The radiation that _____ during the decay of radioactive atomic nuclei is known as gamma radiation.
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Despite being cheap, versatile, and easy to produce, _____ they are made from nonrenewable petroleum, and most do not biodegrade in landfills.
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On April 5, 1977, Kitty Cone and 150 other disability rights activists entered a San Francisco federal building. After pleading for years—to no effect—for the passage of key antidiscrimination legislation, _____ until their demands were addressed. Finally, on April 28, the legislation was signed.
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In recent years, economists around the world have created new tools that quantify the overall well-being of a country’s citizens. Economists in India, for example, use an Ease of Living Index. This tool _____ economic potential, sustainability, and citizens’ quality of life.
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French philosopher René Descartes doubted whether he could prove his own existence. Eventually, he found proof in his famous phrase “I think, therefore I am.” The _____ complexity: only those who exist would be able to ponder their existence.
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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.”
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American abstract artist Richard _____ his installations to make passersby keenly aware of how one’s movements are affected by the physical features of one’s environment, assembles large-scale steel plates into sculptures that dominate the outdoor spaces they occupy.
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Mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz used the metaphor of the “butterfly effect” to explain how seemingly minor events can have major impacts on future weather. According to Lorenz’s metaphor, the wind from a butterfly flapping _____ in Brazil might eventually grow into a storm elsewhere across the globe.
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When a given industry—water and electricity are two well-known examples—carries high infrastructural start-up costs and other barriers that discourage competition, _____ of just one or two suppliers per municipality. Such industries are known as natural monopolies.
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Bonnie Buratti of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ______ data about Saturn’s rings collected by the Cassini spacecraft when she made an interesting discovery: the tiny moons embedded between and within Saturn’s rings are shaped by the buildup of ring material on the moons’ surfaces.
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In the early twentieth century, Joseph Kekuku and other Hawaiian _____ in the mainland United States to the bright and lilting sound of the kīkā kila, or Hawaiian steel guitar. The instrument soon became a fixture in American blues and country music.
Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?
Tortoises can be found in many works of literature. For example, in Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia, there is a tortoise that _____ by two names (Plautus and Lightning) and appears in both of the play’s parallel timelines. As a character, the tortoise symbolizes the connection between the past and present.
Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?
Entomologists Yash Sondhi and Samuel Fabian have tried to explain why moths fly erratically around light sources at night. Knowing that flying insects keep their backs pointed toward sunlight during the day, ______
In her 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild first explored at length her conception of a “sociology of emotions”—the idea that the various cultural and ideological frameworks a person has internalized (class, gender, political affiliation, etc.) ______ each emotional reaction that person has within a situation.
Each night in Gijón, Spain, a section of the city’s marina is bathed in a soft green glow. The source of the glow is the Árbol de la Sidra, a large sculpture made up of 3,200 recycled glass bottles. A lamp inside the tree-shaped structure _____ the green glass.
Rabinal Achí is a precolonial Maya dance drama performed annually in Rabinal, a town in the Guatemalan highlands. Based on events that occurred when Rabinal was a city-state ruled by a king, _____ had once been an ally of the king but was later captured while leading an invading force against him.
During the American Civil War, Thomas Morris Chester braved the front lines as a war correspondent for the Philadelphia Press. Amplifying the voices and experiences of Black soldiers _____ of particular importance to Chester, who later became an activist and lawyer during the postwar Reconstruction period.
In 1903, environmentalist John Muir guided President Theodore Roosevelt on a scenic, sprawling trip through California’s Yosemite Valley. Upon returning from the three-day excursion, Roosevelt _____ to conserve the nation’s wilderness areas, a vow he upheld for his remaining six years in office.
To survive when water is scarce, embryos inside African turquoise killifish eggs _____ a dormant state known as diapause. In this state, embryonic development is paused for as long as two years—longer than the life span of an adult killifish.
