PSAT: Info & Ideas: Command of Evidence

Simulated Change in Annual Aquifer Input and Irrigation Output if Precipitation Concentration Increases as Climate Models Predict

Some climate models for the western United States predict that while total annual precipitation may remain unchanged from the present level, precipitation will become concentrated into fewer but more intense rain and snow events. University of Texas climate scientist Geeta Persad and her colleagues simulated how the amount of water entering aquifers and the amount being used for irrigation purposes would change if this were to occur. Persad and her colleagues concluded that concentration of precipitation into fewer events would result in a higher number of dry days, triggering more irrigation, but that this change in irrigation output is highly sensitive to the baseline concentration of precipitation that currently exists in an area.

Plants like potatoes, tomatoes, and soybeans are susceptible to bacterial wilt disease caused by the bacteria Ralstonia solanacearum. A multinational team of scientists led by Zhong Wei studied whether other microbes in the soil might influence the degree to which plants are affected by the disease. The team sampled soil surrounding individual tomato plants over time and compared the results of plants that became diseased with those that remained healthy. They concluded that the presence of certain microbes in the soil might explain the difference between healthy and diseased plants.

In the 1980s, many musicians and journalists in the English-speaking world began to draw attention to music from around the globe—such as mbaqanga from South Africa and quan họ from Vietnam—that can’t be easily categorized according to British or North American popular music genres, typically referring to such music as “world music.” While some scholars have welcomed this development for bringing diverse musical forms to prominence in countries where they’d previously been overlooked, musicologist Su Zheng claims that the concept of world music homogenizes highly distinct traditions by reducing them all to a single category.

Sandra Cisneros’s 1984 novella The House on Mango Street made a lasting impact on US literature. Its depiction of Mexican American culture inspired later authors to examine their own heritage within their fictional works. Also influential was the book’s portrayal of the main character, Esperanza, during a pivotal year of her youth. This insightful depiction of a preteen girl encouraged authors who, like Cisneros herself, are Latina to use fictional works to examine experiences from their own youth.

To investigate the influence of certain estrogen-responsive neurons on energy expenditure, biologist Stephanie Correa et al. treated female and male mice with either saline solution or clozapine-N4-oxide (CNO), which activates the neurons. Monitoring the activity levels of the mice by measuring how frequently the animals broke infrared beams crossing their enclosures, Correa et al. found that the mice in their study showed sex-specific differences in response to neuron activation: _____

“Odalie” is an 1899 short story by Alice Dunbar-Nelson. In the story, a young woman named Odalie attends the annual Mardi Gras carnival in New Orleans, where she lives with her guardian Tante Louise. Dunbar-Nelson portrays Odalie as eager to escape the monotony of her everyday life: ________

Effects of Mycorrhizal Fungi on 3 Plant Species

Mycorrhizal fungi in soil benefits many plants, substantially increasing the mass of some. A student conducted an experiment to illustrate this effect. The student chose three plant species for the experiment, including two that are mycorrhizal hosts (species known to benefit from mycorrhizal fungi) and one nonmycorrhizal species (a species that doesn’t benefit from and may even be harmed by mycorrhizal fungi). The student then grew several plants from each species both in soil containing mycorrhizal fungi and in soil that had been treated to kill mycorrhizal and other fungi. After several weeks, the student measured the plants’ average mass and was surprised to discover that _____

There Is Confusion is a 1924 novel by Jessie Redmon Fauset. In the novel, the narrator portrays the character Joanna as someone who admires ambition in other people to the exclusion of all other qualities: ______

A survey listed methods for signing into online accounts. Participants in different countries were asked to choose the sign-in method they view as most secure. The table presents data for two of the methods. According to the table, onetime passcodes were viewed as most secure by _____

“We Are Marching” is a 1921 poem by Carrie Law Morgan Figgs. In the poem, the speaker predicts future success: ______

All other things being equal, the larger a wind turbine’s rotor diameter (the diameter of the imaginary circle swept by the turbine’s rotating blades), the greater amount of energy the turbine can generate. In a research paper on wind power, a student claims that in the United States, the amount of energy generated per newly installed turbine increased substantially between 2011 and 2021.

Linguist Deborah Tannen has cautioned against framing contentious issues in terms of two highly competitive perspectives, such as pro versus con. According to Tannen, this debate‑driven approach can strip issues of their complexity and, when used in front of an audience, can be less informative than the presentation of multiple perspectives in a noncompetitive format. To test Tannen’s hypothesis, students conducted a study in which they showed participants one of three different versions of local news commentary about the same issue. Each version featured a debate between two commentators with opposing views, a panel of three commentators with various views, or a single commentator.

