The following text is from Mark Oshiro's 2018 novel Anger Is a Gift. In the novel, Moss and his friends are on a subway train in Northern California.

Lights from the outside world then filled the train car as it rose out of the ground and climbed the elevated track. As long as Moss had lived in West Oakland, he'd never tired of this specific view, so he pointed toward the windows. "Check it," he said, and the Port of Oakland began to pass by them.
@2018 by Mark Oshliro

The following text is adapted from John Matheus's 1925 short story "Fog."
The fog extended its tentacles over city and river, gradually obliterating traces of familiar landscapes. At five-thirty the old Panhandle bridge, supported by massive sandstone pillars, stalwart, as when erected fifty years before to serve a generation now passed behind the portals of life, had become a spectral outline against the sky.

Although the government of the Soviet Union attempted to ______ Georgi Vladimov's novel Faithful Ruslan, copies of the book circulated in secret among readers in several parts of the country.

Although the clustering of cutlery manufacturing firms in Sheffield, UK, is often cited as typical of industrial agglomeration. Giulia Faggio et al. use UK data to show that the mix of factors driving the phenomenon is ______ across industries: while the existence of labor pools can prompt agglomeration, collocation among vegetable oil manufacturers occurs for different reasons.

The 2021 novel My Heart Is a Chainsaw confirmed that Stephen Graham Jones is one of the most talented writers of horror fiction today. By featuring main characters who are Blackfeet, like Jones himself, the novel also helped to ensure that Indigenous people have a place within the horror genre. But Jones is hardly the only Indigenous voice in horror: Ojibway author Richard Wagamese has also written in the genre. His acclaimed 2013 novella Him Standing is set in an urban Indigenous community in Canada.

Horizontal gene transfer involves the exchange of genetic material between organisms not in a parent-offspring relationship. It is common among prokaryotes (single-celled organism, such as the bacteria Brevundimonas diminuta and Lactobacillus curvatus). The process can have the effect of increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics; as such, an understanding of how to prevent horizontal gene transfer might result in the mitigation of dangerous pathogens (organisms that cause disease)

In 2018 Rong Jiahuan and colleagues published a study concluding that ocean acidification has a strong effect on the behavior of Acanthopagrus schlegelii, a species of fish. However, Jiahuan and colleagues' study relied on a mean sample size of only 15 fish. In a 2022 review of various scientists' conclusions about the impacts of ocean acidification on fish behavior, Josefin Sundin 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 point to the rule of the Piast dynasty as crucial to the formation of the Polish state. However, some differentiate between members of the dynasty like Dytryk, who ruled as duke from 1032 to 1033 CE, and less well-documented figures like Siemowit, who is said to have ruled in the 9th century but whose historical actuality is disputed. Siemowit appears in the Gesta principum Polonorum, a chronicle of medieval Polish history written between 1112 and 1118. However, the chronicles documentation of Siemowit relies on oral tradition, unlike its records of later rulers.

It is common for freshwater lakes near or above a latitude of 45° north of the equator, like Bosten Lake in China, 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 the higher a lake's latitude, the more days per winter it will typically have measurable amounts of surface ice.

The Choctaw Nation, the Quapaw Tribe, and the more than thirty other tribes in Oklahoma operate numerous businesses and generate billions of dollars in revenue. An economics student is researching the tribes' collective activity as a single industry. The student wants to compare the average amount that industry contributed per employee to Oklahoma's economy with the average amount contributed per employee by three other industries. Looking at the table, the student finds that tribal economic activity contributed over $141,000 per employee, on average, ranking it______

Uncle Vanya: Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts is an 1898 play by Anton Chekhov, originally written in Russian. In the play, Professor Serebrakoff and his wife Helena have come to stay at their country estate, which Vanya manages with the help of Sonia, the professor's daughter from a previous marriage. Chekhov depicts Vanya's opinion of Professor Serebrakoff as having changed significantly, as is evident when ______

Jia Hu and colleagues hypothesized that workplace leaders who reflect on lessons learned from past mistakes are likely to exhibit more humility than leaders who don't engage in such reflection. To test this, the team placed 301 managers in one of three groups.
Participants in two experimental groups were asked to reflect on a mistake, one group focusing on a mistake that resulted in learning and the other group focusing on a mistake that didn't result in learning. Participants in a control group were asked to reflect on their daily routine. All the participants then described how they would respond to a workplace scenario. After evaluating the responses for evidence of humility, the researchers concluded that their hypothesis was correct.