In 1637, the price of tulips skyrocketed in Amsterdam, with single bulbs of rare varieties selling for up to the equivalent of $200,000 in today’s US dollars. Some historians _____ that this “tulip mania” was the first historical instance of an asset bubble, which occurs when investors drive prices to highs not supported by actual demand.
Professional American football player Fred Cox invented one of the world’s most popular toys. In the 1970s, he came up with the idea for the Nerf football, which _____ of the harder and heavier regulation football.
The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), a commonly used measure of competition between companies in a particular market, ranges from a score of zero to 10,000 points. Compared with that of a highly concentrated market—that is, a market controlled by very few companies—_____
According to the traditional RYB (red-yellow-blue) color model, yellow is a complementary color to purple. However, yellow _____ considered complementary to blue in modern color theory.
Formed in 1967 to foster political and economic stability within the Asia-Pacific region, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations was originally made up of five members: Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. By the end of the 1990s, the organization _____ its initial membership.
Atoms in a synchrotron, a type of circular particle accelerator, travel faster and faster until they ______ a desired energy level, at which point they are diverted to collide with a target, smashing the atoms.
Led by Syrian American astronomer Shadia Habbal, the Solar Wind Sherpas are an intrepid team of scientists who travel the globe to study solar winds, the streams of particles emanating from the Sun that are only visible from certain locations during a total solar eclipse. When such an eclipse is imminent, the Sherpas pack up their telescopes and _____ ready.
In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, an appeal for freedom from the British monarchy that famously helped ignite the desire for independence among the American colonists. After the colonies achieved their independence, Paine moved to Paris, where the provocative _____ would contribute to another revolution—the French Revolution.
Zydeco music originated in the French Creole community of southwest Louisiana. One instrument that gives zydeco its unique sound is the vest frottoir. The vest frottoir _____ a wearable washboard that is played by rubbing spoons or bottle openers against it.
According to linguist Martin Joos, speakers of the English language _____ five main registers—frozen, formal, consultative, casual, and intimate—which they rotate between depending on the situation.
In the list “Adorable Things” from Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book, the author delights in baby sparrows, a face drawn on a melon, and a young courtier in ceremonial garb. So shrewd an observer is Shōnagon, a lady-in-waiting to Empress Teishi, that her book’s musings on tenth-century Japanese courtly life _____ readers a thousand years later.
Nowadays, tug-of-war is usually seen as an informal game one might play at a picnic or in gym class. Surprisingly, the Olympic committee once decided _____ tug-of-war as an official Olympic event! Nations competed in the event at the Olympic Games from 1900 to 1920.
When they were first introduced to western Europe from Byzantium in the eleventh century, table forks were met with much resistance. The Bishop of Ostia, St. Peter Damian, condemned the eating utensils because he considered _____ dangerous and unnecessary luxury items.
Farouk El-Baz, a geologist and space scientist, ______ part of the team that selected the lunar landing sites for the Apollo program during the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1970s, Janaki Ammal, a prominent botanist, emerged as a powerful voice in India’s environmental conservation movement. Her exhaustive chromosomal survey of plants in Silent Valley, a pristine tropical forest in Kerala, India, that is home to nearly 1,000 species of native flora (many of which are endangered), _____ instrumental in the government’s decision to preserve the forest.
Obsidian is a kind of volcanic glass formed when lava cools so quickly that the atoms inside it cannot arrange themselves in a crystalline structure. You _____ more about obsidian’s structure, which is classified as amorphous, in a later chapter.
The artistic talents of Barbara Chase-Riboud, most known for her 1979 historical novel Sally Hemings and the conversation it inspired, _____ limited to the realm of prose: she first excelled in sculpture, where her affinity for bronze—a material she described as “timeless” due to its use across eras and cultures—became part of her artistic identity.
Public-awareness campaigns about the need to reduce single-use plastics can be successful, says researcher Kim Borg of Monash University in Australia, when these campaigns give consumers a choice: for example, Japan achieved a 40 percent reduction in plastic-bag use after cashiers were instructed to ask customers whether _____ wanted a bag.
