The way in which individual elements are balanced within a photographic image tends to affect how viewers perceive it: symmetry tends to give the elements equal importance, asymmetry emphasizes differences, and radial balance (organizing the elements around a central point) emphasizes the center over the periphery. What a photograph conveys is therefore largely ______ how it is balanced.

Stars form in cloudlike swirls of gas and dust that cannot be touched, but astrophysicist Nia Imara believes these formations need not remain completely ______ to researchers: she uses simulation data and sophisticated 3D printers to produce interactive models of these stellar nurseries.

Categorical claims about the original function and significance of the Gabarnmung rock paintings—paintings of human and animal figures found in what is now Australia and dating from around 28,000 years ago—should be treated ______. We simply do not know enough about the people of the time to say with certainty what the paintings meant to them.

Often, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is given to a single person, such as Sir Robert Robinson in 1947. But scientists recognized with a Nobel Prize do not often conduct their work in ______ the scientific community. Instead, success in fields like chemistry is usually achieved through direct cooperation with other experts, as was the case for Roger Y. Tsien, who was among those awarded for “the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP.”

The following text is from José Rizal's 1891 novel The Reign of Greed (translated by Charles Derbyshire in 1912).
A lady accompanied by her husband entered at that moment and took her place in one of the two vacant boxes. She had the air of a queen and gazed disdainfully at the whole house, as if to say, “I've come later than all of you, you crowd of upstarts and provincials, I've come later than you!” There are persons who go to the theater like the contestants in a mule-race: the last one in, wins, and we know very sensible men who would ascend the scaffold rather than enter a theater before the first act.

The following text is from Armando Palacio Valdés's short story "The Love of Clotilde," originally published in Spanish in 1884. In the story, Don Jerónimo is a financial supporter of artists in the theater.
Any youth from the provinces who arrived in Madrid with a drama in his pocket could take no surer road to seeing it produced than that which led to the home of Don Jerónimo. One and all, he received them with open arms, the good and the bad alike. There is no denying that, since he was rather brusque in his ways, he never spared the young authors who asked his advice and read him their productions, but criticized vigorously, even to the verge of insult.

A contraction of “you all,” the pronoun “y'all” has long been used as a plural version of “you” in the South and in Black communities around the US. In recent decades, most other English-speaking communities in the US have begun to use “y'all.” What explains its rise in popularity? Many varieties of English have no pronoun that specifically addresses more than one person and instead must use “you” to address both one person and more than one. But “y'all” always refers to two or more people. As a result, it conveys the speaker's meaning more precisely than “you” can.

Many people use the trademark "Frisbee" to refer generally to flying disc toys rather than specifically to products made by Wham-O, the company that owns the trademark. As legal experts note, this may pose a problem for Wham-O. In the US, courts can cancel a trademark if they decide that its meaning is no longer specific to the trademark owner's products. If "Frisbee" were judged to have become a generic term, as "aspirin" was, other companies would be free to use it to promote similar products, making it harder for Wham-O to stand out from competitors.

The SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, has around 4,500 works of art. Digital images of hundreds of those works have been put online through the museum's website and the Google Arts & Culture project. One of the images is of The Card Game, a painting by Jacob Lawrence. In a paper, a student claims that putting a work from the museum online increases the number of people who experience that work.

In a study of interactions between plants, researchers Carolina Laura Morales and Anna Traveset gathered data about flowering plants growing alongside each other in various locations. In each case, the researchers identified one plant as a "target species" and a nearby plant as a "neighboring species." An example of a neighboring species is the sticky catchfly, which grows alongside the common cow-wheat in ______

It is common for freshwater lakes near or above a latitude of 45° north of the equator, like Lake Mjosa in Norway, to accumulate surface ice in winter. The amount and duration of ice depends on many factors, including local weather conditions as well as the lake's depth, volume, and surface area, but a climate researcher claims that some lakes in these latitudes have seen a decline in the duration of ice between the early 1980s and the mid-2000s. She cites as a typical example ______

Urban agriculture is the practice of growing plant- or animal-based products in urban settings such as community gardens and rooftop farms. Esther Sanyé-Mengual, Kathrin Specht, and their team surveyed three groups of people in Bologna, Italy—leaders of urban agriculture projects, stakeholders in urban agriculture (e.g., food researchers and urban farming associations), and the general public—to compare their views about the extent to which urban agriculture contributes to 25 social or ecological services that the team identified. The survey results show that, on average, project leaders rated urban agriculture as contributing less to ______

