Artist Marilyn Dingle’s intricate, coiled baskets are _____ sweetgrass and palmetto palm. Following a Gullah technique that originated in West Africa, Dingle skillfully winds a thin palm frond around a bunch of sweetgrass with the help of a “sewing bone” to create the basket’s signature look that no factory can reproduce.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The invention in 1958 of the integrated circuit (or microchip) radically altered the semiconductor industry. In fact, some historians argue that it fundamentally _____ the industry by enabling it to take advantage of mass production methods for the first time.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Botanist Al Kovaleski has pointed out that maple trees already thrive in a wide variety of climates and thus may _____ changes in climate better than some other tree species do. The alterations maples may undergo in response to a changing climate are likely to be relatively small and easily achieved.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1837 story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.” The main character, a physician, is experimenting with rehydrating a dried flower.
At first [the rose] lay lightly on the surface of the fluid, appearing to imbibe none of its moisture. Soon, however, a singular change began to be visible. The crushed and dried petals stirred and assumed a deepening tinge of crimson, as if the flower were reviving from a deathlike slumber.
As used in the text, what does the phrase “a singular” most nearly mean?
Rejecting the premise that the literary magazine Ebony and Topaz (1927) should present a unified vision of Black American identity, editor Charles S. Johnson fostered his contributors’ diverse perspectives by promoting their authorial autonomy. Johnson’s self-effacement diverged from the editorial stances of W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, whose decisions for their publications were more ______.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Drivers who strongly believe that the toll they must pay to use the Lewis and Clark Bridge, which spans the Ohio River to connect Indiana and Kentucky, is currently too high are unlikely to be _____ a proposal to increase the toll. Advocates for a higher toll are likely to have more success if they instead direct their arguments toward a more persuadable segment of the population.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
According to a team of neuroeconomists from the University of Zurich, ease of decision making may be linked to communication between two brain regions, the prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex. Individuals tend to be more decisive if the information flow between the regions is intensified, whereas they make choices more slowly when information flow is ____.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Some economic historians _____ that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century households in the United States experienced an economy of scale when it came to food purchases—they assumed that large households spent less on food per person than did small households. Economist Trevon Logan showed, however, that a close look at the available data disproves this supposition.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. The narrator is being driven in a carriage through a remote region at night.
The baying of the wolves sounded nearer and nearer, as though they were closing round on us from every side. I grew dreadfully afraid, and the horses shared my fear. The driver, however, was not in the least disturbed; he kept turning his head to left and right, but I could not see anything through the darkness.
As used in the text, what does the word “disturbed” most nearly mean?
Economist Marco Castillo and colleagues showed that nuisance costs—the time and effort people must spend to make donations—reduce charitable giving. Charities can mitigate this effect by compensating donors for nuisance costs, but those costs, though variable, are largely ______ donation size, so charities that compensate donors will likely favor attracting a few large donors over many small donors.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
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.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
During a 2014 archaeological dig in Spain, Vicente Lull and his team uncovered the skeleton of a woman from El Algar, an Early Bronze Age society, buried with valuable objects signaling a high position of power. This finding may persuade researchers who have argued that Bronze Age societies were ruled by men to _____ that women may have also held leadership roles.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Dance choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar aims to give people the opportunity to be ______ her creative process. For example, live performances of her dance HairStories, which debuted in 2001, featured videos of people across the United States talking about their hair and audience members sharing pictures of their interesting hairstyles.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 short story “Drowne’s Wooden Image.” Drowne, a young man, is carving a wooden figure to decorate the front of a ship.
Day by day, the work assumed greater precision, and settled its irregular and misty outline into distincter grace and beauty. The general design was now obvious to the common eye.
As used in the text, what does the word “assumed” most nearly mean?
The works of Chicana artist Ester Hernandez are now _____ in museums both in the United States and abroad, but the murals she contributed to as a member of Las Mujeres Muralistas early in her artistic career were displayed in outdoor public spaces across San Francisco.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Cat and Plum Blossoms is an important work of Nihonga, or classical Japanese painting. Unlike Kuroda Seiki, who adopted traditional European methods such as painting with oil on canvas, Hishida Shunsō _____ traditional Japanese approaches. For instance, Hishida produced Cat and Plum Blossoms by applying color pigments to a silk scroll.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
In the 1990s, conservationists began planting more than 500,000 native trees in the habitat of the Azores bullfinch to boost the bird’s numbers. This approach was apparently _____: the Azores bullfinch’s population size increased from as few as 100 birds at the end of the 1980s to around 1,300 in 2023.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The results of randomized clinical trials testing the efficacy of common medical interventions sometimes fail to _____ conclusions that practitioners reach based on their real-world observations of patients. While there are several possible reasons for this, one is that practitioners may overlook confounding variables that account for the results they attribute to the interventions in question.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Businesses typically try to promote themselves, but research by Michael Luca, Abhishek Nagaraj, and Gauri Subramani suggests that some do not _____ their marketing. The researchers studied restaurants in Texas and found that those listed on a popular review website (which can be done at no cost) had revenue increases of 5 percent on average, but 33 percent of restaurants studied never listed on the site.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Former astronaut Ellen Ochoa says that although she doesn’t have a definite idea of when it might happen, she _____ that humans will someday need to be able to live in other environments than those found on Earth. This conjecture informs her interest in future research missions to the moon.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Recent measurements of the mass of the
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is from Anita Desai’s 2011 novella Translator Translated. While working on her translation of a novel written in Odia (a language of India) into English, the narrator looks out her window at night to clear her mind.