Buried collections of Bronze Age metal items (called hoards) have been found all over Britain. For hoards discovered since the 1960s such as the 1974 discovery of the Langdon Bay hoard, advancements like inexpensive metal detectors, ground-penetrating radar, and aerial surveys have made it much easier for searchers to locate hoards before putting the first shovel in the ground. Hoards found before the 1960s, however, such as the discovery of the Stretham hoard around 1850, were not aided by such technologies and thus were much more likely to ______

Marguerite Duras's 1984 novel The Lover is regularly described as autobiographical. That characterization is apt—there are many parallels between the experiences of the novel's unnamed narrator and those of Duras—but it should not be taken to mean that all the people and events depicted in The Lover are based on actual people and events. The novel is largely pure invention, and readers who neglect this fact and instead try to identify more and more real-life analogues thus risk ______

What is the correct pronunciation of Kiribati? In the Gilbertese language spoken by residents of the island nation, the letter combination -ti makes the -s sound; as a result, the country's name ______ pronounced "Kiribas."

A recipient of both the Robert A. Welch Award and the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement, chemist Ahmed Zewail expanded the limits of measurability when he devised a novel technique in optical spectroscopy that allows researchers ______ chemical reactions occurring within molecules at a quadrillionth of a second, or one femtosecond.

Both Tetela de Ocampo, in the state of Puebla, and Mineral de Pozos, in the state of Guanajuato, have been designated by Mexico as pueblos magicos (magical villages) to celebrate these ______ natural beauty and unique cultural traditions.

The size of bird eggs varies widely across species, and the researchers, ______ computer imaging to compare the lengths of eggs from species like Treron pompadora and Arborophila atrogularis, aimed to shed light on the evolutionary basis for such variation.

A lady-in-waiting's account of Japanese courtly life in the tenth century, Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book is filled with daily observations and musings. Some of these appear as ______ “Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster,” Shonagon catalogs her appreciation for sparrows feeding their young, a visitor arriving in a carriage, and rain on a window.

In her work, acclaimed Millbrook Mi'kmaq ______ Teresa Marshall uses sculptures and installation pieces to amplify stories of Canada's First Nations people.

Scientists long debated the origins of chondrules, tiny glass beads that formed in meteors billions of years ago. For decades, different theories were proposed, from lightning strikes to powerful rock collisions, but none had sufficient evidentiary support. ______ scientists found strong evidence that chondrules were formed by shock waves in nearby nebulae.

With over five decades of hit singles, including “Higher Ground” from the album Innervisions, Stevie Wonder looms over the history of pop music with near peerless talent and longevity. ______ in 1989, his legacy earned him one of the music industry's top honors: a spot in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Voting members of the 2007 Latin Grammys were impressed by Los Palominos's album Evoluciones and its contribution to the tejano genre, a form of regional Mexican music featuring accordion and guitar that first developed in Texas and northern Mexico in the mid-twentieth century. ______ they awarded the group the Best Tejano Album award.

In 2015, geologist Peter Rogerson calculated that the geographic center of Oklahoma was a point 4.4 miles south of the municipality of Edmond. 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:
• Many disused railroad corridors in the US have been converted into public trails since the 1960s.
• Such trails are known as rail trails.
• The George S. Mickelson Trail is a rail trail located in South Dakota.
• It is 109 miles long and is made of crushed stone.
• The Bruce Vento Regional Trail is a rail trail located in Minnesota.
• It is 7 miles long and is made of asphalt.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• A ship's carrying capacity is also known as its deadweight tonnage (DWT).
• In 2021, a total of 2,137 merchant ships were registered in Malta.
• The average DWT of these ships was 54,000 tons per ship.
• In 2021, a total of 1,926 merchant ships were registered in Vietnam.
• The average DWT of these ships was 5,000 tons per ship.
• The average DWT among all merchant ships globally was 21,389 tons per ship.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Dinosaur fossil specimens can be found at science museums all over the world.
• Many dinosaur fossil specimens are given nicknames.
• The Science Museum of Minnesota in Saint Paul, Minnesota, houses a dinosaur fossil specimen nicknamed Fafnir.
• Fafnir lived in the Late Cretaceous period, which ended more than 65 million years ago.
• It is a member of the genus Triceratops.