Arthurian legends (tales related to the character of King Arthur) derive from many sources, such as Englynion y Beddau, composed between the 9th and 10th centuries, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the 1300s. One of the most significant sources, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, was written in Latin in the 1130s; some material from it was later adapted by the Norman poet Wace into the Roman de Brut in 1155. But while no source before 1155 includes references to the famous Round Table at which Arthur's knights assembled, both the Roman de Brut and Sir Thomas Malory's 15th-century compilation of Arthurian legends, Le Morte d'Arthur, do. It can therefore be inferred that ______

All stainless steel contains varying amounts of iron, carbon, and corrosion-inhibiting chromium. However, ferritic stainless steel, often used for cooking utensils, contains a higher percentage of chromium (at least 10.5%) than does austenitic stainless steel and a higher concentration of iron, which is responsible for its magnetic properties. Unlike ferritic stainless steel, austenitic stainless steel has a face-centered cubic crystalline structure resulting from the addition of nickel to the alloy. Austenitic stainless steel has two subtypes: the 300 series, often used for storage containers, and the 200 series, which has less nickel and more manganese than the 300 series and is used for indoor architecture. Thus, stainless steel used to manufacture storage containers will have ______

An upcoming exhibition will showcase Vincent van Gogh's drawing Woman by a Hearth, which Van Gogh ______ in the city of Nuenen nearly 150 years ago.

While the greater adjutant can be found in places like Chitwan National Park in Nepal and Chhnuk Tru in Cambodia, more than 80 percent of this endangered stork species is found in Assam, India. There, wildlife biologist Dr. Purnima Devi Barman is on the front lines of conservation efforts that—through community involvement and scientific ______ aim to bring adjutants back from near extinction.

While other even-toed ungulate species, such as the domestic pig (Sus scrofa domesticus), are among the most populous animal species on earth, the dama gazelle (Nanger dama) has a total population of roughly 500 ______ one of the criteria required for a species to be considered endangered.

Ottawa/Pottawatomi/Ojibwe artist Kelly Church's mastery of traditional weaving techniques is apparent in her expertly crafted baskets, which typically are woven from black ash (a durable and flexible material) and ______ bold copper accents.

Solarpunk is an art movement that imagines renewable energy-powered technology infused complementarily into nature. In Paolo Bacigalupi's solarpunk short story "Efficiency," an artificial intelligence that absorbs sustainable energies, redistributing them through intricate networks of weights and generators, ______ Chicago's energy grid.

In Los Angeles County, California, bicycle paths such as the Venice Beach bicycle path—which is 1.51 miles lóng—have become an increasingly popular means of travel. Moreover, lawyer and cycling ______ has identified several features of the Los Angeles landscape, like its temperate climate and mostly flat roads, that make the city naturally bike-friendly.

Within Earth's biomes, there are four main types of desert: arid, semiarid, coastal, and cold. The Sonoran Désert in North America is an arid desert, for ______ a total area of about 310,000 km², it is also one of the largest deserts of any type.

The first documented use of the English word "galaxy" is attributed to poet Geoffrey Chaucer's 1380 work "The House of Fame." However, Chaucer didn't write in Modern English; ______ he wrote in what we now call Middle English, which was commonly used during the period.

Courses on African American history can be found at colleges and universities across the US. For example, historian Sharon Harley teaches courses at the University of Maryland about the history of racial and gender politics. ______ at the University of Texas, historian Juliet E.K. Walker teaches courses about African American businesses.

The Coastal Futures Conservatory in Virginia is known for creating aural representations of ecological data. One such effort combines underwater audio recorded in seagrass beds with data that track rising carbon levels in the seagrass. As carbon levels increase, the audio is correspondingly distorted; ______ listeners can "hear" the changes in the carbon levels.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• In a 2021 study, researchers showed participants an unaltered image of a popular character or logo alongside two slightly altered versions.
• The Bic logo contains a cartoon man holding a pen.
• In the first alteration, the man was holding a pencil.
• In the second alteration, the man was holding nothing.
• Participants were asked to identify the correct version.
• 65.3% of participants selected the unaltered image.

• Cinematographers work with cameras and lighting.
• They help translate film, directors' ideas into visual images.
• The Wrestler (2008) was directed by Darren Aronofsky.
• Maryse Alberti was the film's cinematographer.

• Trans-Siberian Orchestra (TSO) is a band from the United States that was created in 1996.
• The band's sound combines the genres of hard rock and classical music, with an epic assembly of nearly fifty musicians that includes over a dozen singers.
• Musicians are regularly invited to perform with TSO on tour.
• Vocalist Joe Cerisano toured with TSO from 2000 to 2003.
• Electric violinist Caitlin Moe toured with TSO from 2009 to 2010.

The following text is from Charles Chesnutt's 1905 novel The Colonel's Dream. Mr. French and Mr. Kirby work together.
Mr. French, the senior partner, who sat opposite Kirby, was an older man—a safe guess would have placed him somewhere in the debatable ground between forty and fifty; of a good height, as could be seen even from the seated figure, the upper part of which was held erect with the unconscious ease which one associates with military training.