In 1929, Edwin Herbert Land invented a polarizing filter that was featured in a number of products, from sunglasses to 3D movies. A decade later, Land _____ his technology to invent the world’s first instant camera, the Polaroid Land camera.
Water in the North Atlantic Ocean is pushed eastward by powerful winds, but the rotation of Earth and interference from nearby landmasses together cause _____ to swirl into a massive, churning whirlpool—also called the North Atlantic Gyre—that spins clockwise.
The soundtrack to Mira Nair’s 1991 film Mississippi Masala expressively captures the clashing of cultures that happens when _____ (a young Indian woman from Uganda and a young African American man from Mississippi) meet. Featured throughout the film are songs from Uganda’s Afrigo Band, the Indian composer L. Subramaniam, and the Mississippi blues musician Sam Chatmon.
Midway through her 1968 jazz album A Monastic Trio, Alice Coltrane switches instruments, swapping the piano for the harp. With the same fluid style that Coltrane was famous for on piano, she _____ her fingers across the harp strings and creates a radiant sound.
It can take time for proposed amendments to the US Constitution to become law. For example, the Twenty-Second Amendment, which limits the number of _____ can serve, was first proposed in 1947 but wasn’t approved by the required three-fourths majority of state legislatures until 1951.
Working from an earlier discovery of Charpentier’s, chemists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna—winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry—re-created and then reprogrammed the so-called “genetic scissors” of a species of DNA-cleaving bacteria _____, a tool that is revolutionizing the field of gene technology.
Objects ranging from the Kikkoman soy sauce bottle to the Yamaha VMAX motorcycle to the Komachi bullet train _____ designed by twentieth-century industrial designer Kenji Ekuan.
In the historical novel The Surrender Tree, Cuban American author Margarita Engle uses poetry rather than prose _____ the true story of Cuban folk hero Rosa La Bayamesa.
In assessing the films of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, ______ have missed his equally deep engagement with Japanese artistic traditions such as Noh theater.
Solarpunk is an art movement that imagines renewable energy–powered technology infused complementarily into nature. In Paolo Bacigalupi’s solarpunk short story “Efficiency,” an artificial intelligence that absorbs sustainable energies, redistributing them through intricate networks of weights and generators, ______ Chicago’s energy grid.
Classical composer Florence Price’s 1927 move to Chicago marked a turning point in her career. It was there that Price premiered her First Symphony—a piece that was praised for blending traditional Romantic motifs with aspects of Black folk music—and _____ supportive relationships with other Black artists.
English poet and Shakespeare contemporary John Donne’s _____ much admired during his lifetime (1572–1631) and in the decades that followed, had, at the time of their enthusiastic rediscovery by the early twentieth-century modernists, been essentially gathering dust for the intervening 250 years.
Like other amphibians, the wood frog (Rana sylvatica) is unable to generate its own heat, so during periods of subfreezing temperatures, it _____ by producing large amounts of glucose, a sugar that helps prevent damaging ice from forming inside its cells.
While exploring Nevada’s Gypsum Cave in 1930, Seneca and Abenaki archaeologist Bertha Parker made her most famous discovery: the skull of a now-extinct ground sloth (
Every last second of space shuttle mission STS-79, which lasted ten days and three hours, _____ carefully monitored by a team of experts.
The sun never sets during the Arctic summer in the Far North. In response, reindeer in this region must change their sleep habits. Instead of resting when it gets dark, they rest when they need _____ their food.
British scientists James Watson and Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize in part for their 1953 paper announcing the double helix structure of DNA, but it is misleading to say that Watson and Crick discovered the double helix. _____ findings were based on a famous X-ray image of DNA fibers, “Photo 51,” developed by X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling.
One of the few African American global explorers during the turn of the 20th century, _____
In the 1950s, a man named Joseph McVicker was struggling to keep his business afloat when his sister-in-law Kay Zufall advised him to repurpose the company’s product, a nontoxic, clay-like substance for removing soot from wallpaper, as a modeling putty for kids. In addition, Zufall _____ selling the product under a child-friendly name: Play-Doh.
