The following text is from Darcie Little Badger's 2021 novel A Snake Falls to Earth. Nina is looking at old family photographs.

Nina couldn't stop looking at the sepia—toned photograph in an oak frame. Propped on the window ledge, it featured a portrait of Great-Great-Grandmother Rosita as a young woman.

The following text is from Mark Twain's 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom, a child, has been told by his aunt to paint their house's fence.
Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high.

Politicians routinely claim that journalists are ______, but while it's true that some journalists allow their own views to creep into their reporting more than others do, most journalists make a good faith effort to be neutral in their reporting.

The Nile River delta system is located in Northern Egypt, where the river drains into the Mediterranean Sea, and is shaped by ______ factors: for example, the geography of the coastline influences sedimentary deposition, which over time alters coastal geography.

Few religious buildings can be said to ______ the astonishing size of Djamaa el Djazair in Algeria, which, with the capacity to accommodate approximately 120,000 people at once, is one of the largest mosques in the world.

The following text is adapted from Jason Reynolds's 2016 novel Ghost. The narrator, who is in middle school, is at a bus stop.
I just go there [to the bus stop] to look at the people working out. See, the gym across the street has this big window—like the whole wall is a window—and they have those machines that make you feel like you walking up steps and so everybody just be facing the bus stop, looking all crazy like they're about to pass out. And trust me, there ain't nothing funnier than that, so I check that out for a little while like it's some kind of movie; The About to Pass Out Show, starring stair-stepper person one through ten.{cke_protected}{C}%3C!%2D%2D%7BC%7D%253C!%252D%252D%257BC%257D%25253C!%25252D%25252DStartFragment%252520%25252D%25252D%25253E%252D%252D%253E%2D%2D%3E
©2016 by Jason Reynolds

In 1827, Rev. John Wilk and other free Black men in New York City founded freedom's Journal. America's first Black owned and operated newspaper. Wilk's accomplishment is just one example of the rich history of Black journalism in the United States. That history is preserved by the National Association of Black journalists, which was founded in Washington. DC, in 1975 to support Black media professionals and honor people like Wilk.

Sheep and barn owls see in three dimensions (3D) by combining two images in their brains, one from each eye. This produces a sense of depth, helping the animals judge how close or far away an object is. Researchers have investigated 3D vision in preying mantises as well. In one study, Vivek Nityananda and his team fitted mantises' faces with two different color filters, one covering each eye, much like the filters in 3D glasses once worn at movies. By observing the mantises' reaction to projected images, the team confirmed that mantises do indeed have 3D vision, but it's unlike that of other animals.

"Coyote" is one example of an English word that has an indigenous origin. The word came to English indirectly from coyote, the Spanish word for the wild canine species. Spanish had borrowed it from Nahuatl, an Indigenous language of Central Mexico, in which the word's original form is coyote. "Iguana" also has an Indigenous origin and entered English through Spanish. But in this case, the original source was Taino, a language of the Caribbean islands, in which the word for the group of related lizard species is iwana.

In present-day Chiapas, Mexico, archaeologist Robert Rosenswig, remote-sensing specialist Ricardo Lopez-Torrijos, and colleagues have located 41 smaller settlements surrounding the ancient Mesoamerican city of Izapa. The researchers have concluded that these settlements were culturally linked to lzapa because each of the settlements is the same age and configured in the same manner as lzapa, with a pyramid to the north and a plaza to the south. Their shared structural orientation suggests that residents of the settlements likely performed some of the same cultural ceremonies as residents in lzapa did.

Many films in a language other than English grow to be financially successful over the course of their time in movie theaters in the United States, but some become immediate successes in their opening weekends. Such success is driven by many factors like advertising, genre popularity, and the fame of the actors and directors. A student claims that opening weekend earnings can reliably predict whether a film will be nominated for an Oscar: films that draw large audiences at the beginning of their release are the most likely contenders to earn these coveted award nominations.

Elisabeth Potzelsberger and colleagues gathered data on 23 non-native tree species grown in Europe. They analyzed reports from Austria, Poland, and Lithuania about the number of these species grown in those countries as well as the numbers of insect and fungus species that damage those trees. The researchers concluded that in only one of these countries are there more insect species than fungus species that pose risks to these trees.

In countries with right-hand traffic, drivers who want to make a left turn at a traffic intersection with stoplights have to wait for either a gap in oncoming traffic or a designated left-turn signal to turn green. At busy intersections, this often causes a backup of vehicles waiting to turn left or being prevented from proceeding by left-turning vehicles in front of them. Transportation researcher Vikash V. Gayah claims that in urban areas eliminating the option to turn left at busy intersections-both with and without dedicated left-turn signals-would improve traffic flow and, as a result, reduce overall travel times even if such a restriction would require drivers to sometimes travel a slightly longer distance.