The results of randomized clinical trials testing the efficacy of common medical interventions sometimes fail to ______ conclusions that practitioners reach based on their real-world observations of patients. While there are several possible reasons for this, one is that practitioners may overlook confounding variables that account for the results they attribute to the interventions in question.

Harriet Chalmers Adams, who explored and photographed in South America, Asia, and the South Pacific, undoubtedly accomplished much, but her place in our historical memory is perhaps more ______ than that of a noteworthy “first” such as Enid Gordon-Gallien, who led the expedition that first mapped the area around Kalambo Falls between Zambia and Tanzania, a deed for which she will always be remembered.

In the 2010s, the price of vintage empty soda cans rose dramatically, which had the counterintuitive effect of ______ demand: buyers who hadn’t previously wanted to purchase old soda cans suddenly thronged the market, believing prices would continue to rise and the cans could be resold later at a profit.

In 2015 Floriana Lai and colleagues published a study concluding that ocean acidification has a strong effect on the behavior of Gasterosteus aculeatus, a species of fish. However, Lai and colleagues' study relied on a mean sample size of only 12 fish. In a 2022 review of various scientists' conclusions about the impacts of ocean acidification on fish behavior, Jeff C. Clements and colleagues caution that relying on such a relatively small sample size can increase the potential for biased analysis. Such analysis, in turn, can contribute to reports of exaggerated effects.

Historians have argued that a crucial component of the Civil Rights Movement's success in the 1960s was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Citizen Education Program (CEP), which invited promising activists from across the South to its one-week training sessions in Dorchester, Georgia. Led by experienced organizers such as Dorothy Cotton and Septima Clark, CEP attendees—more than 7,000 in all—participated in workshops on topics ranging from public speaking to legal doctrine before returning home and using their newly acquired knowledge to spearhead local civil rights initiatives.

Asteroid 6478 Gault has experienced intermittent mass loss since at least 2013, but in contrast to some other asteroids with repeated mass-loss episodes, 6478 Gault has not lost mass at its perihelion (the closest point of its orbit to the Sun), and thus the loss is not attributable to solar energy-driven ice vaporization. And as Jane X. Luu et al. point out, the singular nature of impact ejection makes it untenable as an account of multiple loss episodes of similar duration over several years. Instead, Luu et al. are likely correct that 6478 Gault is shedding mass due to rotational instability.

Text 1
In western Kansas, many buildings and other structures rest on soil that is expansive, meaning that it swells or shrinks as its moisture level changes. Civil engineer Jay X. Wang has noted that the problem with expansive soil appear slowly in the form of gradually growing cracks in foundations, walls, and pavements. Because these effects are incremental and can generally be repaired (though at some cost), structures in western Kansas are typically not built to resist them.
Text 2
In a 2021 study, Rubayet Bin Mostafiz and colleagues calculated that in the state of Louisiana alone, the annual cost of damage caused by expansive soils reaches nearly $90 million. But they note that this damage can be mitigated: building vapor barriers between structural foundations and the soil can significantly reduce the effects of soil swelling and shrinking.

Thomas Piketty and other historians of capitalism rarely discuss domestic capitalism in Africa before the period of European colonization, implicitly presenting capitalism as external to and imposed on Africa. John Iliffe and other Africanist scholars have shown, however, that in parts of Africa, export-oriented manufacturing, the formalization of individual land ownership, and other features of capitalism predated colonization. One reason for this discrepancy is that historians of capitalism tend to focus on longitudinal economic data drawn from archival records, which do not exist for much of precolonial Africa.

Geneticist Elaine Ostrander led an international collaboration in which D. Thad Whitaker and other researchers investigated the evolutionary history of size variation in modern dogs. The researchers identified multiple versions of the gene regulating the production of IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor 1) in dogs and found that dogs of the same breed consistently share the same version of the gene. In a discussion of the study, a student hypothesizes that small breeds of dogs (for example, bulldogs) must share a version that represses IGF-1 production that would otherwise confer larger body size.

Scholars cite The Kingdom of This World, the 1949 novel by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier, as a foundational test of magical realism, the Lation American style of fiction in which antirealistic plot devices—often borrowed from the folkloric traditions of Indigenous and colonial societies in the Americas—are deployed in an otherwise realistic mode of representation typical of the modern novel. This style has exerted a decisive influence on authors around the world, including Orhan Pamuk, whose 2001 novel My Name is Red resembles classic magical realist novels in its juxtaposition of literary realism with folklore—namely, that of Turkey.

