The reception of Andrea Wang's book Watercress has been very good. Many reviewers, booksellers, and librarians have ______ the book, and it won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature.

The following text is adapted from Mary Seacole's 1857 autobiography Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Marry Lands.
That journey across the Isthmus [of Panama], insignificant in distance as it was, was by no means an easy one. It seemed as if nature had determined to throw every conceivable obstacle in the way of those who should seek to join the two great oceans of the world.

Kelp forests grow underwater along the eastern Pacific Coast. These underwater forests are important to fish and other marine animals. Ocean currents can be powerful and rough, making it difficult for animals to find safe places to hide from predators. The underwater forests slow down the currents. This creates a more ______ environment with calmer waters where animals can take shelter.

The recently observed gamma ray burst GRB 230307A lasted for 200 seconds, ______ for a burst generated by the merger of neutron stars. Bursts caused by neutron mergers typically last fewer than 2 seconds.

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.

Pteropods are small swimming snails with thin, delicate calcium carbonate shells. These animals are thought to be especially vulnerable to ocean acidification due to calcium carbonate's susceptibility to dissolution at lower pH values. Victoria L. Peck and colleagues recently found that the periostracum (a protective coating on pteropods' outer shells) prevents this dissolution when intact. Moreover, the team was surprised to discover that even when the periostracum is breached, pteropods can still mitigate damage by rebuilding the inner shell wall.

The Far Side of the World, first published in 1984, is a novel in Patrick O'Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, which includes twenty books plus an unfinished fragment of a twenty-first. Like the rest of the books in the series, The Far Side of the World has a rather abrupt ending, but the following book, The Reverse of the Medal, picks up neatly where The Far Side of the World leaves off. Thus, the sudden ending is only an issue if one considers the books as independent texts—the Aubrey/Maturin series is best thought of as a single incredibly long work, similar to other multivolume stories, such as John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga.

Guojun He and colleagues studied a food-delivery phone app that is popular in China. The researchers found that having “no cutlery” automatically selected influences whether customers request disposable plastic utensils with their food orders. Based on their results, the researchers concluded that this and other small changes to the app could reduce plastic waste in China by as much as 3.26 million metric tons per year.

The following text is from William Shakespeare's play The Tempest, first performed in 1611. Miranda has lived on an island with her father, Prospero, since she was three years old. Prospero has stated that Miranda likely does not remember anything other than her life on the island.
MIRANDA: Tis far off,
And rather like a dream than an assurance
That my remembrance warrants. Had I not
Four or five women once that tended me?

PROSPERO: Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it
That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?
If thou remember'st ought ere thou camest here,
How thou camest here thou mayst.

The Cherokee Nation and the nearly forty other tribes in Oklahoma operate numerous businesses and collectively generate billions of dollars in revenue. Mining, including oil and natural gas production, is a key industry in the state as well. While researching other key industries in Oklahoma for an economics class, a student finds that the average amount contributed to the state's economy in 2017 by each individual employed in wholesale trade was ______

A marine biologist is researching four stony coral species in Caribbean and Indo-Pacific waters, focusing on sightings of these species in the shallow zone (less than 30 meters below the surface) and the mesophotic zone (30 to 150 meters below the surface). Consulting the table, she notes that the smallest maximum depth is located in ______

In a college course on urban affairs, a student asserts that increased traffic congestion in the United States in the 1990s was present both in very large cities such as New York City, New York, and smaller areas such as Albany-Schenectady-Troy, New York, and Beaumont, Texas; though those smaller areas may have been less affected by traffic congestion than very large cities, this congestion also worsened in them over time.

Past research suggests that pollination by honeybees is responsible for up to 10 percent of total onion crop production. Now researchers are trying to determine how dependent cucumber crop production is on honeybees. The first phase of their study involved shielding some cucumber plants to prevent insects from pollinating them, resulting in those plants having 40 to 90 percent lower crop production than plants that were pollinated normally. However, the researchers claim that the first-phase experiment alone didn't tell them how much of that difference in crop production is due specifically to excluding honeybees.

The great egret and the roseate spoonbill are long-legged birds that live in wetlands, like the Everglades in Florida. Laura D'Acunto and colleagues wanted to know how these birds choose an area in which to live. They looked at features of the birds' habitats, such as the extent of tree-canopy coverage in the area and how deep the water is during the birds' breeding season. They found that great egrets prefer areas with deep water during breeding season, but that was not true for roseate spoonbills. The researchers concluded that water management strategies that increase the depth of water in potential wetland bird habitats during breeding season are therefore more likely to ______

In 1989, Missouri ______ official fossil: the Eperisocrinus missouriensis, which is a Carboniferous period marine animal.

