Building additional road capacity may seem like an obvious solution to traffic congestion, but numerous studies have cast doubt on the ______ of that approach. Not only does additional road capacity often fail to relieve congestion, but it can also make traffic worse by encouraging more people to drive.

Though many ______ studies of the effect of altitude on blood chemistry focus on people who live above sea level, researchers Suleiman A. Al-Sweedan and Moath Alhaj recently chose the novel path of focusing on people who live below sea level, in locations such as the California towns of Salton Sea Beach and Holtville.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Black residents of Richmond, Virginia, had few formal options for banking and other financial services. To ______ this situation, Maggie Lena Walker chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in 1903. The bank went on to provide home loans and savings opportunities to thousands of Black families over the following decades.

The Gleaners, painted in the realist style by Jean-Francois Millet, depicts peasants picking stray wheat from a field after the harvest. The realists' emphasis on accurately portraying the experiences of average working people was largely a rejection of the romantic style evident in many paintings by Jérome-Martin Langlois, which instead ______ their subjects’ beauty or heroism while hiding all imperfection.

The following text is from Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1885 novel The Squatter and the Don. In the novel, Clarence and Mercedes develop a romantic relationship.
Mercedes, being not quite seventeen, her grief at parting from Clarence was wild, vehement and all-absorbing. But she had been trained to obedience, and her battles with the spirit always took place after she carefully locked her bedroom door. Then Clarence was wildly apostrophized, and a torrent of tears relieved the overcharged, aching heart.

In 2023 literary scholar Jeremy Douglass cautioned technology investors and enthusiasts who predict conventional books' ultimate displacement by newer forms of media. Douglass observed that the concept of an “interactive” text is much older than technologists assume, extending back to the first time readers scratched notes into a text's margins. In addition, newer media, such as video games, haven't replaced older forms of entertainment, such as comic books, but rather exist alongside them. Douglass believes that rather than supplanting books, technology is simply making new forms of expression possible.

Businesses selling clothing and other fashion items face obstacles in trying to forecast how much product to order: tastes and styles change quickly, while manufacturing clothing takes a significant amount of time. Researchers Youran Fu and Marshall Fisher have found that combining sellers' own data with information gathered from social media can dramatically improve the accuracy of such forecasts—by 24 to 57 percent in the cases they directly studied. Better predictions mean demand is easier to meet without retailers becoming overstocked.

The following text is from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1830 short story “Sir William Phips.”
The knowledge, communicated by the historian and biographer, is analogous to that which we acquire of a country by the map,—minute, perhaps, and accurate, and available for all necessary purposes, but cold and naked, and wholly destitute of the mimic charm produced by landscape painting. These defects are partly remediable, and even without an absolute violation of literal truth, although by methods rightfully interdicted to professors of biographical exactness.

Women like Juanita Moody made important early contributions to the history of US cryptology, a field concerned with secure data communication and storage. Moody worked as a cryptanalyst for the National Security Agency and was the first recipient of the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement. In this way, Moody and others like her helped make it possible for more women—such as Maureen Baginski, who currently works in intelligence and supports the FBI—to enter the field of cryptology.

The following text is from Jerome K. Jerome's 1889 novel Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). The narrator and two friends are taking a boat down the River Thames in England.
In a boat, I have always noticed that it is the fixed idea of each member of the crew that he is doing everything. Harris's notion was, that it was he alone who had been working, and that both George and I had been imposing upon him. George, on the other hand, ridiculed the idea of Harris's having done anything more than eat and sleep, and had a cast-iron opinion that it was he—George himself—who had done all the labour worth speaking of.

In terms of total area, the Cherokee Nation is one of the largest tribal nations in the United States. It covers 6,963 square miles in what is now northeastern Oklahoma. In comparison, the total area of the Red Lake Nation in Minnesota is only ______

A student is writing an essay about four pyramids for a history class and wants to note how long ago each pyramid was built. Consulting the table, the student finds that the Nohoch Mul Pyramid was built ______

“A Pair of Silk Stockings” is an 1897 short story written by Kate Chopin. In describing the character of Mrs. Sommers, Chopin emphasizes the uniqueness of Mrs. Sommers's perspective: ______

A student is researching rotating radio transients (RRATs), a subclass of pulsar stars characterized by short pulses of radio waves. The time between consecutive pulses of an RRAT is referred to as a period. Looking at the table, the student determines that ______

Ulaanbaatar, with a population of roughly 900,000 people, ______ home to an impressive 32 percent of Mongolia's total population.