Indigenous songs are an important resource for ecological information. Songs of the Tlingit people in the extreme northwestern United States tell stories of encounters with wolves and other wildlife, 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 ______

In a 2012 study that took place in Brazil, Enelton Fagnani, Jose Roberto Guimara, and Pedro Sergio Fadini found a negative association between levels of dissolved organic carbon and mercury in bodies of fresh water. It may seem reasonable to be skeptical of this finding, since most other studies, such as research conducted in 2009 in the United States by Jason A. Dittman and colleagues, have found that dissolved organic carbon and mercury levels rise together. Like the latter study, however, most studies of the topic have been conducted in North America, and many of those study sites have similar characteristics to one another, suggesting that ______

As complex life cycle parasites, Gonocerca sp. and Clavinema mariae require multiple host species throughout their development. Extrapolating from parasite counts on surf smelt and seven other fish species collected from Puget Sound from 1880 to 2019, Chelsea Wood et al. found that the abundance of three-host parasites, such as Gonocerca sp., negatively correlated with rising average annual sea temperatures; the abundance of two-host parasites, such as C.mariae, was largely stable. Noting that fish and other marine vertebrates are especially vulnerable to climate change, Wood et al. observed that all three-host parasites in the study depend on at least two vertebrate species, while all two-host parasites depend on only one, suggesting that ______

Today, the Michelin Guide is widely known as the arbiter of fine dining, but when it was created in 1900, it was little more than a marketing gimmick; brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin sought to increase profits for their tire company by encouraging their customers to drive across France, visiting the guide's recommended hotels and restaurants along the way. Nevertheless, the guide soon grew in scope and ______ its modest French eateries were replaced with some of the most esteemed restaurants from around the world, including Hajime in Osaka and Kitcho Arashiyama in Kyoto.

Entomologists Yash Sondhi and Samuel Fabian have tried to explain why moths fly erratically around light sources at night. Knowing that flying insects keep their backs pointed toward sunlight during the day, ______

In Norway, the Longyearbyen observatory site monitors activity in the upper atmosphere of the northern ______ in Antarctica, another observatory site, Zhongshan Station, monitors the sky of the southern hemisphere. Together, they are part of the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network—or SuperDARN, as space physicists like Pavlo Ponomarenko call it.

Butterfly is a 1988 painting by the Japanese artist Ay-O. Like many of Ay-O's paintings, Butterfly, which portrays a swimmer performing the butterfly stroke, attempts to make use of the entire visual light ______ sporting rainbow-striped goggles, the rainbow-hued swimmer splashes through a wavy rainbow of water.

The 20th century saw the founding of many Latino advocacy ______ to protect and advance the rights of Latino Americans, both the Orden Hijos de America (1921) and El Teatro Campesino (1965) contributed to the history of US civil rights.

Estonia, Spain, and the other member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, share a commitment to the principle of collective defense, each NATO member ______ to defend the others if necessary.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) tracks comparative price list data for its thirty-eight member countries. For instance, in July 2021, a hypothetical basket of goods priced at 100 US dollars (USD) in the United States would have cost 50 USD and 137 USD in fellow OECD ______ and Switzerland, respectively.

Modernista architects championed nature in their designs. ______ the wavy stone facade and fish-themed mosaics of Casa Comalat, a Modernista private home designed by Salvador Valeri i Pupurull, couldn't exactly grow in a forest. Still, one sees natural influences in Valeri i Pupurull's penchant for curves (rather than right angles) and plant- and animal-inspired flourishes.

In a 1992 study by Hulet et al., the researchers determined the ratio of three different plant subtypes within the diet of sheep and cattle: graminoids, forbs, and browse. ______ the researchers determined the relative quantities of the plants the animals consumed.

With many elements, like selenium, scientists were able to isolate a relatively pure sample of the substance shortly after discovering its existence. ______ this wasn't the case with all elements. The process of isolating molybdenum, for example, took a few years--three, to be precise.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Artist Glyn Warren Philpot of England won a Carnegie Prize gold medal in 1913.
• The Carnegie Prize is an international art competition.
• It is administered by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• Philpot's winning artwork was a painting entitled The Marble Worker.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Onomatopoeias are words that imitate the sounds they represent.
• Onomatopoeias used to represent the same sound often vary from language to language.
• This variation is due in part to differences in how languages are structured.
• "Bar-bar-bar" is a Batak onomatopoeia that represents the sound of a heartbeat.
• "Doef doef" is an Afrikaans onomatopoeia that represents the sound of a heartbeat.
• The term “onomatopoeia" combines the Greek words for "name"(onoma) and "to make"(poiein).

• Vexillology is the study of flags.
• The flags of many countries include symbols like animals, plants, or landforms.
• These symbols often represent an aspect of the region's history, culture, or landscape.
• The flag of San Marino includes an oak branch.
• The flag of Montenegro includes a lion.