I tried to distract myself with these sights of the ordinary world, but in my mind it was the lines I had been translating and the lines that I had been writing that remained in the forefront. I longed for sleep to obliterate them but it eluded me. Perhaps everything would be normal again once I had sent off the manuscript, I thought, and looked forward to completing the work.
As used in the text, what does the word “completing” most nearly mean?
One popular theory of the origin of the Moon, the “big whack,” posits that a protoplanet called Theia collided with Earth, flinging debris into orbit that eventually coalesced into the Moon. Until recently, Theia was ______, but researcher Qian Yuan and colleagues now claim to have identified pieces of the protoplanet in the lowermost section of Earth’s mantle.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
A musician and member of the Quechua of Peru, Renata Flores Rivera was eager to promote the Quechua language in her music, but she was _____ speaking it. She met this challenge by asking her grandmother, a native speaker of Quechua, to help her pronounce words in her song lyrics and also by taking classes in the language.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
People sometimes dismiss a claim if it comes from a source they regard as self-interested, but from a strictly logical perspective, the source of a claim is _____; it has no direct bearing on whether the claim is true.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Seminole/Muscogee director Sterlin Harjo ______ television’s tendency to situate Native characters in the distant past; this rejection is evident in his series Reservation Dogs, which revolves around teenagers who dress in contemporary styles and whose dialogue is laced with current slang.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is from Yann Martel’s 2001 novel Life of Pi. The narrator’s family owned a zoo when he was a child.
It was a huge zoo, spread over numberless acres, big enough to require a train to explore it, though it seemed to get smaller as I grew older, train included.
As used in the text, what does the word “spread” most nearly mean?
According to botanists, a viburnum plant experiencing insect damage may develop erineum—a discolored, felty growth—on its leaf blades. A _____ viburnum plant, on the other hand, will have leaves with smooth surfaces and uniformly green coloration.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Research conducted by planetary scientist Katarina Miljkovic suggests that the Moon’s surface may not accurately _____ early impact events. When the Moon was still forming, its surface was softer, and asteroid or meteoroid impacts would have left less of an impression; thus, evidence of early impacts may no longer be present.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Charles "Teenie" Harris was a photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1975. During his career he took over 70,000 photographs documenting everyday life in Pittsburgh's Black communities. The Carnegie Museum of Art maintains thousands of his photographs, carefully _____ them so that audiences can continue to view them well into the future.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is adapted from George Eliot’s 1871–72 novel Middlemarch.
[Mr. Brooke] had travelled in his younger years, and was held in this part of the country to have contracted a too rambling habit of mind. Mr. Brooke’s conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather.
As used in the text, what does the word “contracted” most nearly mean?
Barring major archaeological discoveries, we are unlikely to ever have _____ account of ancient Egypt under the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, as much of the evidence of her reign was deliberately destroyed by her successors.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Although science fiction was dominated mostly by white male authors when Octavia Butler, a Black woman, began writing, she did not view the genre as _____; Butler broke into the field with the publication of several short stories and her 1976 novel Patternmaster, and she later became the first science fiction writer to win a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Many ancient sculptures of people’s heads are missing their noses. This is because the nose is the most _____ part of a sculpture of a person’s head. It is delicate and sticks out from the rest of the sculpture, making it especially easy to break.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
In the 1970s, video cameras became increasingly affordable for ordinary consumers and gave Ulysses Jenkins and other artists capabilities that were previously unavailable except to television broadcasters. Jenkins recognized and took full advantage of this _____ access to powerful technology to create groundbreaking works of video art, such as Mass of Images (1978).
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Cuttlefish appear to be surprisingly _____ at exercising self-control: in a 2021 study conducted by behavioral ecologist Alexandra Schnell, these cephalopods routinely demonstrated restraint by delaying gratification, waiting for a favorite treat instead of instantly devouring a readily available meal.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
In a study of residential mobility in Washington, DC, LaTanya Brown-Robertson et al. found that increases in household spending power (via tax credits) had mixed effects on mobility decisions, possibly because residential location choices are not fully reducible to economic factors but are also _____ noneconomic factors such as access to strong local social networks.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
A brief book review cannot fully convey the _____ of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Books of Jacob, with its enormous cast of characters, its complicated, wandering plot, and its page numbers that count backward (beginning at 965 and ending at 1).
