Domesticated thousands of years ago in South America, cacao, the plant from which chocolate is made, deviates structurally from the wild plant it is descended from. Maize (corn), another domesticated crop from the Americas, doesn't closely resemble any wild plant, and genetic research only recently ______ its ancestor to be teosinte grass.

Even among fast animals, top speeds can vary significantly. For example, the Indian antelope can run up to 80 kilometers per hour (km/hr), whereas the Eurasian hobby is much faster, flying up to 160 km/hr. This difference is largely because the features that are ______ for running on land restrict top speeds more than the features needed for flying through the air.

When minor planets are discovered, each is given a unique identification number, and some may be given a unique name, as in the case of 1105 Fragaria, which was named after the plant genus that includes strawberries. But naming a minor planet is not ______; whether to assign it a name is entirely the choice of whoever discovers it.

Agglomeration economies arise when multiple firms in related industries ______ an area, as with initial iron and steel processing firms and iron and steel tube manufacturers in Sheffield, UK. Economists have assumed that companies cluster for the same reasons, but Giulia Faggio et al. found that factors driving agglomeration in some cases are only weakly correlated with agglomeration in others.

The following text is adapted from George Eliot's 1857 short story “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton.” Mr. Ely is a clergyman in the town of Milby.
By the laity of Milby and its neighbourhood [Mr. Ely] was regarded as a man of quite remarkable powers and learning, who must make a considerable sensation in London pulpits and drawing-rooms on his occasional visit to the metropolis; and by his brother clergy he was regarded as a discreet and agreeable fellow. Mr. Ely never got into a warm discussion; he suggested what might be thought, but rarely said what he thought himself; he never let either men or women see that he was laughing at them, and he never gave any one an opportunity of laughing at him.

Mexican architect Luis Barragan's prolific career, which spanned the 1920s to the 1980s, evolved through distinct phases. After traveling to the United States and Europe in the early 1930s and immersing himself in a broader architectural discourse, Barragan shifted his style to incorporate principles of modernism, as seen in the apartment building in Calles Lerma and Guadiana. The project's unadorned geometric forms, typical of the modernist aesthetic, contrasted with the historically inspired architecture seen in his earlier projects in Guadalajara, such as the Cristo House.

In response to concerns that some recent financial crises were exacerbated by consumers misunderstanding risks associated with credit cards, loans, and other financial products, policymakers in many countries have instituted risk-disclosure requirements on sellers of those products. Enrique Seira et al. investigated a variety of risk-disclosure messages sent to thousands of credit card customers and found that the messages had only small and short-lived effects on behavior. Seira et al. asserted that such effects may nevertheless be worth pursuing, given the negligible cost of messaging.

Humans aren't the only ones who use tools. Other animals also find tools helpful. Octopuses use two halves of a seashell to provide protection or a place to hide. And despite sometimes being thought of as simple, many birds make clever use of tools as well. Woodpecker finches have been observed using cactus spines to pry insects from hiding places.

Conservationists worldwide are working to protect ecosystems from habitat destruction and biodiversity loss, and in many cases, initiatives that rely on natural features or processes can help address such challenges. In response to a rapidly dwindling population of blueback salmon, the Quinault Indian Nation (a tribe in Washington State) partnered with the conservation organization Wild Salmon Center to restore naturally occurring logjams in the Quinault River. The logjams create shady pools where the blueback salmon can rest and spawn, thus promoting blueback population recovery.

Janet Echelman is a sculptor and fiber artist. She has installed giant sculptures all over the world. Echelman uses bright and flowing materials, which mimic the wind. However, while her sculptures appear as delicate as a breeze, they are actually very durable.

The Underdogs is a 1915 novel by Mariano Azuela, originally written in Spanish. In the novel, Azuela depicts a traveling group of soldiers as having a renewed sense of agency and authority as they set off on a new stage of their journey: ______

To measure whether countries in free trade agreements (FTAs)—agreements among nations to reduce tariffs, duties, and other trade barriers—experience changes in total agricultural exports, economist Kayode Ajewole and colleagues calculated average export growth rates for several countries over the five years before and the five years after entering an FTA with the United States. The graph shows the results for three countries in the study. Consulting the graph, a student claims that joining an FTA increases the rate of growth of a country's total agricultural exports.