Featuring jagged peaks of black ink surrounded by hazy swirls of blue and green paint, Zhang Daqian's 1983 painting Panorama of Mount Lu is inspired by the tradition of qinglu shanshui, a type of Chinese landscape painting ______ by the use of blue and green hues to depict ethereal, otherworldly landscapes.

Nebraska governor ______ the first woman to serve in that role in the state's history—took office on January 9, 1987.

In her work, Bay of Quinte Mohawk artist Shelley Niro uses canvas, paper, and film to explore cultural portrayals of Native women. The Eiteljorg Museum counts pieces by Niro in______ impressive collection of Native artworks.

Sociologist Todd Gitlin co-opted the term “recombinant,” normally used in reference to genetic engineering, to describe serialized television shows of the 1980s. Gitlin's use of the term referenced TV studios’ practice of repackaging successful narrative formulas as new ______ even shows that varied only slightly from other shows still attracted sizeable audiences.

Okanoue Toshiko's 1954 photograph “Full of Life” is collected in the 2021 exhibition The New Woman Behind the ______ works by artists from over twenty countries, the exhibition showcases the diverse, innovative, often aesthetically daring work of female photographers from the 1920s through the 1950s.

El Salvador ratified the Outer Space Treaty, an international agreement with over 100 signing nations that acts as the foundation for the laws of space, on January 27, 1967. Guyana signed the treaty; ______ it has yet to officially ratify it.

In her 2012 analysis of tree rings from Japan's Yaku Island, cosmic ray physicist Fusa Miyake noted an anomalous carbon-14 spike dating to 774-775 CE, indicating that a massive burst of radiation reached Earth during that time. ______ this unprecedented radiocarbon surge was dubbed a “Miyake event” in honor of its discoverer.

The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is anticipated to generate 2.6 gigawatts of energy, enough to power almost one million homes. As its name indicates, the project—currently in development—consists of wind turbines located off the Virginia coast. ______ the project plan calls for 176 large turbines to be placed at a site 27 miles east of Virginia Beach.

• Minor planets are astronomical objects that orbit the Sun but are neither planets nor comets.
• Astronomer Jane Luu has discovered many minor planets in her career.
• Alongside colleagues David C. Jewitt and Chadwick Trujillo, she discovered the minor planet (19308) 1996 TO66 on October 12, 1996.
• Alongside colleagues David C. Jewitt, Chadwick Trujillo, and David J. Tholen, she discovered the minor planet (24978) 1998 HJ151 on April 28, 1998.

• Atsuto Suzuki is a Japanese particle physicist.
• Particle physicists study subatomic particles.
• Neutrinos are some of the least understood subatomic particles.
• Suzuki is known for his discovery of geoantineutrinos.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Czech Technical University is in Prague, the Czech Republic.
• It is home to a Foucault pendulum.
• The University of Regensburg is in Regensburg, Germany.
• It is home to a Foucault pendulum.
• A Foucault pendulum dangles from a fixed point that ensures the swing path of the pendulum doesn't change.
• To an observer, the swing path of a Foucault pendulum appears to change over time because Earth rotates beneath it.

• 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.
• James Reese Europe is a Black classical music composer included in MBC's Historic Composers Directory.
• He was born in 1881 and died in 1919.

The following text is adapted from William Wordsworth's 1798 poem “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.”
Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

The decline of the Florida spectacled bear, a species found throughout the southern US before it became extinct around 8000 BCE, surely had a number of ______ the larger ecosystem in which it existed. The Florida spectacled bear was part of a complex food web with other organisms, and its disappearance likely affected several other species.

Writer Lydia Davis observed that while ______ literary forms, such as the short story, are recognizable as such even as they evolve, there are rarer “intergeneric” forms that might, for example, use elements of both fables and realist narratives to create something unclassifiable. Anne Carson's collection Float arguably fits in this category, since it straddles the line between prose and poetry.

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 Oase 1, discovered in Romania in 2002, have sharpened our picture of what a day in the life of Oase 1 may have looked like.

