Scientists have used machine learning tools to study elephant sounds, uncovering a sophisticated communication system. The tools ______ unique patterns in the rumbling sounds elephants make. The scientists claim that these patterns are specific calls the elephants use for individuals, similar to names.

The following text is from Chinua Achebe's 1964 novel Arrow of God. The novel is set in Nigeria in the 1920s. Ezeulu, who is the religious leader for several villages, announces when the annual yam harvest can begin.
Whenever Ezeulu considered the immensity of his power over the year and the crops and, therefore, over the people he wondered if it was real. It was true he named the day for the feast of the Pumpkin Leaves and for the New Yam feast; but he did not choose it. He was merely a watchman. His power was no more than the power of a child over a goat that was said to be his.
©1964 by Chinua Achebe

The following text is adapted from John Matheus's 1925 short story "Fog."
The fog extended its tentacles over city and river, gradually obliterating traces of familiar landscapes. At five-thirty the old Panhandle bridge, supported by massive sandstone pillars, stalwart, as when erected fifty years before to serve a generation now passed behind the portals of life, had become a spectral outline against the sky.

Microplastics are a common pollutant in large masses of water like glaciers. High concentrations and ______ among particles—variations in size, shape, and material—make it onerous to comprehensively classify the microplastics in a water sample, so Ojeda-Benítez et al. are exploring a device to help quickly and accurately identify certain characteristics.

The following text is adapted from Henry James’s 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady.
Everything Osmond did was pose—pose so subtly considered that if one were not on the lookout one mistook it for impulse. Ralph had never met a man who lived so much in the land of consideration. His tastes, his studies, his accomplishments, his collections, were all for a purpose.

Tomi Adeyemi's first published work, the inventive West African-inspired fantasy novel Children of Blood and Bone, has intriguing things to say about the relationship between identity and power. Adeyemi works in a decades-long tradition going back to writers such as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, who wove cultural elements of the Black diaspora into their science fiction and fantasy in a movement known as Afrofuturism. At its core, the movement is characterized by speculation, not just about distant futures or other planets but also about alternate versions of our shared past. Afrofuturism’s meditations on authority reinvigorate the creative potential of fiction.

Founded in 1904, the Hispanic Society of America showcases the arts and cultures of Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking regions around the world, including Latin America. It is located in New York City and has more than 18,000 objects in its museum collection. Since 2000, a number of other institutions devoted to Latino cultures have opened in the United States. A notable example is LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles. It focuses on Mexican American art and culture.

Text 1
According to a study by a conservation group representing 11 tribal nations in the Great Lakes region, the region’s painted turtle (miskwaadesi in the Ojibwe language) will have significantly worse outcomes over the next 50 years if temperatures increase as much as some models suggest. By contrast, the American crow (aandeg in Ojibwe) should be able to withstand the highest predicted warming without much harm.
Text 2
Researchers must be careful when developing predictions about how plants and animals will respond to future environmental changes. Ecosystems are complex and difficult to generalize about. Researchers should not assume that a given species will respond the same way in every place and time. Predictions developed without close attention to local circumstances are likely to fail.

A student is writing a paper on the global rise of the home video game industry during the 1980s. The student is researching the relative popularity of various genres of console and computer games. Looking at the information in the table, the student finds that the games in the genres of ______

Wenhao Xu and colleagues demonstrated that applying a low direct current electrical field to graphite (a conductor) and an acrylamide (AAm) gel can increase how strongly materials adhere to each other. At some voltages, adhesion strength—as measured in kilopascals (kPa) of stress needed to pull the materials apart—was high (more than 30 kPa). But the mere application of a direct current electrical field with positive voltage is not sufficient to cause increased adhesion, as evidenced by the fact that ______

When a predator nears the nesting site of a semipalmated plover (Charadrius semipalmatus), the bird will lead the predator away from the nest by pretending to be injured and unable to fly. This behavior is called “broken-wing display” and was long thought to be used only in the order Charadriiformes (shorebirds). However, recent research has shown that species from Caprimulgiformes (night birds), Apodiformes (hummingbirds), and 10 additional avian orders use the display—particularly those species that experience high levels of predation. Given that species with higher predation rates tend to have shorter incubation durations, some researchers have predicted that the defensive behavior is associated with relatively short incubation periods.