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. A journalist claims that a film's reception can greatly influence its long-term success. Indications that the film is of high quality, such as an Oscar nomination, can dramatically boost public interest in the film and thus its overall earnings, even with a relatively modest opening weekend performance: for example, ______

A group of primate conservationists recently began a long-term study of the effects of different conservation strategies on the northern muriqui (Brachyteles hypoxanthus). The species population is currently estimated to be around 1,000. It is challenging to accurately count these primates, however, which makes it difficult to tell whether the population is increasing, decreasing, or staying stable. The study may thus ______

With the ongoing expansion of e-commerce, consumers are expecting faster and faster delivery of goods, but delivery companies continue to struggle with last-mile logistics (the final step in delivery to consumers) due to challenges such as high personnel costs associated with more deliveries. Innovations to mitigate these challenges have been emerging—the use of aerial drones, for example—but these innovations tend to engender their own complications (e.g., regulations on the use of drones in residential airspace), leading researchers to conclude that ______

Museo de Recursos Históricos de Lares, a history museum in Lares, Puerto Rico, is one of more than eighty museums in the US territory. Puerto Rico's museums ______ visitors about everything from the territory's history to its architecture to its coffee.

Deep learning is an approach that computer scientists like Sanaz Bahargam use to engineer artificial intelligence technologies. It involves training computers to process data in the same way a human brain would. Trustworthy machine learning is another approach. ______ involves training computer algorithms to be accurate, safe, and fair.

When a picture of Albert Gallatin was printed on $500 banknotes in ______ former US secretary of the treasury became just one of many nonpresidents to appear on US currency.

In 1965, a group of student activists traveled by bus across the state of New South Wales to protest racial discrimination against Aboriginal Australians. The activists drove to Wellington, where they interviewed locals; to Walgett, where they picketed a segregated ______ where they staged a protest at a segregated public pool.

The Austronesian language family comprises some 1,200 languages—including the ______ Tuvaluan and Gilbertese, which are spoken by 13,000 and 120,000 speakers, respectively—and accounts for one-fifth of the world's languages, making it of keen interest to linguists like Li Jen-kuei.

Despite its great distance from Earth—it is 2,600 light-years away—the star Deneb is one of the brightest stars in the sky, ranking 19th. Although not as bright as Deneb, the star Peacock also ranks among the 50 brightest stars (44th, to be exact). ______ Peacock's brightness is likely due to the star's relative proximity: Peacock is only 180 light-years from Earth.

In the West African country of Burkina Faso, the percentage of the population living in cities rose from 27.5% to 30.6% between 2015 and 2020. ______ urbanization rates climbed across West Africa as a whole, rising 3.2 percentage points in that five-year period.

The near-Earth asteroid Yuliya is orbited by the moonlet S/2018 (15745). In 2022 scientists studying asteroid deflection intentionally crashed a probe into a similar moonlet, Dimorphos, shortening its orbital period by 32 minutes. ______ it used to take Dimorphos 11 hours, 55 minutes to orbit the near-Earth asteroid Didymos; now it takes 11 hours, 23 minutes.

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.
• Vaalbara was a supercontinent that formed about 3.6 billion years ago.
• Columbia was a supercontinent that formed about 1.8 billion years ago.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• The Carnegie Prize is an international art competition.
• It is administered by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• One Carnegie Prize gold medal winner is Cecilia Beaux of the US.
• Beaux's painting Mother and Daughter was honored in 1899.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Most of the plant and bird species in Oahu, Hawaii, are non-native.
• In a 2019 study, researchers wanted to know what role non-native birds play in dispersing plant seeds in Oahu.
• Researchers catalogued plant seeds found in fecal samples from non-native birds.
• Ilex anomala, a flowering shrub, was one of fifteen native species catalogued.
• Psidium guajava, a fruit tree, was one of twenty-nine non-native species catalogued.
• Researchers concluded that non-native birds play a vital role in dispersing the seeds of native and non-native plants.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Tibetan mastiffs are large dogs native to the Himalayas.
• A mutation in their EPAS1 gene prevents excess hemoglobin production.
• A mutation in their HBB gene boosts hemoglobin's oxygen-carrying ability.
• These mutations enable the dogs to withstand hypoxic (low-oxygen) conditions at high altitudes.
• In a 2016 study, Zhen Wang and colleagues noted that Tibetan wolves' DNA has the same EPAS1 and HBB mutations.
• Wang and colleagues determined that the dogs first acquired these mutations by interbreeding with Tibetan wolves around 24,000 years ago.

Text corpora such as the Bank of English are large collections of electronically stored texts that can be used to determine the frequency of ______ words. (Words used mainly in specialized or academic publications, on the other hand, tend to be poorly represented.) A corpus could reveal, for example, that the word “go” is the seventh most commonly used verb in standard English.