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is from Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand.
The trees in their spring beauty sent through her restive mind a sharp thrill of pleasure. Seductive, charming, and beckoning as cities were, they had not this easy unhuman loveliness.
As used in the text, what does the word “beckoning” most nearly mean?
The creation of Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed was _____ process. Over the course of three years, Reiniger and her collaborators painstakingly made more than 250,000 individual images of hand-cut paper silhouettes and repeatedly had to invent entirely new methods and tools to create the special effects Reiniger envisioned.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Biologist Jane Edgeloe and colleagues have located what is believed to be the largest individual plant in the world in the Shark Bay area of Australia. The plant is a type of seagrass called Posidonia australis, and it _____ approximately 200 square kilometers.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
In the early 1800s, the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah created the first script, or writing system, for an Indigenous language in the United States. Because it represented the sounds of spoken Cherokee so accurately, his script was easy to learn and thus quickly achieved ______ use; by 1830, over 90 percent of the Cherokee people could read and write it.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
In 1929 the Atlantic Monthly published several articles based on newly discovered letters allegedly exchanged between President Abraham Lincoln and a woman named Ann Rutledge. Historians were unable to _____ the authenticity of the letters, however, and quickly dismissed them as a hoax.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Following the principles of community-based participatory research, tribal nations and research institutions are equal partners in health studies conducted on reservations. A collaboration between the Crow Tribe and Montana State University — _____ this model: tribal citizens worked alongside scientists to design the methodology and continue to assist in data collection.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The equipment from the Apollo Moon landings (1969–1972), such as radiation detectors and temperature probes, remains there to this day, but the data from these missions were mostly inaccessible until a recent data-transfer project made them _____. This project has allowed researcher Seiichi Nagihara to make use of the information in investigating temperature changes on the Moon.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The process of mechanically recycling plastics is often considered ______ because of the environmental impact and the loss of material quality that often occurs. But chemist Takunda Chazovachii has helped develop a cleaner process of chemical recycling that converts superabsorbent polymers from diapers into a desirable reusable adhesive.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Predatory animals differ widely in how they _____ food for their young. Some leave dead prey nearby for their young to consume, some bring live prey to their young, and some feed their young directly from their own mouths.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Bioluminescent beetles called fireflies may seem to create flashes of light randomly, but each species of firefly actually has its own special series of repeated flashes and pauses. These unique _____ allow fireflies of the same species to find each other.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
According to Potawatomi ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Indigenous method of harvesting
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The work of molecular biophysicist Enrique M. De La Cruz is known for _____ traditional boundaries between academic disciplines. The university laboratory that De La Cruz runs includes engineers, biologists, chemists, and physicists, and the research the lab produces makes use of insights and techniques from all those fields.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The güiro, a musical instrument traditionally made from a dried and hollowed gourd, is thought to have originated with the Taíno people of Puerto Rico. Players use a wooden stick to scrape along ridges cut into the side of the gourd, creating sounds that are highly ____: the sounds produced by güiros can differ based on the distance between the ridges, the types of strokes the player uses, and the thickness of the gourd.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
One challenge of generating electricity from ocean waves is that wave power isn’t ______; it varies in unpredictable ways that pose technological and planning problems for electricity generation.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Visual artist Gabriela Alemán states that the bold colors of comics, pop art, and Latinx culture have always fascinated her. This passion for the rich history and colors of her Latinx community translates into the _____ artworks she produces.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is from John Muir’s 1913 autobiography The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. Muir describes being on a boat.
The water was so clear that it was almost invisible, and when we floated slowly out over the plants and fishes, we seemed to be miraculously sustained in the air while exploring a veritable fairyland.
As used in the text, what does the word “clear” most nearly mean?
Proposals to raise the age at which retirees begin receiving government transfers of funds are generally discussed in terms of the effects on transfer recipients, but Andria Smythe has argued that delaying such transfers could _____ wealth creation among working adults by lengthening the period in which they are providing financial support to their nonworking parents.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
In studying the use of external stimuli to reduce the itching sensation caused by an allergic histamine response, Louise Ward and colleagues found that while harmless applications of vibration or warming can provide a temporary distraction, such _____ stimuli actually offer less relief than a stimulus that seems less benign, like a mild electric shock.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The fossil remains of the individual known as Oase 1, discovered in Romania in 2002, can help paleoanthropologists not only _____ steps in the evolution of hominids but also illuminate the Pleistocene epoch generally, revealing important details about the time in which Oase 1 lived.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Stars form in cloudlike swirls of gas and dust that cannot be touched, but astrophysicist Nia Imara believes these formations need not remain completely _____ to researchers: she uses simulation data and sophisticated 3D printers to produce interactive models of these stellar nurseries.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Beginning in the 1950s, Navajo Nation legislator Annie Dodge Wauneka continuously worked to promote public health; this _____ effort involved traveling throughout the vast Navajo homeland and writing a medical dictionary for speakers of Diné bizaad, the Navajo language.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
In Nature Poem (2017), Kumeyaay poet Tommy Pico portrays his _____ the natural world by honoring the centrality of nature within his tribe’s traditional beliefs while simultaneously expressing his distaste for being in wilderness settings himself.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
A team of paleontologists has found a rich fossil deposit near Gulgong, Australia. The fossils are so well preserved that the team has been able to _____ detailed information about the life forms that left them behind, such as color patterns and how they interacted with other species.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Particle physicists like Ayana Holloway Arce and Aida El-Khadra spend much of their time _____ what is invisible to the naked eye: using sophisticated technology, they closely examine the behavior of subatomic particles, the smallest detectable parts of matter.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
In recommending Bao Phi’s collection Sông I Sing, a librarian noted that pieces by the spoken-word poet don’t lose their _____ nature when printed: the language has the same pleasant musical quality on the page as it does when performed by Phi.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is adapted from James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room. The narrator is riding in a taxi down a street lined with food vendors and shoppers in Paris, France.