A typical string quartet consists of two violin players, a viola player, and a cello player. When a string quartet performs, one violinist and the cellist usually sit facing the audience. The violist and the other violinist usually sit facing each other. This seating arrangement causes the viola’s carved sound openings, or f-holes, to be angled away from the audience. Therefore, if the viola player has a musical solo and wants to make sure that the audience can hear it clearly, the violist typically ______

A few years ago, a study found that participants who rode a bicycle while listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll”—which, at 169 beats per minute, or bpm, is a high-tempo song—exhibited a faster pace and higher heart rate than did participants who listened to Ella Fitzgerald’s “From This Moment On” (93 bpm). In a recent effort to replicate this study’s findings, researchers played the same songs while two groups of participants similar to those from the earlier study climbed steps for 30 minutes. Average paces and heart rates were similar across the two groups in the new study, leading the researchers to suggest that ______

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 urban dwellers from a large city in Thailand and the Seri people from a small community in Mexico. The team observed that across cultures, people generally rated odors about the same: vanillin, which smells like vanilla, was typically rated more pleasant than galbazine, which smells like peanuts. The team therefore concluded that ______

Jesse Treviño’s 1976 painting Mis Hermanos was featured in the Smithsonian’s 2013 exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art. The piece ______ chosen for the exhibition by curator E. Carmen Ramos.

Mia Heavener’s 2019 novel Under Nushagak Bluff, which takes place in a mid-twentieth-century rural Alaskan fishing ______ the story of three Yup’ik women who grapple with the rise of commercial fisheries and other changes affecting their community.

Enacted in 1944, Iceland’s 4,089-word constitution, in contrast to Spain’s, which was enacted in 1978 and contains a far greater number (17,608) of words, ______ as the 2nd shortest in the world. Such data are studied by constitutional scholars like George Tsebelis, who can use them to draw broader conclusions.

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, climate, famous residents, or chief export. For example, the Puerto Rican municipality of Manatí is well known for its history as a cultural center in the early 20th ______ this distinction has earned it the fitting nickname of “the Athens of Puerto Rico.”

The city of New Delhi, India, is home to an office of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol). However, you won’t see Interpol agents chasing international criminals in New Delhi. Interpol can help with investigations, but only Indian authorities ______ permitted to make arrests there.

Recordings of electrical activity in the brain, ______ increased activity in brain areas associated with suppressing motor functions.

A team led by Portuguese researcher Isabel C.F.R. Ferreira found that many species of mushrooms contain chemicals called phenolic compounds, such as cinnamic acid and catechin. ______ Ferreira detected cinnamic acid in Agaricus blazei mushrooms and catechin in Lentinus edodes mushrooms.

While some researchers have identified the planet Kepler-296e as potentially habitable, it’s unlikely that humanity will be able to take advantage of its favorable conditions anytime soon—it’s 737 light years away. ______ humanity must first focus on making planets within our solar system more habitable.

The Tres Zapotes archaeological site is located in our home state of Veracruz, Mexico. ______ an 8.5-ton stone statue of a human head was left behind by the ancient Olmec civilization. In the nearby state of Tabasco was another stone statue that weighs 19.8 tons.