Whatever the general attitude toward Spike Lee's 1992 film Malcolm X and Carl Franklin's 1995 film Devil in a Blue Dress when they were initially released, both films now tend to be regarded quite ______. In 2018, for example, critics for the New York Times praised the former as “electrifying” and the latter as “picture-perfect.”

President Richard Nixon is most famous for his participation in the 1970s Watergate political scandal, a convoluted tale of criminality and eroded ethics involving a constellation of associates such as political operative Jeb Stuart Magruder and Nixon's personal friend Charles “Bebe” Rebozo. But Nixon's legacy is complex: he has been praised for his role in affirming the sovereignty of tribal nations, and he once made an attempt at reforming United States health care policy that is arguably a precursor to the Affordable Care Act, which became law during the Barack Obama administration.

In a study by Mika R. Moran, Daniel A. Rodriguez, and colleagues, residents of Panama City, Panama, and Caracas, Venezuela, were surveyed about parks in their cities. Of the 318 respondents from Panama City, 53.5% indicated that they use the city's parks, and of the 1,043 respondents from Caracas, 44.7% indicated using city parks. Given that the percentage of Panama City respondents who reported having access to desired nonpark amenities near parks was much lower than that reported by Caracas respondents, the difference in park use can't be explained by Panama City residents having more access to desired nonpark amenities near parks.

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—painting, film, 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 practice their 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 AGNI, Harvard 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.

At over a thousand pages across two volumes, The Fifty-Year Mission, compiled by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, is presented as the “complete, uncensored, unauthorized oral history” as told by the people behind the media franchise Star Trek. The work aspires to be comprehensive by, for example, including accounts from cast and crew members of every Star Trek television series and film to date. But while The Fifty-Year Mission is clearly a unique and valuable resource, it has a shortcoming common among oral histories: it lacks a clear authorial point of view that could otherwise unite the various accounts into a cohesive whole.

Water flowing around an obstruction creates vortices (swirls) that vary in size with the obstruction's size and position, and fish sense these vortices in order to navigate around the obstructions. Using models of three fish-head shapes—narrow (low ratio of width to length), intermediate, and wide (high ratio of width to length)—Yuzo R. Yanagisuru, Otar Akanyeti, and James C. Liao showed that as vortex size increases, pressure fluctuations at the snout increase for narrow-headed and intermediate-headed fish but remain low for wide-headed fish. A second research team has therefore hypothesized that in low visibility, a fish will be more likely to avoid an obstruction when the associated pressure fluctuations at the fish's snout are greater.

In a study of the evolution of DptA and DptB—Diptericin genes encoding antimicrobial peptides that combat pathogens and foster beneficial microbes in fruit flies (Drosophila)—researchers assessed Drosophila melanogaster resistance to pathogenic infections by Providencia rettgeri and Acetobacter sicerae, bacteria common in the flies' environments. Subjects included flies identified by mutations silencing DptA, DptB, or both DptA and DptB (termed types A, B, and AB, respectively). In conjunction with the observation that resistance to P. rettgeri correlates with DptA activity but is not significantly affected by DptB activity, data in the graph of survival rates post-A. sicerae infection suggest that ______

A film studies student is researching early 20th-century film serials, which consisted of individual episodes of a single long story that were shown weekly in theaters. Clancy of the Mounted is a 1933 serial that, over its 12 episodes, kept its audience interested with the suspense and drama that are typical of the northern adventure genre. The student, however, claims that ultimately audiences of the time preferred resolution and closure over ongoing tension.

Neurobiologists Laura Cuaya, Raúl Hernández-Pérez, and colleagues investigated the language detection abilities of eighteen dogs raised in similar settings. The researchers monitored the brain activity of Döme (a cocker spaniel), Mini (a mixed breed), and other dogs while the animals listened to three recordings: one of The Little Prince being read in Spanish, the second in Hungarian, and a third made up of short, randomly selected fragments of the first two, scrambled so that they didn't resemble human speech. Each dog was familiar with either Spanish or Hungarian, but not both. The team concluded that the amount of previous language exposure a dog has received may influence its ability to distinguish familiar languages from unfamiliar ones.