Results of Footprint Analysis for Two Sets of Theropod Tracks

The table shows data from paleontologist Angélica Torices and colleagues’ 2021 study of two sets of dinosaur tracks preserved in a fossilized lake bed in Spain. The tracks, referred to as La Torre 6A and La Torre 6B, were left by two individual theropods (dinosaurs that walked on two legs). The team’s findings suggest that of the two theropods, the one that left the La Torre 6B tracks had a higher maximum mean speed, _____.

Argentina, Brazil, and the United States are among the world’s leading producers of maize (corn), and each country exports a certain percentage of maize each marketing year, which runs from March to February in Argentina and Brazil and from September to August in the United States. A student is researching those percentages and finds that for the marketing year 2012/2013, the percentage of maize exported by _____

The share of the world’s population living in cities has increased dramatically since 1970, but this change has not been uniform. France and Japan, for example, were already heavily urbanized in 1970, with 70% or more of the population living in cities. The main contributors to the world’s urbanization since 1970 have been countries like Algeria, whose population went from _____

Recordings of Female Bottlenose Dolphins with Their Calves

In a study of bottlenose dolphins, biologist Laela S. Sayigh and a team of researchers analyzed recordings of female bottlenose dolphins interacting with their calves.

“Ghosts of the Old Year” is an early 1900s poem by James Weldon Johnson. In the poem, the speaker describes experiencing an ongoing cycle of anticipation followed by regretful reflection: ______.

Ecologist Veronika Bókony and colleagues investigated within-species competition among common toads (Bufo bufo), a species that secretes various unpleasant-tasting toxins called bufadienolides in response to threats. The researchers tested B. bufo tadpoles’ responses to different levels of competition by creating ponds with different tadpole population densities but a fixed amount of food. Based on analysis of the tadpoles after three weeks, the researchers concluded that increased competition drove bufadienolide production at the expense of growth.

A student is presenting average monthly rainfall totals in various Puerto Rican cities for a science class. During the presentation, the student notes that in September _____

Electra is a circa 420–410 BCE play by Sophocles, translated in 1870 by R. C. Jebb. Electra, who is in mourning for her dead father and her long-absent brother, is aware of the intensity of her grief but believes it to be justified: _____

Accomplished printmaker and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) used her art to explore the Black experience in the United States. In a paper for an art history class, a student claims that Catlett had a particular talent for unifying various artistic traditions and styles in her work.

A student is researching the Chinese government’s 1992 shift to a market economy that emphasizes trade liberalization. One means of trade liberalization involves expanding from ordinary imports into an emphasis on processing imports, which have two types: processing with assembly (in which a firm obtains raw materials from a foreign trading partner without payment and sells the final goods to that partner, charging for assembly) and processing with inputs (in which a firm expends capital to buy raw materials from a trading partner, processes them into final goods, and sells those goods to whichever trading partner it chooses). The student asserts that while initial efforts at trade liberalization were shaped by Chinese firms’ limited capital, this situation resolved during the 2000s.

Electric companies that use wind turbines rely on weather forecasts to predict the maximum amount of power, in megawatt-hours (MWh), they can generate using wind so that they can determine how much they’ll need to generate from other sources. When winds are stronger than they were forecast to be, however, the predicted maximum amount of electricity wind turbines could generate will be too low. For example, the graph shows that for the West region, the winds were _____

Among the most visited art museums in the world, the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence had approximately 1.7 million visitors in 2019. The Galleria dell’Accademia also offers virtual tours that art lovers can view online for free. Although there were initial concerns that people who viewed the virtual tours would then consider an in-person visit unnecessary, museum administrators claim that their surveys of in-person visitors show that those concerns were unjustified.

Digital paywalls restrict access to online content to those with a paid subscription. In an investigation of the effect of paywalls on newspaper company revenues for print and digital subscriptions and advertising, Doug J. Chung and colleagues compared actual outcomes (with a paywall) to control estimates (without a paywall). The researchers concluded that introducing a paywall is generally more beneficial for larger newspapers, which have high circulation and tend to offer a substantial amount of unique online content.

In addition to her technical skill and daring feats, American stunt pilot Bessie Coleman was also known for dazzling the crowds that came to watch her air shows in the 1920s with her exuberant personality. During her career, she was careful and purposeful about how she crafted her public persona. An aviation researcher has claimed that Coleman intentionally defied social norms of the time by how she chose to present herself to the public.

Male túngara frogs make complex calls to attract mates, but their calls also attract frog-biting midges, insects that feed on the frogs’ blood. Researchers Ximena Bernal and Priyanka de Silva wondered if the calls alone are sufficient for midges to locate the frogs or if midges use carbon dioxide emitted by frogs as an additional cue to their prey’s whereabouts, like mosquitoes do. In an experiment, the researchers placed two midge traps in a túngara frog breeding area. One trap played recordings of túngara frog calls and the other released carbon dioxide along with playing the calls. Bernal and de Silva concluded that carbon dioxide does not serve as an additional cue to frog-biting midges.