The multitude of Paris seems to be dressed in blue every day but Sunday, when, for the most part, they put on an unbelievably festive black. Here they were now, in blue, disputing, every inch, our passage, with their wagons, handtrucks, their bursting baskets carried at an angle steeply self-confident on the back.
As used in the text, what does the word “disputing” most nearly mean?
The recent discovery of a carved wooden figure dating to around 2,000 years ago in a ditch in England was truly surprising. Wooden objects _____ survive for so long due to their high susceptibility to rot, but archaeologists suspect layers of sediment in the ditch preserved the figure by creating an oxygen-free environment.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Due to their often strange images, highly experimental syntax, and opaque subject matter, many of John Ashbery's poems can be quite difficult to _____ and thus are the object of heated debate among scholars.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The Appalachian Trail is a hiking path in the eastern United States. Much of the 2,000 mile trail passes through wilderness areas. In order to _____ those areas, the United States Congress passed the National Trails System Act in 1968, ensuring that the trail would not be sold or commercially developed.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
While scholars believe many Mesoamerican cities influenced each other, direct evidence of such influence is difficult to ascertain. However, recent excavations in a sector of Tikal (Guatemala) unearthed a citadel that shows _____ Teotihuacán (Mexico) architecture—including a near replica of a famed Teotihuacán temple—providing tangible evidence of outside influence in portions of Tikal.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is adapted from José Martí’s 1891 poem “At the Salon” (translated by Cecil Charles in 1898). The speaker describes a painting featuring a female figure.
From the sterile soil no ray
Of hope in a blade of green,
Nor sheltering roof is seen—
Though the skies are heavy and gray.
Ah, this is the woman fair
Who stole away my heart
In the splendid halls of art
Yester-e’en as I wandered there!
As used in the text, what does the word “sheltering” most nearly mean?
The following text is adapted from Sui Sin Far’s 1912 short story “Mrs. Spring Fragrance.” Mr. and Mrs. Spring Fragrance immigrated to the United States from China.
Mrs. Spring Fragrance was unaware that Mr. Spring Fragrance, tired with the day’s business, had thrown himself down on the bamboo settee on the veranda, and that although his eyes were engaged in scanning the pages of the Chinese World, his ears could not help receiving the words which were borne to him through the open window.
As used in the text, what does the word “receiving” most nearly mean?
While we can infer information about climate activity in Earth's distant past from physical evidence, we of course cannot observe past climates directly. To study early Earth's climate in action, we must _____ that climate using computer models that represent various climate conditions consistent with the physical evidence.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
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.
As used in the text, what does the word “supported” most nearly mean?
The following text is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.
[Jay Gatsby] was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness.
As used in the text, what does the word “quality” most nearly mean?
In 1877, 85% of California’s railways were already controlled by the Southern Pacific Railroad. The company further solidified its _____ in rail access to the state’s Pacific coast when it completed the Sunset Route in 1883: running from Louisiana to Southern California, the route established the first transcontinental rail line across the southern United States.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is adapted from Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle. Marija is helping to manage her sister’s wedding.
It was [Marija’s] task to see that all things went in due form, and after the best home traditions; and, flying wildly hither and thither, bowling every one out of the way, and scolding and exhorting all day with her tremendous voice, Marija was too eager to see that others conformed to the proprieties to consider them herself.
As used in the text, what does the word “consider” most nearly mean?
The following text is from the 1989 novel The Ancient Child by Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday. The main character has achieved tremendous commercial success as a painter.
More and more often he was asked to compromise his art or himself in one way or another, and more often than not he did so, for he was inclined to be passive and naive; it was difficult for him to say no. Those who exhibited his work, who praised and purchased it, and who demanded its proliferation began to determine it.
As used in the text, what does the word “determine” most nearly mean?