Arsenal Football Club won more than half its home matches between 1947 and 2003, helping to distinguish the team as a top British professional soccer club. Additionally, Arsenal, whose home uniform color is mainly red, was more successful in home matches than was Huddersfield Town Association Football Club, whose home uniform color is not red. Research has shown that many people associate the color red with power and dominance. Past experiences with red objects such as stop signs can even cause people to respond to the color red with caution and hesitation. These findings, if applicable in the context of athletic competitions, could suggest that the uniforms worn by Arsenal's players in their home matches may have ______

Biologists Rebecca M. Calisi-Rodriguez and George E. Bentley examined research on kestrels and canaries, both of which have been studied in the laboratory as well as in the wild, to see how studies' settings might have affected their results. Lab studies are useful because they make it easy to control important variables, but kestrels’ surroundings can significantly affect their hormone levels. Therefore, it's not altogether surprising that when Calisi-Rodriguez and Bentley examined studies of kestrels, they found that ______

Exclusively inhabiting tropical countries such as the Central African Republic, wild chimpanzees lack adaptations to seasonal variations in ultraviolet B (UVB) irradiance from sunlight; since UVB exposure enables vertebrates to synthesize vitamin D, this raises questions about how chimpanzees in mid-latitude zoos are affected by the lower and more variable UVB irradiance in those locations. In a study of zoo chimpanzees in Ireland and other mid-latitude countries, Sophie Moittié and colleagues found not only that chimpanzees’ vitamin D levels correlate with UVB irradiance but also that vitamin D levels show no evidence of plateauing as UVB irradiance reaches its highest local levels, suggesting that ______

As cheesemaking practices spread throughout Europe and Asia during and after the Neolithic, divergent strategies for preserving milk ______ whereas rennet-coagulated cheesemaking became key to milk preservation in Europe and Southwest Asia, acid-heat coagulation methods became common among nomadic herding populations of the northeastern Eurasian steppe.

The editors of Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape turned to the nonfiction ______ to craft the entry about “revetment,” a term referring to an erosion-control structure on a cliff or bank.

Increased gender diversity is revitalizing the field of economics, according to Harvard's Claudia Goldin. The trailblazing accomplishments of Goldin, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on women in the labor force, ______ to the value of scholars of diverse backgrounds in spurring research into previously unexplored, but vitally important, topics.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, automobiles were commonly referred to as horseless carriages after the older technology they still resembled. Known as the Brass Era, this period in automotive design is remembered for its grandeur and artistry, its vehicles ______ by collectors for their ornate detailing and gleaming brass fittings.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) tracks comparative price list data for its thirty-eight member countries. According to this data, in July 2021, a “basket” of goods and services priced at 100 US dollars (USD) in the United States would have cost 73 USD in fellow OECD member ______

English poet and Shakespeare contemporary John Donne's ______ much admired during his lifetime (1572-1631) and in the decades that followed, had, at the time of their enthusiastic rediscovery by the early twentieth-century modernists, been essentially gathering dust for the intervening 250 years.

Following the American Revolutionary War, North American foodways underwent a radical transformation, fueled in large part by spiking consumer demand for certain grains. The cultivation, trade, and transportation of maize and wheat, ______ reconfigured the continent's existing regional foodways into a globally oriented food system.

With some elements, like bromine, scientists were able to isolate a relatively pure sample of the substance shortly after discovering its existence—but this wasn't the case with all elements. ______ the isolation process took several years. The element europium, for instance, was discovered in 1896 but not isolated until 1901.

Iocaste, one of the eighty known moons of Jupiter, is designated as Jupiter XXIV (“XXIV” means “24”). Roman numerals typically indicate the order in which the moons were named rather than the order of their proximity to Jupiter. It is incorrect to assume, ______ that Iocaste is the twenty-fourth moon from Jupiter in terms of proximity.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Ibn Sina was a Persian philosopher and physician.
• His book The Canon of Medicine recorded the most advanced medical knowledge of his time.
• It was published in the year 1025 CE.
• It was used as a medical textbook in Middle Eastern and European universities for centuries.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• There are more than 500 National Wildlife Refuges (NWRs) across the United States.
• The James River NWR is a 4,147-acre area in Virginia, on the Atlantic coast.
• It was established to protect the endangered bald eagle.
• The Ellicott Slough NWR is a 139-acre area in California, on the Pacific coast.
• It was established to protect the endangered Santa Cruz long-toed salamander.