Often anthologized alongside the ______ associated with the Black Arts movement—such as Haki Madhubuti and Quincy Troupe—Audre Lorde's poem “Coal” stands out for its memorable first lines: “Is the total black, being spoken / From the earth's inside.”

The part of a compound that determines the compound's color is ______ the chromophore. One example of a chromophore is hemoglobin, which gives human blood its red color.

Released in 1996, the Hewlett-Packard PA-8000 microchip contained a single CPU, or core, to execute commands. Since then, the average processing power of microchips has increased so drastically—cores now number in the dozens, hundreds, or even ______ the once-revolutionary dual-core technology that replaced the single-core chip can be found in everyday items like toasters and toothbrushes.

As a behavioral economist, Ai Hisano of Kyoto University recognizes that people sometimes make irrational economic decisions. Hisano's research can thus address anomalies that neoclassical economic______assume that people are consistently rational decision-makers—cannot explain.

When a given industry—water and electricity are two well-known examples—carries high infrastructural start-up costs and other barriers that discourage competition, ______ of just one or two suppliers per municipality. Such industries are known as natural monopolies.

There are three basic steps you should follow when planning a scientific inquiry. First, thoroughly research the question you wish to answer. ______ come up with a prediction (also called a hypothesis) about the answer to your question. Third, develop an experiment that can test the accuracy of your hypothesis.

Upon first approaching artist Kurt Wenner's Dies Irae, a colorful scene painted on the surface of a cobblestone street in Mantua, Italy, one might assume a deep hole filled with life-sized, classically styled sculptures had opened up in the street. ______ by expertly applying the principles of perspective, Wenner created merely the illusion of depth.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The human tongue contains taste receptors for a rich, savory flavor called umami.
• Umami is triggered by the compounds in a variety of foods, including tuna and Parmesan cheese.
• Participants in a study tasted a sample of sea palm, a type of brown seaweed.
• They rated its umami intensity as moderate.
• The participants tasted a sample of rausu-konbu, another type of brown seaweed.
• They rated its umami intensity as high.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Xochicoatlan 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 traffic control.
• Xochicoatlan covers an area of roughly 187 km².
• Hidalgo is divided into 84 municipalities.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Future of Nostalgia is a scholarly book by literary theorist Svetlana Boym.
• The book provides a multifaceted exploration of the concept of nostalgia.
• Chapter 8 explores nostalgia and Europe's largest shopping mall.
• Chapter 14 discusses themes of nostalgia in Joseph Brodsky's writing.
• In chapter 14, Boym writes, “Brodsky's nostalgia is not only for the poetic tradition, but also for the ways of reading and inhabiting culture.”

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Clovis First hypothesis proposes that ancient humans known as Clovis were the first to populate North America.
• The Clovis arrived around 13,000 years ago.
• Stone tools found at the Saltville site in Virginia date to approximately 16,000 years ago.
• These items support the idea that humans were present in North America before the Ciovis population arrived.
• More than a dozen North American sites containing pre-Clovis items have been identified.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Onomatopoeias are words that imitate the sounds they represent.
• Words that represent the same sound are often written and pronounced very differently from language to language.
• This variation is due in part to differences in how the languages are structured.
• “Hrr pityipu” is a Hungarian onomatopoeia that represents the sound of snoring.
• “Krooh pyyh” is a Finnish onomatopoeia that represents the sound of snoring.

Although our knowledge of the Pleistocene epoch and the lives of hominids during this time was once ______, recent analyses of fossils like that of the individual known as Petralona 1, discovered in Greece in 1960, have sharpened our picture of what a day in the life of Petralona 1 may have looked like.

Text corpora such as the American National Corpus are enormous collections of electronically stored texts that can be used for empirical testing of hypotheses regarding how ______ a word is in spoken and written English. For instance, one might have a guess about the incidence of the word “long,” but only an analysis of a corpus can prove that “long” is the fifth most commonly used adjective.

Authors like Laura Esquivel contributed to the outpouring of Mexican literature in the years following the Mexican Revolution, which lasted from 1910-1920. Works from this period make up an ______ proportion of what is considered the canon of Mexican literature, but nineteenth-century writers like Justo Sierra O'Reilly should be considered just as integral to the Mexican literary canon.