Possessing an outstanding collection of public art, Chicago has everything from monumental fountains like Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain at sites like Millennium Park to innovative street art like Gloria "Gloe" Talamantes's mural Temple of Bloom located on South Central Park Avenue. The ______ public art on display in the city can thus satisfy any art lover.

Posed in 1972, Nagata's conjecture ______ many mathematicians before yielding to the combined efforts of Ualbai U. Umirbaev and Ivan P. Shestakov, who presented a proof of it in 2004.

Contrary to Fernand Braudel and other historians of capitalism, who tend to treat capitalism as largely ______ Africa before the period of European colonization, John Iliffe and other Africanist scholars have shown that in parts of Africa, institutionally protected private land ownership and other practices associated with capitalism predated colonization.

Ingrid Bertin and team claim that 9,500-year-old objects in a cave in Spain are evidence of the earliest forms of grass basketry in southern Europe. Discoveries of this type of object are relatively ______ because artifacts made from plant-based materials don't withstand the passage of time as well as artifacts made from more durable materials, such as gold jewelry pieces, do.

Some scholars have argued that the stories of the Kanaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people, ______ Hawaiian culture to a remarkable degree, extensively shaping its literary expression, as is evident in works by Anwei Skinsnes Law and Imaikalani Kalahele.

Shaohong Feng and colleagues relied on historical DNA (hDNA)--genomic data incidentally preserved in specimens housed in collections such as those at the American Museum of Natural History--to investigate genetic diversity declines in the crested ibis (Nipponia nippon). Although this approach can yield many insights about the biological past, it remains a relatively underutilized resource in part because hDNA is often to some extent degraded, a situation not easily remediable under current methodological paradigms and with extant DNA extraction and analysis technologies.

The following text is Emily Dickinson's circa 1873 poem “There is no Frigate like a Book.” A frigate is a light, fast ship; coursers are swift horses.
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry—
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll—
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human soul.

Text 1
Isaac Asimov, author of The Caves of Steel and Pebble in the Sky, is highly regarded despite his mediocre writing style. His prose is basic and hastily composed; his characters are flat and discuss ideas rather than emotions. That his work is enjoyable despite such deficiencies is a testament to his prodigious imagination—even if people read his books only for the ideas, they will have much 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, it is true that the prose in his novel Foundation is quite plain—we are often given only the faintest ideas of what people, objects, and settings look like. But Asimov's storytelling is extremely efficient: he can relate in 250 pages a tale for which other writers would need 1,000. Thus his minimalist style is central to his storytelling.

Many artists associated with hyperpop, a movement in electronic music that emerged in the 2010s, conform to the model perfected by American musician Laura Les: bold synthesizer arrangements, propulsive beats, and electronically manipulated vocals. Yet the movement is hardly uniform: Swedish recording artist Namasenda incorporates hip-hop rhythms into the hyperpop sound, for example. Such stylistic diversity is encouraged in part by the music-streaming app Spotify, whose curated playlist of hyperpop songs balances cohesion with variety.

Amazon's introduction of the AWS cloud-computing platform in 2002 is an instance of brand extension--the company leveraged its brand recognition as an online retailer to enter a new product category. To understand consumer responses to extended brands, Alicia Grasby et al. identified 30 extended-brand pairs (e.g., the same brand of automobile and lawnmower) in household purchasing data and, for each pair, had consumers rate the similarity of the pair's product categories. Pairs of product categories such as bread and bagels were rated as similar, whereas those such as mozzarella cheese and ice cream were rated as dissimilar. Grasby et al. concluded that category similarity positively affects the probability of cross-category purchases of the same brand.

Jocelyn Plassais and other researchers probed the evolutionary history of size variation in canids (wolves, foxes, dogs, and their close relatives). The researchers found that small domestic dogs (e.g., toy poodles) as well as small wild canids (e.g., foxes) tend to have a particular variant, known as the C allele, of the gene IGF1, a growth-related gene found in all mammals. Large canids (e.g., grey wolves, German shepherds), however, tend to have a different variant, known as the T allele, of IGF1. The researchers concluded that the T allele is the more recent of the two alleles to emerge.

Neuroscientist Kiyohito ligaya and colleagues developed a computational model to predict how much a person will enjoy a particular work of art on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 4 (very much) and then recruited participants to use the same scale to rate several sets of paintings in various styles. The team calculated the correlation between the ratings predicted by the model and those reported by the participants, with higher correlations indicating that predicted ratings were closer to reported ratings. Assuming that participant P4 gave equal ratings to the impressionist and cubist paintings, the graph reveals that the model predicted ______

Neurobiologists Laura Cuaya, Raul Hernandez-Perez, and colleagues investigated the language detection abilities of eighteen dogs raised in similar settings. The researchers monitored the brain activity of Barney (a golden retriever), Bingo (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.