It is common for freshwater lakes near or above a latitude of 45° north of the equator, like Lake Stechlin in Germany, to accumulate surface ice in winter. A study from 1980 to 2006 showed that, in general, the number of days per winter that such lakes have measurable amounts of surface ice is declining. However, a researcher claimed that some lakes have instead seen an increase in the duration of ice.

The state of Maryland has designated the flathead catfish as an invasive species that could outcompete some of the state's native species. Many other states draw similar distinctions between invasive and native species. But researchers Alejandro Camacho and Jason McLachlan have pointed out that Earth's climate is changing in ways that challenge such designations. Climate changes may cause animals to leave their current ranges and establish new ones. Climate changes may also create good habitats in areas where species couldn't live previously. These observations suggest that ______

To coders like Black Girls Code founder Kimberly Bryant, the computer programming languages C# and S-Lang have a clear difference: the former is an object-oriented language while the latter is not. Because both languages require highly technical knowledge to understand, though, laypeople ______ to distinguish between them.

On Humphreys Peak, which ______ an elevation of 12.637 feet, one can find the highest point in Arizona.

A recipient of the King Faisal international Prize and the Othmer Gold Medal, ______ known as femtochemistry when he devised an optical spectroscopy technique that allowed researchers to study ultrafast chemical reactions occurring within molecules.

"Coalition" is the term for a group of male lions, and across the Greater Kruger National Park in South Africa, many coalitions vie for territory. Between 2010 and 2018, the lions of the Majingilane ______ including Dark Mane, Golden Mane, and Scar-Nose—thrived within a part of the park called the Londolozi Game Reserve.

Several advantages—the ability to react strongly with chip components, to avoid interference from other waves, and to be confined within tiny circuits—______ acoustic waves as a promising alternative to electrical waves for transmitting data on computer chips; as a result, researchers are invested i developing more acoustic wave-based chips.

Like much scientific research, a noted 2021 study of moon jellyfish published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B reflects the combined efforts and expertise of multiple ______ Brad Gemmell is listed first, Kevin Du Clos, Kelly Sutherland, and other coauthors also made important contributions to the study.

Broadcasting from the Spirit Lake Tribe's lands in North Dakota, the Native-run radio station KABU 90.7 FM serves its local Dakota speaking community in several ways. ______ it broadcasts local news and music and also hosts programming in the Dakota language.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Spike is the nickname of a dinosaur fossil specimen from the Late Cretaceous period.
• The Late Cretaceous period ended more than 65 million years ago.
• Spike is a member of the genus Pentaceratops.
• Spike is housed at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History.
• The New Mexico Museum of Natural History is in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• A supercontinent is a single landmass made up of most or all of Earth's continents.
• Over time, continents merge together to form supercontinents, which then break apart.
• This process is believed to take hundreds of millions of years and is known as the supercontinent cycle.
• Rodinia and Euramerica were supercontinents.
• Rodinia formed about 1.1 billion years ago.
• Euramerica formed about 300 million years ago.

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 1,769 merchant ships registered in Malaysia.
• The combined DWT of these ships was 10.2 million tons.

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 Mason Neck NWR is a 2,276-acre area in Virginia, on the Atlantic coast.
• It was established to protect the endangered bald eagle.
• The Bitter Creek NWR is a 14.054-acre area in California, on the Pacific coast.
• It was established to protect the endangered California condor.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The French Republican calendar was developed during the French Revolution.
• It had twelve months divided into tree weeks of ten days each, followed by five supplemental days.
• Each day was named after a plant, animal, agricultural tool, or mineral as a way of honoring an aspect of rural life.
• Messidor is the tenth month of the French Republican calendar.
• The fifth day of Messidor is named Mulet, which means "mule."

Although Alfred E, Green's 1950 film The jackie Robinson Story and Ossie Davis's 1970 film Cotton Comes to Harlem may have had some ______ at the time of their initial release, their place in critics' estimations is now more secure. In 2018, for example, critics for the New York Times described the former as "irresistible" and the latter as "especially pointed."

Political scientists have found that although voters claim to prefer candidates who have nuanced perspectives on issues and who show a willingness to compromise, when asked to compare speeches expressing such views with speeches expressing ______ views, voters tend to regard the unyielding rhetoric of the latter more favorably.