Diadromous fish migrate between freshwater and marine biomes during their life cycle. The migration's obligate nature is why diadromous fish can be ______ those that are merely euryhaline (able to tolerate high salinity): the euryhaline blackchin tilapia can survive high salinity, but its life cycle does not involve relocation to a different biome, as does that of the diadromous wild salmon.

In 2016, Gabriela Gonzalez and team announced that a chirping sound captured by Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory antennas was direct evidence of gravitational waves, which skeptics had argued would be too faint for detection. Detailed statistical analysis helped preclude claims of the event's ______, confirming the signal at a confidence level of over 99%.

Though John Crowley, author of Engine Summer, is not as well known as the most widely read American writers of the past fifty years, his work has had several influential champions, including the poet James Merrill and the literary critic Harold Bloom. In his afterword to Crowley's book Little, Big, Bloom argues that the novel adroitly blends what playwright Friedrich Schiller termed the naive and sentimental modes—while Schiller thought works could be classified as either naive (seeking to describe reality) or sentimental (seeking to develop ideas), Little, Big fuses both modes of writing.

Cartagena has high pedestrian traffic, but simply replicating a feature of Cartagena associated with walkability—e.g., its aesthetically appealing streetscape—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 local norms, 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
Isaac Asimov, author of The Caves of Steel 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 his thematic aims.

The following text is from George Eliot's 1857 short story “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton.” In the text, the narrator addresses the reader directly and alludes to a discussion among Rev. Amos Barton's neighbors.
It was happy for the Rev. Amos Barton that he did not, like us, overhear the conversation recorded in the last chapter. Indeed, what mortal is there of us, who would find his satisfaction enhanced by an opportunity of comparing the picture he presents to himself of his own doings, with the picture they make on the mental retina of his neighbours? We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence! The very capacity for good would go out of us.

Biologist Grace Herzel and colleagues conducted a study of how butterfly color and butterfly size relate to butterfly behavior, which wouldn't have been possible without data gathered by students and other amateur science enthusiasts in the community. Considering over three years' worth of data, the researchers found that black butterflies tended to be larger than brown and white butterflies, and that large butterflies were observed on orange flowers more often than any other butterflies were.

Poetry in Classical Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Empire, relies on difrasismo, or a parallel noun construction that conventionally operates as a single metaphor. For example, the common difrasismo in cuauhtli in ocelotl (literally, “the eagle, the jaguar”) signifies “warrior.” The device's function is both formal—providing structure to lines of verse—and ritual: semantic relations among the two nouns and the concept they signify can be tenuous, as in the previous example, such that difrasismos are often only intelligible according to the conceptual associations observed in Aztec ceremonial culture.

Some studies of migrating animals measure how far the animals travel in a year by fitting individuals with GPS tracking collars. Other studies track annual round-trip distance (RTD), which is equal to double the distance separating the two habitats a population migrates between each year. A researcher argues that since GPS records all of an animal's movements, using the GPS method to track a population would result in significantly higher recorded travel distances than using the RTD method would. For example, it's very likely that the distance reported for the ______

Norfolk, Virginia, has installed engineered structures along 56% of its shoreline to protect infrastructure from storm surges and other hazards, a practice known as shoreline hardening. To evaluate the responses of waterbirds to two types of hardening structures—riprap and bulkheads—Diann Prosser et al. surveyed waterbird communities consisting of the mute swan, the Canada goose, and 62 other species at different sites in the Chesapeake Bay on the US East Coast. Utilizing the Index of Waterbird Community Integrity (IWCI), on which a high score corresponds to high community integrity, the researchers found that bulkheads are more strongly negatively correlated with waterbird community integrity than is riprap.

In a study of urban physical expansion, Richa Mahtta et al. conducted a meta-analysis of more than 300 cities worldwide to determine whether urban land expansion (ULE) was more strongly influenced by urban population growth or by growth in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, a measure of economic activity. Because efficient national government is necessary to provide urban services and infrastructure that attract economic investment, Mahtta et al. propose that absent other factors, the importance of GDP per capita growth to ULE would likely increase relative to the importance of population growth as governments become more efficient. If true, this suggests the possibility that ______

Scientists looking for signs of ancient life in South America have found many examples of fossilized dinosaurs, including in a geological formation at the Bauru Basin. However, to find even older specimens like sponges from the Ordovician period, scientists must look elsewhere, such as in the Ordovician geological formation at Goodsell Ridge in North America, because ______