In a 1948 article titled “The Language of Lines,” Brazilian photographer José Yalenti argued that black-and-white photography’s distinctive—and in his view, superior—use of lines is what elevates the medium to the status of fine art. ______ Yalenti insisted that conveying perspective through linear forms is photography’s “indisputable and exclusive domain,” creating a visual language surpassing even celebrated painters’ works.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• A merchant ship is any ship hired to carry cargo or passengers.
• A ship’s carrying capacity is also known as its deadweight tonnage (DWT).
• In 2021, there were a total of 1,323 merchant ships registered in the Bahamas.
• The combined DWT of these ships was 74.3 million tons.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• 1914: British explorer Ernest Shackleton and a small crew embarked on an expedition to Antarctica.
• 1915: Shackleton’s ship Endurance became stuck in ice before eventually breaking apart and sinking.
• 1916: After more harrowing sea-ice adventures, the entire crew was rescued.
• 1959: Historian Alfred Lansing wrote a book called Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage.
• 2001: Filmmaker George Butler released a documentary called The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition.
• 2022: The wreckage of Endurance was discovered at the bottom of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Cree is a synthetic language in the Algonquian language family.
• In synthetic languages, nouns can take several different forms (or cases) depending on their function within a sentence.
• Combining the suffix -ihk with the Cree noun sākahikan (lake) forms the locative-case noun sākahikanihk (in the lake).
• Synthetic languages have extensive case systems.
• In analytic languages, cases are not typically used to indicate noun function.
• Noun function is instead indicated through word order and auxiliary words (such as prepositions and adjectives).

In a 2020 experiment, Kai Ruggeri and his team presented participants from Spain, Slovenia, and seventeen other countries with questions that were ______ those used in a groundbreaking 1979 study. By using the same questions that the earlier study did, Ruggeri and his team attempted to reproduce that study’s findings.

Annie Smith Peck, who was the first person to climb Mount Nevado Huascarán in the Andes, and Sophia Danenberg, who was the first Black woman to summit Mount Everest, are ensured lasting places in our historical memory. No matter what others may do in the future, nobody can ever ______ the standing of these women as the first to accomplish these feats.

The following text is from Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s 1895 poem “In Memoriam.” The speaker describes sunshine coming into a cathedral.
The light streams through the windows arched high,
And o’er the stern, stone carvings breaks
In warm rich gold and crimson waves,
Then steals away in corners dark to die.

The following text is from Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play Lady Windermere’s Fan.
MRS. ERLYNNE: I am going to live abroad again. The English climate doesn’t suit me. My—heart is affected here, and that I don’t like. I prefer living in the south. London is too full of fogs and—and serious people, Lord Windermere. Whether the fogs produce the serious people or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don’t know, but the whole thing rather gets on my nerves.

A study by Mohamed Alburaki, Dennis vanEngelsdorp, and colleagues suggests that overall, US honey bee populations exhibit low genetic diversity. Working with a large sample of honey bee specimens collected from most US states, the researchers determined that there are just three maternal evolutionary lineages in the populations: the North Mediterranean lineage, the West Mediterranean lineage, and the African lineage. They found that of the specimens from Montana, 100% descended from the North Mediterranean lineage—a finding in keeping with that for the lineage in many of the other states studied.

Text 1
The poet Audre Lorde once claimed that poetry is the most inexpensive of art forms to practice. While people who pursue other art forms—sculpture, architecture, theater—require large blocks of uninterrupted time as well as money to complete their work, poets can write, as Lorde said, “between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper.” So poets can make worthwhile art even if they must earn their living in another way.

Text 2
Any assessment of the state of contemporary poetry must reckon with the professionalization of the field. While it is possible in theory for anyone to publish in Poetry, Kenyon Review, or a similar major poetry outlet, many people who do so have professional training in poetry and extensive practice writing it, which requires time not often available to those who must also work full-time jobs. Thus, financial security indirectly affects which people become poets.

The average age at which people in the United States start businesses is 35. Economist Andrés Hincapié studied why young adults are relatively less likely to start businesses and whether there are ways to increase entrepreneurship in early adulthood. Hincapié found that one impediment is lack of knowledge about the practical details of how businesses are started; he further found that simply providing young adults with good informational resources on the topic significantly alleviates this problem.