According to a board-gaming website, the game The Resistance: Avalon has an average website-user rating of 7.6 out of 10. Although average ratings can be misleading when only a few users have rated the game, The Resistance: Avalon has been rated by over 22,000 users, which is an ______ number to feel confident that the average rating is reliable.

A number of recording artists ______ distinctions between Indigenous music and other musical styles. For example, Wolastoq musician Jeremy Dutcher incorporated traditional Wolastoq songs into experimental pop on his album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, and Wayuu singer-songwriter Lido Pimienta combined Afro-Indigenous music from Colombia with Latin pop on her album Miss Colombia.

Today composer Scott Joplin is mainly celebrated for his catchy ragtime pieces "Maple Leaf Rag" and "The Entertainer" . However, by overlooking his less famous works, listeners will miss the full range of Joplin's creativity. For instance, his waltz "Pleasant Moments" and his opera Treemonisha skillfully blend ragtime and classical music. These masterpieces deserve as much fame as Joplin's biggest hits.

The Ionian Mission, first published in 1981, is a novel in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey Maturin series, which includes twenty completed books. Some critics have found fault with the abrupt endings of The Ionian Mission and other books in the series, saying that they do not finish conclusively but arbitrarily stop. But other critics argue that the books should not be thought of as discrete texts with traditional beginnings and endings but as a single incredibly long work, similar to other multivolume stories, such as Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Text 1
Isaac Asimov, author of Nemesis and The Stars, Like Dust, is highly regarded despite his mediocre writing style. His prose is workmanlike: his characters are flat and discuss ideas rather than emotions. That his work is enjoyable despite this is a testament to his prodigious imagination-even if people read his books only for the ideas, they will have plenty to consider.
Text 2
Asimov is critiqued for his style, but it is wrong to fault a writer for failing to do what he never intended to do. For example, although most of his novel Foundation consists of people discussing science and politics and we find out little about his characters ' lives, Asimov wanted to convey the vast sweep of human history over centuries, and one of his points is that at such a timescale, individuals don't matter. Thus his lack of characterization is central to Asimov's thematic aims.

Shanlin Liu and colleagues relied on historical DNA (hDNA)—genomic data incidentally preserved in specimens housed in natural history collections—to investigate the evolutionary history of the rhinoceros family (Rhinocerotidae). Although this approach offers unique benefits, such as the ability to ascertain the biogeographical origins of organisms, it remains a relatively underutilized resource because hDNA is often to some extent degraded, a situation not easily remediable under current methodological paradigms and with extant DNA extraction and analysis technologies.

Meredith E. Protas and colleagues have explored how convergent evolution—a phenomenon that occurs when the same trait evolves independently in two reproductively separate lineages—can result from a genetic mechanism shared by both lineages. Meanwhile, Cynthia C.Steiner and colleagues have investigated how convergence occurs through different genetic mechanisms, but the relative prevalence of convergence through shared and different genetic processes is still poorly understood. This motivated biologists Delbert A. Green II and Cassandra G.Extavour to evaluate both types of convergence in a single study for their 2012 paper.

A report from an international organization that monitors the numbers of women serving as judges or magistrates on various nations' highest courts, such as the Supreme Court of Justice and the Constitutional Court in Belgium and the Supreme Court in Honduras, indicates that, other than the countries that had more women on these courts in 2013 than in 2009, for some the number in 2013 was less than that in 2009, and for others it was the same in both years. For instance, the number of women judges and magistrates on high courts in ______

Over time, marine mollusks called nautilids continually add segments to their shells, and the chemical composition of each segment is influenced by the available materials in the surrounding water when the segment forms. Paleontologist Amane Tajika and colleagues analyzed the septa (the walls between shell chambers) of one male (samples labeled “M”) and one female (samples labeled “F”) nautilid, finding that sample F07 had the same concentration of oxygen-18 as did water approximately 135 meters deep and that the oxygen-18 concentration in sample M28 matched that of water at approximately 365 meters deep. Tajika et al. concluded that sample F07 formed at a higher point in the water column than did M28.

Callie W Babbitt, Hema Madaka, and colleagues assembled a database of materials used in consumer electronics by studying products in the lab and by gathering data from similar product studies. The team gave each of these studies a rating for level of traceability (with a higher rating for clearer description of procedures) and for category consistency (with a higher rating for using materials categories more closely aligned with the categories in the team's database). Based on these ratings, a second research team concluded that the methodology was better explained in a study by Jaco Huisman and colleagues than it was in a study by Oguchi Masahiro and colleagues.