Designed by BHA studio, Nha Khoa Cuoi Viet Dental Clinic demonstrates the increasing focus among architects on developing eco-conscious and sustainable buildings. One way to accomplish this goal is through biophilic design, which incorporates elements that establish a coherent physical and emotional relationship among nature, human biology, and the building. Architects dedicated to this approach carefully contemplate every aspect of their projects from location characteristics and initial materials selection to ultimate interior design choices and building installation. Thus, ______

The morphological novelty of echinoderms—marine invertebrates with radial symmetry, usually starlike, around a central point—impedes comparisons with most other animals, in which bilateral symmetry on an anterior-posterior (head to tail) axis through a trunk is typical. Particularly puzzling are sea stars, thought to have evolved a headless layout from a known bilateral origin. Applying genomic knowledge of Saccoglossus kowalevskii acorn worms (close relatives of sea stars, and thus expected to have similar markers for corresponding anatomical regions) to the body patterning genes of Patiria miniata sea stars, Laurent Formery et al. observed activity only in anterior genes across P. miniata's entire body and some posterior genes limited to the edges, suggesting that ______

As computer engineer Nina Miolane can explain, unsupervised machine learning (UML) and multitask learning (MTL) take divergent approaches in the development of AI technologies. UML pertains to the training of computer algorithms to organize unlabeled data sets, and MTL ______ to the training of computer models to perform multiple tasks at the same time.

The Proto-Maban language, common ancestor of nine African languages with similar linguistic properties, ______ like all protolanguages, hypothetical: there's no direct evidence these ancestral languages actually existed.

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass first appeared in 1855 as a slim collection of twelve poems, but Whitman would revise and expand it substantially over the next four decades. These extensive ______ the addition of hundreds of new poems, the removal of some existing ones, and the insertion of prefatory material, reflected the poet's evolving literary perspective and experience of the US Civil War.

Though he's performed on many respected albums, including Return of the Brecker Brothers by the Brecker Brothers, drummer Dennis Chambers may be best know for his time as house drummer for the hip-hop label Sugar Hill Records. He did not play drums on the label's classic song “Rapper's Delight,” ______ joined the label after the song's release.

With the development of new technologies that use natural resources more efficiently, the overall consumption of those resources might be expected to decrease. Economists have observed that improvements in efficiency often correlate negatively with resource ______ efficiency gains, lowering the cost of use, may increase demand to the extent that resource consumption ultimately rises.

On May 13, 1972, American astronomers detected a supernova (the explosion of a massive star) in the constellation Centaurus, 11 million light-years from Earth. The powerful blast ______ from the collapse of the star's core under the force of its own gravity ejected particles at speeds of thousands of miles per second.

The Madison is a type of line dance that involves neat rows of dancers performing a repeated sequence of steps in unison. ______ many other dances are also defined by order, repetition, and synchronicity, but the Madison is distinguished by its extreme uniformity; when an auditorium full of dancers performs the Madison, one almost gets the impression of a military march.

On June 13, 1927, aviator Charles Lindbergh was recognized with a ticker-tape parade in New York City. This was just one of a number of aviation-related parades over the years. ______ between 1886 and 2022, there were sixteen ticker-tape parades held in New York to honor record-breaking pilots.

In 2015, geologist Peter Rogerson calculated that the geographic center of Nevada was a point 26 miles southeast of the municipality of Austin. Rogerson's calculation was more accurate than the one from 1920 by the US Geological Survey. ______ this earlier calculation was made using far more rudimentary equipment—only cardboard and string.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Generally, an object will heat up when twisted.
• The twisting of an object is known as torsion.
• A 2019 study led by Zunfeng Liu and Ray Baughman tested the torsional heating of various fibers.
• When a sample of dimethicone fiber was twisted, its average surface temperature increased by 1.8°C.
• When a sample of thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) fiber was twisted, its average surface temperature increased by 6°C.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Merle Oberon (1911-1979) was an actress born in Mumbai (then known as Bombay), India.
• She was of Indian, Maori, and Irish heritage.
• She was the first Indian-born actress to be nominated for an Academy Award.
• Early in her career, she played many nameless, uncredited roles, such as her role in Never Trouble Trouble (1931).
• Later, she played many named, credited roles, such as Lydia MacMillan in Lydia (1941).

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Meeting of Two Cultures is a 1993 black-and-white relief print by South African artist Sandile Goje.
• It features an anti-apartheid meeting between South Africans.
• Intaglio and relief are printmaking techniques in which an image is carved onto a printing block, covered in ink, and stamped onto paper.
• In intaglio printing, ink is applied to the grooved, carved portions of the block.
• In relief printing, ink is applied to the raised, uncarved portions of the block.