Blue holes, such as Watling’s Blue Hole near San Salvador Island, are large marine sinkholes. They are typically located in areas where the ocean bedrock is made of soluble material (e.g., marble) because rock erosion is crucial to their formation. Because of the diverse marine life they contain, blue holes attract numerous divers and scientists. Currently, the Taam Ja’ Blue Hole in Chetumal Bay, Mexico, is the deepest blue hole on record, measured by Teresa Álvarez-Legorreta and colleagues to be at least 420 meters below sea level.

In a 2024 study, Caihong Vanderburgh and colleagues examined whether the composition of soil microbial communities could affect plants’ flavor chemistry. Whereas Jimenez-Gomez et al. (2017) showed that adding specific bacterial or fungal strains to soil can yield increased vitamin C in strawberry crops, Vanderburgh and team applied intact microbial communities gathered from ecologically distinct settings across Colorado, including areas of aspen grove and sagebrush, to mustard plants and evaluated the flavor compounds in the plants’ seeds. This ensured that the microbial conditions in their experiment would better reflect the variation and complexity of naturally occurring communities.

A student is comparing the speeds of trains on high-speed rail lines in different countries. The table shows information about high-speed rail in four countries.

An anthropologist is recording the metal contents of various historical deposits of valuables, called hoards, found in Ireland and Northern Ireland. He notes that the hoards differed in their contents; for example, ______

Since the nation’s earliest days, both houses of the United States Congress have counted many military veterans among their elected officials, including Hiram L. Fong (who served in the US Army Air Force) and Ralph Harold Metcalfe Sr. (who served in the US Army). A research institute gathered historical data about congressional members who have reported past military experience and determined that ______

Evan MacLean and colleagues evaluated behavioral and genetic data from over 14,000 dogs, representing more than 100 breeds, and found that genetic variations track to differing extents with behavioral variations between the breeds. This was the case for the behavioral categories of dog rivalry and excitability but was especially pronounced for attachment and attention-seeking, which can be seen when a dog solicits affection or attention. In another study, researchers found that the boxer and the Yorkshire terrier breeds exhibit very different levels of attachment and attention-seeking. When considered in light of the study by MacLean and colleagues, this finding suggests that ______

Animals Out of Paper is a 2008 play by Rajiv Joseph. ______ play was first performed at the McGinn/Cazale Theater in New York City.

In the twentieth century, many countries developed secret codes. These codes were used ______ plans during wartime.

A portrait of Silas Wright, former governor of New York, appeared on the $50 gold certificate. This form of paper currency ______ discontinued by the US Treasury in 1933.

Still Life with Three Puppies is a painting by Paul Gauguin, a French artist. Gauguin created ______ in 1888.

Physical barriers, chemical defenses, and protein defenses are the three main categories of plant defense mechanisms. The poplar tree uses a ______ the trees produce chemicals that prevent certain herbivorous insects from feeding on the trees’ leaves.

Julia Saltz is a biologist at Rice ______ conducts research on animal behaviors.

Artists’ palettes—the surfaces on which painters arrange and mix their paints—can provide valuable insights into the painters’ creative processes. In her 2024 book The Artist’s Palette, Alexandra Loske analyzes the palettes of 50 different painters across 500 years. ______ Loske reveals clues about the techniques and practices of such artists as Kerry James Marshall, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Vincent van Gogh.

The visual magnitude scale, which measures the brightness of stars, is reverse logarithmic: the brighter a star, the lower its magnitude number. ______ the star Dubhe, the 34th brightest in the sky, has a higher visual magnitude number (1.79) than does the brighter star Adhara. The 22nd-brightest star, Adhara has a magnitude of 1.5.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Save Me is a 2018 sculpture by American artist Olivia Steele.
• It is crafted from pink neon lighting that spells out the title phrase ("save me").
• Harvest Moon is a 2013 sculpture by British/Pakistani artist Shezad Dawood.
• It is crafted from yellow neon lighting that forms an abstract moon shape.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Usually, a country’s capital is also its largest city by population.
• The capital of Cameroon is Yaoundé.
• Its largest city by population is Douala.
• The capital of Liechtenstein is Vaduz.
• Its largest city by population is Schaan.