In the late 1970s, the price of collectible stamps from earlier in the century rose dramatically, which had the counterintuitive effect of ______ demand: buyers who hadn't previously wanted to purchase old stamps suddenly thronged the market, believing prices would continue to rise and the stamps could be resold later at a profit.

Buenos Aires has high pedestrian traffic, but simply replicating a feature of Buenos Aires associated with walkability—e.g., its high concentration of shaded streets—may be insufficient to induce increased walking in other cities. As urbanist Mariela Alfonzo argues, our understanding of individuals’ decision-making about whether to walk is insufficiently robust: some studies emphasize the role of individual physical fitness, others the role of population density, and so on, but walking decisions are made in complex contexts in which multiple conditions and needs inform individuals’ choices.

Text 1
In separate studies, Stephen Meding and Robert J. Zasoski and Xinhua He and colleagues examined whether plants transfer nutrients to one another using a common mycorrhizal network (CMN)—a lattice of fungal strands in the soil. Meding and Zasoski excluded all pathways other than the CMN by using barriers to keep the plants' root systems separate while allowing mycorrhizal strands through—a crucial step He and colleagues’ study did not take.

Text 2
Meding and Zasoski took the necessary precaution of separating the plants’ root systems (thereby excluding root-to-root transmission). However, any barrier used must allow the thread-like hyphae of a CMN to pass through, and this permeability would also allow liquids through. Thus, the researchers' experimental design cannot ensure that any nutrient transfer observed can be attributed to a CMN and not to some other pathway.

“Tomato” is an example of a loanword—that is, a word that originated in one language and was later adopted by another. The word came to English indirectly from tomate, the Spanish word for the widely cultivated plant. Spanish had borrowed it from Nahuatl, an Indigenous language of Central Mexico, in which the word's original form is tomatl. “Maize” 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 corn plant is mahis.

The food industry has long used thermal technologies to preserve food in large batches. Recent advancements in radiofrequency heating were made through research in Mexico on the preservation of wheat flour. Radiofrequency heating is generally considered to be an improvement over more conventional thermal preservation methods: whereas conventional methods transfer energy from the surface of a food to its interior, radiofrequency heating uses precisely controlled radio waves to generate heat within the food itself, thus reducing industrial cooking times.

Yingguang Frank Chan 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, Patricia J. Wittkopp and colleagues have investigated how convergence occurs through different genetic mechanisms. However, 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.

The following text is from Mick Herron's 2023 novel The Secret Hours. The narrator is describing members of a government committee.
Finally, and adding much-needed gravitas, was Sir Winston Day, whose features seemed moulded to adorn a bust, or possibly a stamp, and whose forehead was so evidently bulging with grey matter that it would have been impertinent to inquire too closely into the actual achievements his half century of public service had produced. His recently published memoirs possibly cast light on this enigma, but given that such details were not provided until after the thirty-page mark, they might as well have remained state secrets.
©2023 by Mick Herron

Drosophila (fruit flies) have generation times of 10-12 days, so seasonal changes in humidity and other environmental conditions can drive seasonal fluctuations in chromosome rearrangements in species such as D. persimilis and D. subobscura. Drosophila body size (for which wing centroid size serves as a proxy measure) correlates with reproductive fitness. Banu Sebnem Onder and Cansu Fidan Aksoy measured the wing sizes of members of a D. melanogaster population in Yesiloz, Turkey, that were collected monthly between May and October over three years. Their research suggests that Drosophila collected in relatively warmer months should tend to have greater reproductive fitness, as is illustrated by the finding that ______

Some toothpastes contain titanium dioxide nanoparticles (TiO₂-NPs), which can leach into waterways and soils via wastewater. In a 2015 study, Adeline Bourgeault and colleagues found that TiO₂-NPs can accumulate in the bodies of zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha). While bioaccumulation of manufactured nanoparticles may be inherently worrisome, it has been hypothesized that TiO₂-NP bioaccumulation in invertebrates like D. polymorpha could serve a valuable proxy role, obviating the need for manufacturers to conduct costly and intrusive sampling of vertebrate species—such as common carp (Cyprinus carpio), commonly used in regulatory compliance testing—for nanoparticle bioaccumulation, as environmental protection laws currently require.