Mónica Lopes-Ferreira and others at Brazil’s Butantan Institute are studying the freshwater stingray species Potamotrygon rex to determine whether biological characteristics such as the rays’ age and sex have ______ effect on the toxicity of their venom—that is, to see if differences in these traits are associated with considerable variations in venom potency.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is from Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel The Namesake. Gogol, a child, is at a beach in Massachusetts with his father.
On the beach Gogol collects rocks, digs tunnels in the sand. He and his father wander barefoot, their pant legs rolled halfway up their calves.
As used in the text, what does the word “collects” most nearly mean?
Archaeologist Erika Karuzas works with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana to preserve culturally significant sites. In 2015 they decided that creating a new national trail connecting many of these sites would _____ their preservation efforts, because the US government provides some protections to national trails that aren’t given to other areas.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Cucurbits, a group of plants that includes squash and melons, relied on mastodons to spread their seeds in the Ice Age. When these animals died out, cucurbits faced extinction in turn, having lost their means of seed dispersal. Around this time, however, the ancestors of Indigenous peoples in North America began raising cucurbits as crops, thus ______ the plants’ survival.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
To develop a method for measuring snow depth with laser beams, NASA physicist Yongxiang Hu relied on _____; identifying broad similarities between two seemingly different phenomena, Hu used information about how ants move inside colonies to calculate how the particles of light that make up laser beams travel through snow.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The way in which individual elements are balanced within a photographic image tends to affect how viewers perceive it: symmetry tends to give the elements equal importance, asymmetry emphasizes differences, and radial balance (organizing the elements around a central point) emphasizes the center over the periphery. What a photograph conveys is therefore largely _____ how it is balanced.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
While recent scholarship has undermined claims that the works of twelfth-century Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd were _____ other Muslim philosophers of his time, it is indisputable that his location in the Muslim-ruled area of what is now Spain meant that his works were primarily available thousands of miles west of the era’s center of Islamic thought.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Whether the reign of a French monarch such as Hugh Capet or Henry I was historically consequential or relatively uneventful, its trajectory was shaped by questions of legitimacy and therefore cannot be understood without a corollary understanding of the factors that allowed the monarch to ______ his right to hold the throne.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Text corpora such as the Bank of English are enormous collections of electronically stored texts that can be used for empirical testing of hypotheses regarding the frequency of typical word usage. If one has a _____ that the word “get” has a high incidence in English, for example, an analysis of a corpus can support that hypothesis by showing that “get” is the fifth most commonly used verb.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
According to statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the best way to predict the amount of time a nonperishable entity (such as a building or a technology) will continue to exist is to examine how long it has survived so far. In this view, an item’s age is the strongest _____ how much longer it will last.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Economist Jingting Fan argues that the effects of international trade may display spatial variation at sub-national levels. For instance, imported goods may reduce expenses for a country's average consumer, but for consumers living far from ports, high intranational transport costs could ______ the price advantages associated with imports.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Whether Carmen Lomas Garza is creating small paintings and illustrations or large public artworks—such as Baile, a copper cutout of traditional Mexican dance in the San Francisco International Airport—she is _____ direct experience, drawing from memories of her childhood in Texas or details of her current surroundings in California.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
In the mid-nineteenth century, some abolitionist newspapers _____ westward migration in the United States; by printing a letter that described the easy fortunes and high salaries miners could make in California during the Gold Rush, Frederick Douglass’s newspaper North Star was one such publication that inspired readers to relocate.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Like other tribal nations, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation is self-governing; its National Council generates laws regulating aspects of community life such as land use and healthcare, while the principal chief and cabinet officials _____ those laws by devising policies and administering services in accordance with them.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is adapted from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1905 novel A Little Princess. Sara is a young student at a school in London.
Sara not only could tell stories, but she adored telling them. When she sat or stood in the midst of a circle and began to invent wonderful things, her green eyes grew big and shining, her cheeks flushed, and, without knowing that she was doing it, she began to act and made what she told lovely or alarming by the raising or dropping of her voice.
As used in the text, what does the word “invent” most nearly mean?
A journalist and well-respected art critic of nineteenth-century Britain, Lady Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake did not hesitate to publish reviews that went against popular opinion. One of her most divisive works was an essay questioning the idea of photography as an emerging medium for fine art: in the essay, Eastlake _____ that the value of photographs was informational rather than creative.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Artificially delivering biomolecules to plant cells is an important component of protecting plants from pathogens, but it is difficult to transmit biomolecules through the layers of the plant cell wall. Markita del Carpio Landry and her colleagues have shown that it may be possible to _____ this problem by transmitting molecules through carbon nanotubes, which can cross cell walls.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Critics have asserted that fine art and fashion rarely _____ in a world where artists create timeless works for exhibition and designers periodically produce new styles for the public to buy. Luiseño/Shoshone-Bannock beadwork artist and designer Jamie Okuma challenges this view: her work can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and purchased through her online boutique.