• 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 West Virginia is Spruce Knob, at 4,863 ft.
• The highest point in Colorado is Mount Elbert, at 14,440 ft.

• Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737) was an Italian instrument maker.
• He made about 1,000 violins in his lifetime.
• Musicians prize his Stradivarius violins for their famed sound quality.
• The Marie Hall Stradivarius is named for former owner Marie Hall, a British violinist.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Lighthouses send out crucial light signals to help ships and other watercraft navigate at night.
• Before automation, lighthouses were run by lighthouse keepers.
• Fannie May Salter was the lighthouse keeper at Turkey Point Light in Maryland.
• She held this position for twenty-two years (1925–1947).
• Ida Lewis was the lighthouse keeper at Lime Rock Light in Rhode Island.
• She held this position for fifty-four years (1857–1911).

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The meter of a poem is the rhythmic structure or pattern of accents in its lines.
• Alliterative meter is structured by a pattern of repeated sounds.
• Quantitative meter is structured by a pattern of long and short syllables.
• The Old English poem Widsith uses an alliterative meter.
• The Sanskrit poem Meghadūta uses a quantitative meter.

In the search for new impact craters on Mars, the roles of seismic monitoring and orbital imaging as data sources are ______: when vibrations detected with seismic monitoring indicate roughly where an impact has occurred, researchers can use orbital images of that relatively limited area of the rocky surface to precisely locate a new crater.

______ the mythological and heroic subject matter often found in works by Horace Vernet and other establishment figures, Honoré Daumier's painting The Third-Class Carriage instead focuses on something decidedly mundane: working-class travelers in a third-class railway car.

If some specific predictions in Alvin Toffler's 1970 book Future Shock seem ludicrous now—people do not wear paper clothing while living in underwater cities—Toffler's fundamental claim that rapid technological and social change will leave people feeling disoriented and atomized seems, in our age of disequilibrium and fragmentation, remarkably ______.

A conclusive demonstration of the logical certainty of the honeycomb conjecture, posed in the first century BCE, ______ mathematicians' efforts until Thomas C. Hales presented the first valid proof of the conjecture in 1999.

Establishing protected areas (PAs), such as Abrolhos Marine Park in Brazil, is a common conservation strategy, but because PAs restrict some kinds of economic activity, it's widely thought that they hinder economic development. This perception is driven in part by the fact that economic assessments often don't capture the indirect effects of tourism linked to PAs. But Heng Zhu et al. found that tourism associated with Abrolhos boosts local demand for goods and services in other economic sectors, resulting in, for instance, increased income from fishing in nearby areas.

Most Native languages belong to language families, or groups of languages whose structural and lexical correspondence likely derives from their descent from a single language spoken long ago. A minority—such as Washoe, which is spoken in California and Nevada, and Chitimacha, which is spoken in Louisiana—are isolates, having no demonstrable genealogical relationship to other languages. Yet Washoe and Chitimacha, like all isolates, are potentially remnants of families whose other members vanished before the historical record could attest to them, perhaps through the geographical expansion of extant families.

Text 1
Good art often challenges and disrupts social and aesthetic norms, but the creation of public art—paintings, sculptures, and performance pieces displayed in nonmuseum or nontheatrical public settings—typically requires broad agreement among artists, civic officials, and community members about the works' message and artistic goals. Public art that fails to appease everyone by being sufficiently aesthetically and conceptually bland almost inevitably provokes backlash.
Text 2
Public art is commonly displayed in spaces intended for purposes other than meaningful aesthetic engagement. Some critics of public art therefore note that norm-defying pieces that aren't effectively integrated within their surroundings in a manner that primes passersby to appreciate the pieces' merits (as is often the case) tend to be regarded more unfavorably than similarly provocative art encountered in museums is.

