of the TJBH. The profiler recorded depths around 420 meters but was unable to confirm detection of the bottom of the hole, suggesting that ______

For nearly nine years, Swedish runner Gunder Hägg held the world record for the mile, a record that stood at 4:01.4 until it was broken in 1954 by an English medical ______ who ran the first sub-four-minute mile.

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

The city of Delhi, India, first opened its rapid transit ______ in 2002.

San Juan Market is a public market in Mexico City. Both locals and visitors ______ the market, buying everything from fresh produce to specialty meats and cheeses.

Museo de Arte de Ponce, an art museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico, is one of more than eighty museums in the US territory. Puerto Rico's museums ______ everything from the territory's art to its architecture to its coffee.

Refined safflower oil reaches its smoke point at around 510 degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature, the substance cannot absorb any more heat ______ will begin to combust, emitting smoke.

Philosopher Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) explored how multiple names can be used to refer to the same object or person yet still have different meanings. For instance, the fictional character Clark Kent and his alter ego Superman are the same person, yet the two personas are distinct. For Frege, this raises further questions about how ______

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

Silver is one of a variety of potentially useful trace elements contained in the chemical-rich brine that remains after seawater is purified through desalination. However, routine extraction of silver and other such elements from brine is not yet technologically or economically feasible. ______ most trace elements have only been extracted from seawater on an experimental basis.

The El Chaco meteorite, discovered in Argentina in 1969, weighs approximately 63,580 pounds and is the fourth-largest iron meteorite ever discovered on Earth. The Fukang meteorite, discovered in China in 2000, is much smaller at 2,211 pounds. ______ the latter is a stony-iron meteorite, and a size difference between meteorites of different compositions isn’t unexpected.

A student has taken the following notes:
• A team of researchers led by Guanning Pang discovered that inactive volcanoes in the Cascade Range have large underground magma chambers 3 to 9 miles below their surface.
• Some of these volcanoes have been dormant for thousands of years.
• Researchers detected magma by tracking earthquake waves that slowed down when passing through chambers of magma consisting of 3% to 32% melted rock.
• Magma chambers need over 35% liquid rock to potentially erupt.
• These findings challenge the scientific theory that magma chambers only exist right before eruptions.
• The discovery could improve volcano monitoring and eruption prediction methods.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Epistolary novels are novels written primarily as a series of fictional documents, typically letters.
• Sometimes, the documents are journal entries, newspaper clippings, and more.
• Julie, or The New Heloise (1761) is an epistolary novel by French author Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
• It consists primarily of letters sent between a man and a woman living in a small French town.
• Parable of the Sower (1993) is an epistolary novel by American author Octavia Butler.
• It consists primarily of journal entries written by a teenager living in an apocalyptic society.