When they were first discovered in Australia in 1798, duck-billed, beaver-tailed platypuses so defied categorization that one scientist assigned them the name Ornithorhynchus paradoxus: “paradoxical bird-snout.” The animal, which lays eggs but also nurses _____ young with milk, has since been classified as belonging to the monotremes group.
Known as Earth’s “living skin,” biocrusts are thin layers of soil held together by surface-dwelling microorganisms such as fungi, lichens, and cyanobacteria. Fortifying soil in arid ecosystems against erosion, _____
In order to prevent nonnative fish species from moving freely between the Mediterranean and Red Seas, marine biologist Bella Galil has proposed that a saline lock system be installed along the Suez Canal in Egypt’s Great Bitter Lakes. The lock would increase the salinity of the lakes and _____ a natural barrier of water most marine creatures would be unable to cross.
An online content creator who uses copyrighted songs without permission risks being demonetized (prohibited from including paid advertisements in content). The best way to avoid demonetization is to choose music from the public domain. Using one of these noncopyrighted songs _____ a creator won’t lose advertising revenue.
The African Games Co-production Market, one of over 180 annual international conferences supporting video game development, _____ the growth of the African gaming industry by helping start-up studios in Africa find partners.
Eighteen letters written by Louisa May Alcott, author of the popular novel Little Women (1868), can be found at the New York Historical Society. _____ letters demonstrate Alcott’s keen business sense in her interactions with publishers.
The village of Panduyacu in Ecuador _____ one of the rare places in the world located almost directly on the equator.
In 1966, Emmett Ashford became the first African American to umpire a Major League Baseball game. His energetic gestures announcing when a player had struck out and his habit of barreling after a hit ball to see if it would land out of _____ transform the traditionally solemn umpire role into a dynamic one.
The classic children’s board game Chutes and Ladders is a version of an ancient Nepalese game, Paramapada Sopanapata. In both games, players encounter “good” or “bad” spaces while traveling along a path; landing on one of the good spaces _____ a player to skip ahead and arrive closer to the end goal.
Literary agents estimate that more than half of all nonfiction books credited to a celebrity or other public figure are in fact written by ghostwriters, professional authors who are paid to write other _____ but whose names never appear on book covers.
Based on genetic evidence, archaeologists have generally agreed that reindeer domestication began in the eleventh century CE. However, since uncovering fragments of a 2,000-year-old reindeer training harness in northern Siberia, _____ may have begun much earlier.
Several advantages—the ability to react strongly with chip components, to avoid interference from other waves, and to be confined within tiny circuits—_____ acoustic waves as a promising alternative to electrical waves for transmitting data on computer chips; as a result, researchers are invested in developing more acoustic wave–based chips.
In the early twentieth century, Joseph Kekuku and other Hawaiian _____ in the mainland United States to the bright and lilting sound of the kīkā kila, or Hawaiian steel guitar. The instrument soon became a fixture in American blues and country music.
Tortoises can be found in many works of literature. For example, in Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia, there is a tortoise that _____ by two names (Plautus and Lightning) and appears in both of the play’s parallel timelines. As a character, the tortoise symbolizes the connection between the past and present.
Former First Lady of the United States Eleanor Roosevelt and Indian activist and educator Hansa Mehta were instrumental in drafting the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that _____ the basic freedoms to which all people are entitled.
Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?
In knot theory (the mathematical study of curved, closed loops), knots are characterized by their crossing numbers—that is, the number of times the knotted thread crosses over itself. The trefoil knot and the figure-eight knot, each with a crossing number below five, _____ among the simplest possible knots with the fewest number of crossings.
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Featuring jagged peaks of black ink surrounded by hazy swirls of blue and green paint, Zhang Daqian’s 1983 painting Panorama of Mount Lu is inspired by the tradition of qinglü shanshui, a type of Chinese landscape painting _____ by the use of blue and green hues to depict ethereal, otherworldly landscapes.