The following text is adapted from Mark Twain's 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Aunt Polly is having dinner with Tom, her mischievous young nephew.
Aunt Polly asked [Tom] questions that were full of guile, and very deep—for she wanted to trap him into damaging revealments. Like many other simple-hearted souls, it was her pet vanity to believe she was endowed with a talent for dark and mysterious diplomacy, and she loved to contemplate her most transparent devices as marvels of low cunning.

From petroleum refining to fuel for residential heating, hydrogen has many applications. Currently, producing hydrogen is carbon intensive, but Alexandra M. Oliveira is one of many scholars investigating the feasibility of large-scale production of hydrogen through electrolysis, a process that emits no carbon when renewable energy is used. Oliveira suggests that although some obstacles may prevent electrolytic hydrogen from dominating energy systems, there is utility in its ability to decarbonize the petroleum and heating industries, where reducing carbon emissions is especially challenging.

In subtropical Asia, Apis dorsata (giant honeybee) plays an essential role in pollinating a wide variety of crops and wild plants. To study how different agricultural land covers affect the species, Rika Raffiudin and colleagues monitored the foraging activity of the bees as well as the pollen content of the honey from A. dorsata colonies at two sites in Indonesia: Kampar, characterized by its surrounding monoculture farms (growing a single crop), and Kerinci, a forest-agriculture site where multiple crops, including hot peppers and coffee, are grown nearby. The researchers concluded that a lack of crop variety may reduce total pollen collection by A. dorsata.

In 2009, the US state of Montana enacted rate stability regulations (RSRs), constraining insurance companies' latitude to raise premiums (the recurring fees policyholders pay to maintain insurance policies) once policies are in effect. Although RSRs are intended to benefit consumers, Naoki Aizawa and Ami Ko note that RSRs could curtail insurers' profits to such a degree that insurers abandon the market, thereby reducing the competitive pressure that typically restrains premium prices for newly issued policies. To determine whether this occurred in Montana, students first collect data on the number of insurers in the state for a few years leading up to and following 2009 and the premium prices for new policies offered by those insurers.

Variously, researchers have closely examined obsidian artifacts to understand ancient social and economic structures, as in Raymond V. Sidrys's 1976 study, or to glean aspects of cultural identity, as in Dennis Ogburn and colleagues' 2009 study. Studies of the Malia archaeological site on the Mediterranean island of Crete have shown that significant changes to building styles—changes consistent with an influx of people from another culture elsewhere in the Mediterranean—occurred from the Middle Bronze Age to the Late Bronze Age. In a 2022 study, however, Tristan Carter and Vassilis Kilikoglou found that obsidian-object production methods at Malia stayed remarkably consistent during this architectural transition, which they interpret as indicative of local cultural continuity in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages.

The presence of other individuals of the same species has been observed to mitigate stress in highly social mammals. To investigate whether this phenomenon, known as social buffering, also occurs in reptiles, researchers led by Chelsea E. Martin monitored stress responses in wild southern Pacific rattlesnakes (Crotalus helleri) in three experimental treatments: when alone, with a rope, and with a companion C. helleri. The researchers compared the percent change between baseline and peak heart rate in response to a (harmless) disturbance, with higher values indicating higher stress levels.

Mountain summits are often described in terms of their elevation, or height above sea level. But a summit's elevation may not be as good an indication of how high the mountain appears to observers as is the summit's prominence, or its height above its surroundings, and these values can differ significantly. For example, the Indian mountain of ______

Whereas Joan Lockard's 1984 study of captive gorillas reported more right-handedness than left-handedness, Jane Goodall's 1963 study of wild chimpanzees did not. According to a meta-analysis of studies of nonhuman primates, captive populations are more likely to be described as right-handed than wild populations are. Statistical analysis indicates a handedness study would need a minimum of 176 individuals to show a representative result; however, the study by Lockard included a total population of 8, and the study by Goodall included a total population of 8. This suggests that ______