Prolonged exposure to anthropogenic noise (sounds from human sources like traffic or mining) can affect animals, as Marty L. Leonard and colleagues showed in a 2015 study of birds. This effect is so common that biologists Hansjoerg P. Kunc and Rouven Schmidt consider anthropogenic noise a serious form of pollution. In a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies of anthropogenic noise and various species and classes of animals, Kunc and Schmidt found that, on average, mammals showed larger effects from the noise than birds did. Therefore, their results suggest that conservationists focused on the well-being of mammals will likely find that ______

Exclusively inhabiting tropical countries such as Liberia, 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 seasonal variations in UVB irradiance that occur in those locations. In a study of zoo chimpanzees in Belgium and other mid latitude countries, Sophie Moittie and colleagues found that vitamin D levels are lower in spring than in summer, paralleling UVB irradiance, but also that regardless of season, chimpanzees with unlimited outdoor access have higher vitamin D levels than chimpanzees with limited outdoor access. These findings suggest that ______

The constitution of Hungary, enacted in 2011, enshrines 68 total rights across 15,247 words of text. According to constitutional scholar Giovanni Sartori, who examines the implications of constitutional length on civil rights, ______ 91st in a global ranking of the shortest constitutions.

Most sand is beige because of deposits of gray- and tan-hued minerals, such as quartz and feldspar. The sand at Porto Covo Beach in Portugal is a more unusual ______ deposits of iron oxide and other organic matter lend the sand a unique orange hue.

The hypothesized protolanguage from which all 453 Sino-Tibetan languages have descended, ______

All member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO—including Belgium, which joined in 1949; Poland, which joined in 1999; and Latvia, which joined in ______ are committed to NATO's principle of collective defense, each member pledging to defend all others.

In her work, acclaimed Yup'ik/Inupiaq ______ Susie Silook uses bone and other natural materials to carve sculptures of women and sea goddesses.

Though he's performed on many respected albums, including Tokyo Live by John McLaughlin and the Free Spirits, drummer Dennis Chambers may be best known 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 ______ he joined the label after the song's release.

Generally, sleek vehicles are more aerodynamic than bulkier ones. The streamlined nose of the F-4 Phantom II jet, ______ helps it glide through wind with relative ease, while a boxy pickup truck encounters more wind resistance, making it less aerodynamic.

Modernista architects championed nature in their designs. ______ the dramatic archways and painted sea creatures of Hotel Espafna, a Modernista hotel designed by Lluis Domenech i Montaner, couldn't exactly grow in a forest. Still, one sees natural influences in Domenech i Montaner's penchant for curves (rather than right angles) and plant- and animal-inspired flourishes.

Plants known as metal hyperaccumulators can help remove heavy metal pollutants from soil by absorbing and storing large amounts of them. Some species can hyperaccumulate only one type of metal; Piptatherum miliaceum, or smilograss, ______ is among those that can hyperaccumulate multiple types of metals, including zinc and lead.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Hina Hanta is an online archive curated by the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
• Hina Hanta means “bright path” in Choctaw.
• It features images of cultural artifacts relevant to the history of the Choctaw people.
• It includes a fanner basket (ufko tapushik in Choctaw) made from cane.
• It includes a robe (nita anchi) made from bear fur.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• For centuries in Japan, it was common practice for farmers to cultivate terraced rice fields (tanada).
• The Kurumeki tanada in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, was developed during the Heian period (794 CE-1185 CE).
• Active tanada cultivation has been in decline since the 1960s.
• Scholar Katsue Fukamachi argued that tanada are "essential components of the traditional cultural landscape of Japan."
• Scholar Hidehiro Inagaki argued that tanada are "important for the conservation of plant species diversity."

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:
• Louis Ballard was a classical composer and citizen of the Quapaw Tribe.
• His works blend Western classical music with elements of various Native musical traditions.
• His 1970 composition Cacega Ayuwipi incorporates a Yaqui gourd rattle, a traditional Native instrument.
• Critic Peter Altman commended Ballard's ability to synthesize “strong, idiomatically modern expressions.”