Soil thawing in Alaska has been accelerating in response to climate warming, potentially enabling increased carbon dioxide (CO₂) absorption through greater productivity of Port Clarence Indian paintbrush (Castilleja caudata) plants and other vegetation, but also potentially enabling increased CO₂ output through greater heterotrophic respiration (CO₂ generated by the activity of soil microorganisms). Hydrologist Yonghong Yi and her colleagues developed a model incorporating numerous inputs—years of soil moisture and snow cover data among them—to evaluate the effects of warming on the CO₂ balance in Alaska, concluding that net CO₂ is likely to increase if warming hastens spring snow melt.

The Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA-ÉLCV) is a longitudinal study surveying approximately 1,000 individuals in Canada to glean extended trends in aging. To carry out the necessary sampling of the population over many years, CLSA-ÉLCV needs extensive financial support, but this method provides valuable insights into causal relationships. However, when questions of causation are irrelevant, as with a fitness study seeking only to reveal the percentage of regular exercisers in a city who do weight training, longitudinal methods are unnecessary, and so ______

The many editions of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses are not textually identical, and scholars debate which versions reflect Joyce's authorial intent. One no longer widely read edition is the 1984 "critical and synoptic edition" edited by Hans Walter Gabler, which followed French and German editorial theories rather than editorial traditions of the United States and United Kingdom and which was later found to have introduced errors due to Gabler's choice to consult facsimile manuscripts rather than using only originals. However, few Joyce scholars worldwide had expertise in such textual issues, and most of those who did worked on the edition with Gabler. So, it is unsurprising that initial scholarly reviews of the 1984 edition were mostly ______

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 exports. For example, the Puerto Rican municipality of Adjuntas has also been called “the Switzerland of Puerto Rico,” a nickname that alludes to what the area is well ______ its chillier temperatures.

A region of the Soviet Union encompassing the present-day city of Sukhumi, Georgla, the Abkhazian—speaking Abkhaz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic—was in fact only nominally autonomous. President Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, by helping the Abkhaz Republic and other Soviet republics established along ethnolinguistic lines assert their prerogatives, ______ to the Soviet Union's breakup.

Minerals can be classified by how much light passes through them. For example, all (or almost all) light passes through kainite, which is classified as ______ only some light to pass through, hauyne is instead classified as translucent.

The artist Edvard Munch's painting The Scream, symbolically ______ to portray the existential anxiety that can occur when facing the unknown, is a highly regarded example of allegory.

The relationship between genomes and epigenomes reveals how cells with identical DNA develop different ______ whereas the genome in each cell contains a complete DNA sequence, the epigenome consists of chemical compounds that determine which traits in the sequence will be expressed.

That the geographic center of North America lay in the state of North Dakota was conceded by all ______ establishing its precise coordinates proved more divisive.

Monument 4 is the name given to a 19.8-ton stone statue of a human head that was created during the ancient Olmec civilization. It was discovered in Tabasco, Mexico, at the La Venta archaeological site. ______ at the Tres Zapotes site in the state of Veracruz, another colossal head statue called Monument Q was discovered.

In the West African country of the Gambia, the percentage of the population living in cities increased from 59.2% to 62.6% between 2015 and 2020: this upward trend in urbanization was seen throughout that part of the continent. ______ from 2015 to 2020, the overall percentage of the West African population living in cities rose from 44.5% to 47.7%.

Ugandan American professor Peter Nazareth believed that Elvis Presley's music is best understood not as a homogeneous collection but as an anthology (because Elvis showcased the contributions of a wide range of gospel, blues, and rock artists). ______ Nazareth entitled his college course on Elvis and his music, which focused on Elvis's many musical influences, “Elvis as Anthology.”

• A copyright prevents a book's contents from being reproduced (published) without permission from the copyright holder.
• When a book's copyright expires, the book enters the public domain.
• Public domain books can be legally reproduced by anyone.
• New Hampshire is a poetry collection by Robert Frost.
• It was published in 1923 and entered the public domain on January 1, 2019 (ninety—six years later).

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• lxmiquilpan 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.
• Ixmiquilpan's population was 98,634 in 2020.
• Hidalgo is divided into 84 municipalities.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Mohs scale of mineral hardness is a ten-point scale that orders minerals by hardness based on their ability to scratch other minerals.
• Minerals with larger numbers are harder than minerals with smaller numbers and can leave visible scratches on them.
• Minerals with smaller numbers are softer than minerals with larger numbers and cannot leave visible scratches on them.
• The mineral calcite has a Mohs scale number of 3.
• The mineral orthoclase has a Mohs scale number of 6.
• The mineral topaz has a Mohs scale number of 8.