Interested in how the color of dogs' irises affects human responses to dogs, Akitsugu Konno et al. showed images of 12 dogs' faces to human participants and asked them to rate the dogs' kindness and trustworthiness as well as the likelihood that they would interact with or keep the dogs. The researchers had previously adjusted the images so that each dog was presented in two versions, one with light irises and one with dark irises. They distributed the images such that no participant saw both the light and dark versions of the same dog. Konno et al. found that participants responded more positively to the latter. The study's design allowed the researchers to exclude the possibility that the results ______

Astronomers Annie and Edward Maunder meticulously studied historical records of dark areas on the sun's surface known as sunspots. Their work in the late 1800s led to the identification of a period from 1645 to 1715—now known as the Maunder ______ sunspots were notably scarce, a phenomenon that solar physicists continue to investigate.

Charles Dickens's classic 1850 novel about a young man named David Copperfield has a title that is instantly recognizable to many readers: David Copperfield. Dickens's novel originally had a different ______ while writing and editing, Dickens had planned to call the novel Mag's Diversions.

On Guard is a 1997 photograph by Iranian artist Shirin Neshat. Like many of Neshat's photos, the work features a pair of hands. Clasping a microphone, one hand ______ covered in Persian script, the hands imply an out-of-frame figure on the edge of speaking.

The exoplanet Pi Mensae d was discovered using an indirect approach to planetary detection, the radial velocity method. Compared to that of the direct imaging method, ______ the effect these exoplanets have on nearby stars.

In the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, known as a hub for silk manufacturing, a unique tradition of embroidery ______ back over two thousand years—one that includes iconic double-sided stitching with different images on each side—remains popular with modern audiences, preserving the city's cultural heritage.

As anthropologist Cristina Grasseni explains, many artisanal cheeses in Italy, such as Provolone Valpadana from Trentino-Alto Adige and Ragusano from Sicily, are highly valued for their regional authenticity; ______ they are prized for being made using local ingredients and methods typical of their respective geographic regions.

The early Australian railroad system of the 1800s was famously uncoordinated. Trains on the broad gauge Victorian Goldfields Railway line in Victoria couldn’t travel on the Hotham Valley Railway in Western Australia, which used narrow gauge tracks, without performing time-consuming conversions. ______ historians refer to this complicated system as the "mixed gauge muddle."

When ordering the branches of the Colville River system, cartographers tend to begin with the riverway's lowest point, the Colville River. ______ hydrologists begin at the top of the river system, with the Siksikpuk River and other tributaries fed by the riverway's source, Alaska's De Long Mountains.

The Sultanate of Brunei, a Malay sea power based on the northern coast of Borneo that reached its height around 1600 CE, is considered a thalassocracy—a geopolitical entity whose hegemony resulted from control of the sea rather than of land. Historians classify thalassocracies as distinct from tellurocracies, or land-based powers. ______ the Ottoman Empire (1300s–1900s CE) is known for both land and sea supremacy.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The farm-size transition hypothesis predicts that economic pressures associated with modernization result in smaller farms amalgamating into larger-scale commercial farms.
• Masters et al. (2013): The average farm size in Asia "already has or will soon begin to rise."
• Promkhambut et al. (2023) argue that small rice farms in Thailand have adopted modern farming methods without a significant scaling-up of farm size.
• Promkhambut et al.: "The persistence of [small] rice farms [in Thailand] does not represent a 'failure' to modernize...or a 'truncated' transition—it is a response to modernization."

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Melissa Cody is a Diné (Navajo) textile artist known for blending traditional Diné designs (stripes, zigzags, and diamond patterns) with nontraditional elements.
• Cody's work incorporates arrangements of shapes or text inspired by video game graphics and pop culture references.
• Cody: "I'm a child of '80s video game culture...I grew up with this world of pixelization."
• Cody: "The things we consider tradition now weren't considered tradition when they first came about."
• Her tapestry Only Love Can Break Your Heart features pop song lyrics in a blocky digital font over a jagged diamond pattern.
• Her tapestry Walking Off No Water Mesa features rectangular panes revealing a stylized landscape patterned by contrasting colored diamonds.