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Manul cats are small, shy felines. They live mostly alone in out-of-the-way parts of Asia, such as on Mount Everest. These cats have been difficult to research because their habitats are so _____ large populations of humans.
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Radar and sonar can detect objects or people through walls, but they are too costly for consumer use. Researchers Fadel Adib and Dina Katabi have shown, however, that there may be a comparatively _____ alternative: small changes to the Wi-Fi technology used in smartphones can give users a cheap way to count people or even identify their gestures through walls.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
ID: 03f5a9b7
When marine biologist Brittany Williams played different ocean recordings to groups of oyster larvae, groups that heard sounds of a healthy oyster reef were the most ______. They were twice as likely as other groups to show signs of making a permanent home. This suggests that playing recordings of a healthy ocean reef may encourage oysters to create such a reef.
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The following text is adapted from Charles Chesnutt’s 1899 story “The Wife of His Youth.” Mr. Ryder is hosting a formal gathering where he will propose marriage to the woman he has been courting.
[A] younger and less cautious man would long since have spoken. But he had made up his mind, and had only to determine the time when he would ask her to be his wife. He decided to give a ball in her honor, and at some time during the evening of the ball to offer her his heart and hand.
As used in the text, what does the word “determine” most nearly mean?
Nigerian American author Teju Cole’s _____ his two passions—photography and the written word—culminates in his 2017 book, Blind Spot, which evocatively combines his original photographs from his travels with his poetic prose.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The following text is from Claude McKay’s 1922 poem “Morning Joy.” The speaker is looking out a window and observing a wold, or large area of land.
At night the wide and level stretch of wold,
Which at high noon had basked in quiet gold,
Far as the eye could see was ghostly white;
Dark was the night save for the snow’s weird light.
I drew the shades far down, crept into bed;
Hearing the cold wind moaning overhead
Through the sad pines, my soul, catching its pain,
Went sorrowing with it across the plain.
As used in the text, what does the word “drew” most nearly mean?
Jetties—long, narrow structures that extend from a landmass into the water—are often constructed to protect coastlines from erosion. Jetties can sometimes have the opposite _____, obstructing the natural flow of sand along the shore can lead to increased erosion in some areas.
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In 1727, dramatist Lewis Theobald presented a new play, Double Falsehood, at a London theater. Theobald claimed that his drama was based on a little-known play by William Shakespeare, Cardenio. Many, including poet Alexander Pope, were _____; historians have determined that Shakespeare’s company did perform a play called Cardenio in 1613.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation is a bryologist, a plant scientist who specializes in mosses. To Kimmerer, mosses are Earth’s most adaptable plants: they can clone _____ enter a dormant state in times of drought, and grow in areas that don’t have soil.
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The Tantaquidgeon Museum in Uncasville, Connecticut, was founded in 1931 with the goal of showcasing the culture and history of the Mohegan _____ today, nearly a century later, it is the oldest Native-owned and -operated museum in the country.
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For thousands of years, humans have used domesticated goats (
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Nigerian American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola uses black-ink pens to create highly detailed drawings of human figures. Her portrait of novelist Zadie _____ is displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?
The poem Beowulf begins with the word “hwæt,” which is an Old English _____ as “hark!” or “listen!”; in some versions, the word was playfully rendered as “bro!” by Maria Dahvana Headley in her 2020 translation of the poem.
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In 1976, the Inuit rock group Sikumiut recorded the album People of the Ice. Though only their first record, it shows a band already skilled at the difficult task of making music that sounds easy and fun. On songs like “Utirumavunga,” Lucassie Koperqualuk’s guitar riffs effortlessly _____ Charlie Adams’s delightfully catchy vocal melodies.
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Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta’s celebrated literary oeuvre includes The Joys of Motherhood, a novel about the changing roles of women in 1950s _____ a television play about the private struggles of a newlywed couple in Nigeria; and Head Above Water, her autobiography.
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Long attributed to Jacques-Louis David, the preeminent Neoclassical painter of his day, the 1801 painting Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes gained fresh attention in the 1990s when art historians discovered that the painting—which depicts a solitary young woman sketching—was actually the work of little-known French portrait ______ Marie-Denise Villers (1774–1821).
Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?
Eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon thought the only character defect of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was his mild temperament—though the emperor was widely considered virtuous, his overly permissive nature led him to _____ the vices of those who surrounded him.
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Close analysis of the painting Girl with a Flute, long attributed to the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, has revealed subtle deviations from the artist’s signature techniques. These variations suggest that the work may be that of a student under Vermeer’s tutelage—potentially ______ our understanding of Vermeer as a solitary artist.
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Stephen Hannock’s luminous landscape paintings are appealing to viewers but have elicited little commentary from contemporary critics, a phenomenon that may be due to the very fact that the paintings seem so ______. Many critics focus their attention on art that is cryptic or overtly challenging.