Employing high-performance liquid chromatography—a process that uses pressurized water to separate material into its component molecules—astrochemist Yasuhiro Oba and colleagues analyzed two samples of the Murchison meteorite that landed in Australia as well as soil from the landing zone of the meteorite to determine the concentrations of various organic molecules. By comparing the relative concentrations of types of molecules known as nucleobases in the Murchison meteorite with those in the soil, the team concluded that there is evidence that the nucleobases in the Murchison meteorite formed in space and are not the result of contamination on Earth.

Effect of Neighboring Species on Pollinator Visits to Target Species

Researchers Carolina Laura Morales and Anna Traveset gathered data about flowering plants growing alongside each other in various locations. In each case, the researchers identified one plant as a “target species” and a nearby plant as a “neighboring species.” The researchers then calculated a positive or negative value to show how the neighboring species affected pollinator visits to the target species. One example of a neighboring species with a negative effect value is the ______.

The Navajo Nation has the largest land area of any tribal nation in the United States: over 27,000 square miles in the Southwest. Because this area is so huge and its communities are located at various elevations, the people of the Navajo Nation can experience different climate conditions depending on where they live. For example, in July, _____

In a survey of public perceptions of energy use, researcher Shahzeen Attari and her team asked respondents to name the most effective action ordinary people can take to conserve energy. The team categorized each action as either an efficiency or a curtailment and found that respondents tended to name curtailments more often than they did efficiencies. For example, 19.6% of respondents stated that the most effective way to conserve energy is to turn off the lights, while only _____.

Studying tools unearthed at a cave site on the western coast of Italy, archaeologist Paola Villa and colleagues have determined that prehistoric Neanderthal groups fashioned them from shells of clams that they harvested from the seafloor while wading or diving or that washed up on the beach. Clamshells become thin and eroded as they wash up on the beach, while those on the seafloor are smooth and sturdy, so the research team suspects that Neanderthals prized the tools made with seafloor shells. However, the team also concluded that those tools were likely more challenging to obtain, noting that ____.

The Jordanelle Dam was built on the Provo River in Utah in 1992. Earth scientist Adriana E. Martinez and colleagues tracked changes to the environment on the banks of the river downstream of the dam, including how much grass and forest cover were present. They concluded that the dam changed the flow of the river in ways that benefited grass plants but didn’t benefit trees.

Huge international exhibitions known as world’s fairs have been held since 1851, but the United States hasn’t hosted one since 1984. Architecture expert Mina Chow argues that this is because some people think the events are too expensive and not popular enough. For example, the 1984 World’s Fair cost $350 million and had only _____

Nan Gao and her team conducted multiple surveys to determine participants’ levels of comfort in a room where the temperature was regulated by a commercial climate control system. Participants filled out surveys several times a day to indicate their level of comfort on a scale from $-3$ (very cold) to $+3$ (very hot), with $0$ indicating neutral (neither warm nor cool), and to indicate how they would prefer the temperature to be adjusted. The table shows three participants’ responses in one of the surveys. According to the table, all three participants wanted the room to be cooler, ______.

High levels of public uncertainty about which economic policies a country will adopt can make planning difficult for businesses, but measures of such uncertainty have not tended to be very detailed. Recently, however, economist Sandile Hlatshwayo analyzed trends in news reports to derive measures not only for general economic policy uncertainty but also for uncertainty related to specific areas of economic policy, like tax or trade policy. One revelation of her work is that a general measure may not fully reflect uncertainty about specific areas of policy, as in the case of the United Kingdom, where general economic policy uncertainty _____

By the early 1900s, the Singer Corporation, a US sewing machine manufacturer founded in 1851, began to see rapidly increasing sales abroad, particularly in Russia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. These markets were responsible for the bulk of Singer’s overseas sales, but demand for the company’s machines in other countries also grew significantly in the early twentieth century. For instance, sales of their sewing machines in _____

Guilds—local associations of artisans and merchants in the same industry—were widespread in France from the medieval period until the late eighteenth century. But guilds were much more numerous relative to the population in some cities than in others: for example, _____

Alicia Montesinos-Navarro, Isabelle Storer, and Rocío Perez-Barrales recently examined several plots within a diverse plant community in southeast Spain. The researchers calculated that if individual plants were randomly distributed on this particular landscape, only about 15% would be with other plants in patches of vegetation. They counted the number of juvenile plants of five species growing in patches of vegetation and the number growing alone on bare ground and compared those numbers to what would be expected if the plants were randomly distributed. Based on these results, they claim that plants of these species that grow in close proximity to other plants gain an advantage at an early developmental stage.