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In many of her landscape paintings from the 1970s and 1980s, Lebanese American artist Etel Adnan worked to capture the essence of California’s fog-shrouded Mount Tamalpais region through abstraction, using splotches of color to represent the area’s features. Interestingly, the triangle representing the mountain itself _____ among the few defined figures in her paintings.
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A second-generation Japanese American, Wataru Misaka _____ in World War II (1941–45) and won two amateur national basketball championships at the University of Utah when he joined the New York Knicks for the 1947–48 season, becoming the first non-white basketball player in the US’s top professional league.
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A government body officially known as the Althing, ______
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In 1930, Japanese American artist Chiura Obata depicted the natural beauty of Yosemite National Park in two memorable woodcuts: Evening at Carl Inn and Lake Basin in the High Sierra. In 2019, _____ exhibited alongside 150 of Obata’s other works in a single-artist show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
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Mary Madden of Ohio _____ a fierce advocate of women’s voting rights in the late 1800s. The dedication of Madden and her fellow activists was rewarded in 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution guaranteed American women the right to vote.
Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?
If simple sugars such as ribose and glycolaldehyde _____ Earth from elsewhere and survived impact—a possibility astrophysicist Nicolle Zellner outlined in a 2020 study—the sugars could have reacted with other molecules that were already present on the planet to form the nucleotides that are the structural components of RNA and DNA.
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Inventor John Friedman created a prototype of the first flexible straw by inserting a screw into a paper straw and, using dental floss, binding the straw tightly around the _____. When the floss and screw were removed, the resulting corrugations in the paper allowed the straw to bend easily over the edge of a glass.
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Photographer Ansel Adams’s landscape portraits are iconic pieces of American art. However, many of the _____ of landscapes were intended not as art but as marketing; a concessions company at Yosemite National Park had hired Adams to take pictures of the park for restaurant menus and brochures.
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Forming extensive networks via mycorrhizal association—that is, a symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi—_____
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Each year in the fall, when the weather starts to cool in the northern hemisphere, millions of North American monarch butterflies journey south. Searching for food and warmer habitats, they ______ thousands of miles—from as far north as Canada all the way down to Mexico—on this annual migration.
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Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s star quilt poems offer an unusually open-ended reading experience. With _____ eight panels of text stitched together in the shape of a traditional eight-pointed Lakota star quilt, the poems present viewers with a seemingly infinite number of ways to read them.
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In a rural area along the border between Oklahoma and Texas, amateur astronomers gather each year to observe the night sky at the Okie-Tex Star Party. Like most star parties, Okie-Tex takes place in an area with low light pollution, _____ dark skies and ideal stargazing conditions.
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“Praise Song for the Day,” Elizabeth Alexander’s 2009 inaugural poem, asserts that “We cross dirt roads and highways...to see what’s on the other side.” Alexander’s use of “we” _____ Americans’ collective efforts and shared desire to seek new opportunity.
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By the time Hawaiian king Kamehameha III ______ the throne, the number of longhorn cattle, first introduced to the islands in 1793, had drastically increased, and so too had the need for paniolo (Hawaiian cowboys) to manage the wild herds that then roamed throughout the volcanic terrain.
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In 1899, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius developed an equation to answer a long-standing question: why do chemical reactions speed up at higher temperatures? The Arrhenius equation, named for its creator, _____ an important concept in modern chemistry.
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Increased gender diversity is revitalizing the field of economics, according to Harvard’s Claudia Goldin. The trailblazing accomplishments of Goldin, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on women in the labor force, _____ to the value of scholars of diverse backgrounds in spurring research into previously unexplored, but vitally important, topics.
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In 1994, almost 200 years after the death of Wang Zhenyi, the International Astronomical _____ the contributions of the barrier-breaking 18th-century astronomer and author of “Dispute of the Procession of the Equinoxes,” naming a crater on Venus after her.
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