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Novelist Leon Forrest admired William Faulkner’s writing style. Forrest’s novel Divine Days contains a long passage in tribute to Faulkner that is a perfect ______ of Faulkner’s style; anyone familiar with Faulkner’s writing would see the resemblance.
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Anthropologist Kristian J. Carlson and colleagues examined the fossilized clavicle and shoulder bones of a 3.6-million-year-old early hominin known as “Little Foot.” They found that these bones were _____ the clavicle and shoulder bones of modern apes that are frequent climbers, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, suggesting that Little Foot had adapted to life in the trees.
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Although the playwrights hoped that their play would be _____ when performed live, critics generally agreed that the production and performances had the opposite effect, wearying audiences instead of energizing them.
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The following text is from Darcie Little Badger’s 2021 novel A Snake Falls to Earth. Nina is looking at old family photographs.
Nina couldn’t stop looking at the sepia-toned photograph in an oak frame. Propped on the window ledge, it featured a portrait of Great-Great-Grandmother Rosita as a young woman.
As used in the text, what does the word “featured” most nearly mean?
Bicycle sharing systems allow users to rent a bicycle at one location within a city and return it to any other designated location in that city, which can cause serious problems of bicycle supply and user demand within the city’s system. Tohru Ikeguchi uses open-source data and statistical modeling to identify when a high number of users making one-way trips is likely to leave some locations within the system _____ bicycles and other areas with insufficient supply.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Osage Nation citizen Randy Tinker-Smith produced and directed the ballet Wahzhazhe, which vividly chronicles Osage history and culture. Telling Osage stories through ballet is _____ choice because two of the foremost ballet dancers of the twentieth century were Osage: sisters Maria and Marjorie Tallchief.
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In the Indigenous intercropping system known as the Three Sisters, maize, squash, and beans form an ______ web of relations: maize provides the structure on which the bean vines grow; the squash vines cover the soil, discouraging competition from weeds; and the beans aid their two “sisters” by enriching the soil with essential nitrogen.
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The printing of Virginia Woolf’s novels featured a creative _____ between Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell: a talented painter, Bell worked closely with Woolf to create original cover art for most of the novels.
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Disproving the common misconception of Native art as ______, the painters whose work appears in the collection at the National Museum of the American Indian employ a range of styles. There are artists working in the traditional arts of their specific tribal communities, artists working in European modernist or American abstract expressionist art traditions, and artists blending various traditions into something wholly new.
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The following text is adapted from Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest.
CECILY: Have we got to part?
ALGERNON: I am afraid so. It’s a very painful parting.
CECILY: It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.
As used in the text, what does the word “endure” most nearly mean?
Art scholars have noted that some colors seem to be more _____ viewers than others. For example, people tend to find paintings featuring blues and greens more appealing than paintings featuring yellows and oranges.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The spacecraft OSIRIS-REx briefly made contact with the asteroid 101955 Bennu in 2020. NASA scientist Daniella DellaGiustina reports that despite facing the unexpected obstacle of a surface mostly covered in boulders, OSIRIS-REx successfully _____ a sample of the surface, gathering pieces of it to bring back to Earth.
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The parasitic dodder plant increases its reproductive success by flowering at the same time as the host plant it has latched onto. In 2020, Jianqiang Wu and his colleagues determined that the tiny dodder achieves this _____ with its host by absorbing and utilizing a protein the host produces when it is about to flower.
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The following text is adapted from Elizabeth von Arnim’s 1922 novel The Enchanted April. Mrs. Wilkins and her friend Rose are traveling in Italy.
“I’m going to have one of these gorgeous oranges,” said Mrs. Wilkins, staying where she was and reaching across to a black bowl piled with them. “Rose, how can you resist them. Look—have this one. Do have this beauty—” And she held out a big one.
As used in the text, what does the phrase “reaching across to” most nearly mean?
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.
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Sumerian civilization (which lasted from around 3300 to 2000 BCE) _____ many concepts that persist into present-day civilizations; for example, the first description of the seven-day week appears in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.
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Physicist Joseph Weber performed _____ work in gravitational wave research in the 1960s and 1970s, conducting key experiments that scientists later used as the basis for their own investigations that led to the first verified detection of a gravitational wave in 2015.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Containing over 160 billion base pairs of DNA resulting from polyploidy (whole genome duplication) and accumulation of noncoding DNA without significant deletion, the genome of Tmesipteris oblanceolata (New Caledonian fork fern) is the largest known among eukaryotes—and, given the high biological costs of extremely large genomes, is unlikely to be ______.
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As an architect in Los Angeles in the 1950s, Helen Liu Fong became known for avoiding _____ designs in her buildings. Instead of using standard shapes and colors, she typically explored innovative forms and daring hues.