Many Indian snack foods, such as bhatoora and paneer pakora, acquire their flavor from being fried in oil; some are also coated in batter beforehand. Chemists Marc A, Meyers and Andrew Grazela studied the mass and heat transfer processes that occur when foods are fried in batters containing hydrocolloids, polymers that become viscous or gel-like in water. During frying, water in the food evaporates, leaving voids that oil (a pure fat) can fill. As the process continues, water from the food's center moves to the crust as long as the crust remains permeable. However, hydrocolloids can create structures in the crust that reduce the transfer of moisture out of the food's core during frying. Therefore, a food fried without a hydrocolloid batter coating will likely ______

Zooarchaeologist Ophélie Lebrasseur and her team examined a fox skeleton discovered in 1991 at an archaeological site alongside artifacts of human habitation (like spear points) in central Argentina. Lebrasseur et al. determined that the fox was Dusicyon avus, an extinct species resembling a jackal, and radiocarbon dating placed the fox at the site at the same time as human inhabitants. (Indeed, the inhabitants may have deliberately buried the fox.) In addition, while wild foxes have a diet entirely made of meat, isotopic signatures of the skeleton's teeth indicated that the fox's diet, like that of the humans, was partly composed of plant material. Lebrasseur et al. therefore concluded that ______

Prolonged exposure to anthropogenic noise (sounds from human sources like traffic or mining) can affect animals, as Graeme Shannon and colleagues found in a 2014 study of black-tailed prairie dogs. Researchers conducted a meta-analysis of studies of how such noise affects animals and found that, for every study, relevant traits or behaviors of the animals were observably different between the exposed group and the otherwise similar but unexposed group. Although, on average, studies of mammals showed larger differences than studies of fish did, for every class of animals examined, there were individual studies showing differences well above the average for mammals. Therefore, the results of the meta-analysis suggest 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 Hijikata in Nagoya and ABaC in Barcelona.

Each year, the Nobel Prize in Literature is given to an author who has, in the words of its founder Alfred Nobel, “produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic ______ in 1967, for instance, judges recognized Andre Paul Guillaume “for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight.”

After finding information about Benjamin Sterling Turner, who represented Alabama in the United States House of Representatives, the student discovered biographical sketches of two other Black Americans who served in ______ Robert Brown Elliott of South Carolina and Ronald V. Dellums of California.

Joy Williams's essay on “cenote,” a term referring to a deep sinkhole containing a pool of water, is just one of many essays included in Home Ground: A Guide to the American ______ by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, the book celebrates the rich language used to describe the landscape of North America.

Most US states and territories have had at least one woman serve as governor. In Nebraska, for example, Governor Kay A. Orr took office on January 9, 1987. In fact, the number of states and territories that have had only male governors ______ almost every year.

The Austronesian language family comprises some 1,200 languages, including Minangkabau and llokano, which are spoken primarily in Indonesia and the Philippines, ______ accounting for one-fifth of the world's languages, the Austronesian family is of keen interest to linguists like Sandra Chung.

Before the first railroads were built in Australia, engineers warned against using multiple track widths across the continent. ______ regional officials couldn't agree on a single-width system. Thus, railways in Queensland, like the Durundur Railway, were made using narrow tracks, while those in Victoria were built with wide tracks.

Joseph Goodrich was an outspoken abolitionist whose Wisconsin home was a stop on the underground railroad (the network of people and places that some enslaved people used to escape to freedom). ______ supporters of the railroad were secretive about their antislavery views. By and large, they were vocal abolitionists like Goodrich.

The work of contemporary Asian American poet John Yau often incorporates references to other poems and works of visual art. Typically, these allusive gestures are subtle, recognized by only the most attentive of Yau's readers. In his 2013 poem “Further Adventures in Monochrome,”______Yau explicitly identifies a particular artwork—Yves Klein's 1960 painting Silence is Golden—as the poem's inspiration.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Documentary TV programs in the slow TV genre consist of uninterrupted broadcasts of ordinary events in real time.
• Reinflytting is a Norwegian slow TV program.
• The 9-day-long program documented a wild reindeer migration from their winter to summer pastures.
• It first aired in 2017.
• Slow TV has been called “the world's most boring television.”
• American journalist Nathan Heller praises it, writing that “it affords a visceral kind of armchair tourism.”

• Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who produced more than two thousand drawings and paintings.
• His work Mater was completed in 1982 and sold at auction in 2017.
• Mater is composed of acrylic and oil stick on canvas and measures 6,048 square inches in area.
• His work Flash in Naples was completed in 1983 and sold at auction in 2009.
• Flash in Naples is composed of acrylic, oil stick, and oil on canvas and measures 3,992 square inches in area.

• The Music by Black Composers (MBC) project aims to inspire aspiring music students by archiving and sharing information about the music of Black classical composers.
• Maurice Arnold is a Black classical music composer included in MBC's Historic Composers Directory.
• He was born in 1865 and died in 1937.