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It is by no means _____ to recognize the influence of Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch on Ali Banisadr’s paintings; indeed, Banisadr himself cites Bosch as an inspiration. However, some scholars have suggested that the ancient Mesopotamian poem Epic of Gilgamesh may have had a far greater impact on Banisadr’s work.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
On the basis of extensive calculations and models, astronomers in the 1990s predicted that the collision of two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole could release a massive burst of gamma rays in an event called a kilonova. This _____ was confirmed with observations in 2017.
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Though not closely related, the hedgehog tenrecs of Madagascar share basic _____ true hedgehogs, including protective spines, pointed snouts, and small body size—traits the two groups of mammals independently developed in response to equivalent roles in their respective habitats.
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As discussed by scholar Anna Mladentseva, many artworks produced in the mid-1990s to the early 2000s exclusively for exhibition on the internet, such as Sinae Kim’s Genesis (2001), have become inaccessible because viewing them requires the use of _____ software (most notably Adobe Flash, discontinued in 2021).
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In 1891, design artist William Morris cofounded the Kelmscott Press, which printed editions of books using preindustrial methods. Historians argue that Morris’s repudiation of industrialization is ______ the Kelmscott editions’ use of handmade materials and intricate ornamentation reminiscent of medieval manuscripts: these meticulously handcrafted elements exemplify the artistry involved.
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The discoverers of the minor planet 1227 Geranium named it after the plant genus that includes cranesbills. Most of the recently discovered minor planets, however, are given only an identification number, largely due to there being over 500,000 such bodies known at present, which makes the already challenging task of finding a unique name for each nearly ______.
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The following text is adapted from Ida B. Wells’s 1970 autobiography A Crusade for Justice. Mr. Watts is a reference to George Frederic Watts, an English painter.
[Manchester’s] art galleries are so arranged that the name of every picture is plainly seen and one has no need of a catalogue to pick out the name and the artist. This is a convenience to the general public, which other art galleries, which shall be nameless, might copy to advantage. To her treasure of art Manchester has added Mr. Watts’ latest picture, the Good Samaritan.
As used in the text, what does the word “arranged” most nearly mean?
Scholarly discussions of gender in Shakespeare’s comedies often celebrate the rebellion of the playwright’s characters against the rigid expectations _____ by Elizabethan society. Most of the comedies end in marriage, with characters returning to their socially dictated gender roles after previously defying them, but there are some notable exceptions.
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Despite how _____ they may seem on first glance, the works of the philosopher Georg Hegel have proven to be quite influential. Readers who manage to penetrate Hegel’s frustratingly dense prose often find that his thrillingly original and profound ideas wind up shaping their own thinking.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Sueño de Familia is an exhibition of drawings, paintings, and ceramics that explores the artistic heritage of US-based artist Yolanda González. The exhibition _____ five generations, featuring works by González’s great-grandfather, grandmother, mother, and niece as well as González herself.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
In 2008 a complete set of ancient pessoi (glass game pieces) was uncovered from beneath a paving stone in modern-day Israel. Due to their small size, pessoi were easily misplaced, making a whole set a rare find. This has led some experts to suggest that the set may have been buried intentionally; however, without clear evidence, archaeologists are left to _____ what happened.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The general store was essential to daily life in the rural United States during the 1800s because it provided the supplies that the people living in nearby communities needed. Also, the store was a ______ of information. People socializing at the general store would share news and help spread it throughout their communities.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
US traffic signals didn’t always contain the familiar three lights (red, yellow, and green). Traffic lights only _____ red and green lights until the three-light traffic signal was developed in the 1920s.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Given that the conditions in binary star systems should make planetary formation nearly impossible, it’s not surprising that the existence of planets in such systems has lacked _____ explanation. Roman Rafikov and Kedron Silsbee shed light on the subject when they used modeling to determine a complex set of factors that could support planets’ development.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The percentage of US forest land that a 2023 federal report identified as being either mature or old growth exceeds other recent estimates. Given how little _____ there is among scientists regarding the scope of these categories, this discrepancy shouldn’t be surprising: forest researchers regularly dispute one another’s classifications.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
The National Heritage Fellowship was created to publicly _____ exceptional folk and traditional artists in the United States. In 2015, the fellowship was given to the circus aerialist (mid-air acrobat) Dolly Jacobs to celebrate her lifetime contributions to the arts.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
For her 2021 art installation Anthem, Wu Tsang joined forces with singer and composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland to produce a piece that critics found truly ____; they praised Tsang for creatively transforming a museum rotunda into a dynamic exhibit by projecting filmed images of Glenn-Copeland onto a massive 84-foot curtain and filling the space with the sounds of his and other voices singing.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Despite stated claims of global relevance, much major research on income inequality performed in the 2010s suffered from a myopic focus on a few countries in North America and Western Europe, partly due to limited data availability. Researchers would later _____ this shortcoming after gaining new access to banking records located in nations in Africa, such as Tunisia, and Eastern Europe, such as Hungary.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
While most animals are incapable of passing somatic mutations—genetic alterations that arise in an organism’s nonreproductive cells—on to their offspring, elkhorn coral (
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?