Neuroscientist Karen Konkoly wanted to determine whether individuals can understand and respond to questions during REM sleep. She first taught volunteers eye movements they would use to respond to basic math problems while asleep (a single left-right eye movement indicated the number one). ______blank she attached electrodes to the volunteers’ faces to record their eye movements during sleep.

In discussing Mary Shelley’s 1818 epistolary novel Frankenstein, literary theorist Gayatri Spivak directs the reader’s attention to the character of Margaret Saville. As Spivak points out, Saville is not the protagonist of Shelley’s ______blank as the recipient of the letters that frame the book’s narrative, she’s the “occasion” of it.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• Sam Maloof (1916–2009) was an American woodworker and furniture designer.
• He was the son of Lebanese immigrants.
• He received a “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1985.
• The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, owns a rocking chair that Maloof made from walnut wood.
• The armrests and the seat of the chair are sleek and contoured, and the back consists of seven spindle-like slats.

In June, female loggerhead sea turtles will swim back to the sandy beaches where they were born to lay eggs of their own. First, the turtle will dig her nest in the sand. ______blank she will lay up to 100 eggs in the nest. Finally, she will cover it all with sand, before returning to the ocean.

In her poetry collection Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove interweaves the titular characters’ personal stories with broader historical narratives. She places Thomas’s journey from the American South to the Midwest in the early 1900s within the larger context of the Great Migration. ______blank Dove sets events from Beulah’s personal life against the backdrop of the US Civil Rights Movement.

In a study of the mechanisms underlying associative memory—or the ability to learn and remember connections between inherently unrelated things—neuroscientists Kei Igarashi, Jasmine Chavez, and others presented mice with memory tests. The team discovered that fan cells, a type of cell found in the medial temporal lobe of the brain, are necessary for the acquisition of new associative memories. They also found that fan cell activity requires dopamine, a chemical the brain produces in response to pleasure and rewards. Consequently, receiving a reward should likely help to ______blank

Ten of William Shakespeare’s plays are classified as histories. Although each one of these plays, which include Henry V and Richard III, ______blank on a single historical figure (specifically, an English king), some, such as Henry VI Part One and Henry VI Part Two, feature different episodes from the same monarch’s life.     

The following text is from the 1923 poem “Black Finger” by Angelina Weld Grimké, a Black American writer. A cypress is a type of evergreen tree.

I have just seen a most beautiful thing,
Slim and still,
 Against a gold, gold sky,
 A straight black cypress,
Sensitive,
Exquisite,
A black finger
Pointing upwards.
Why, beautiful still finger, are you black?
And why are you pointing upwards?

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.

Po’Pay was a Tewa leader from Ohkay Owingeh, a pueblo located about twenty-five miles north of present-day Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was instrumental in organizing the Pueblo Revolt of ______blank as a result of his leadership, the Spanish colonizers were expelled from the region for a time.

Far from being modern inventions, ______blank more than 5,000 years ago.

Paleontologist Lucas E. Fiorelli and colleagues have reported the discovery at a mine in Brazil of several egg clutches, partially preserved single eggs, and egg shells from the Late Cretaceous period. The researchers have concluded that the area was once a nesting and breeding site for titanosaurs, a group of sauropod dinosaurs. The finding is significant given the previous lack of known nesting sites in northern regions of South America, which led many paleontologists to assume that titanosaurs migrated south to lay eggs.

In a heated debate in biogeography, the field is divided between dispersalists and vicariancists. ______blank there are those who argue that dispersal is the most crucial determining factor in a species’ distribution, and those who insist that vicariance (separation due to geographic barriers) is. Biogeographer Isabel Sanmartín counts herself among neither.

The following text is from Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale. Mr. Verloc is navigating the London streets on his way to a meeting.

Before reaching Knightsbridge, Mr. Verloc took a turn to the left out of the busy main thoroughfare, uproarious with the traffic of swaying omnibuses and trotting vans, in the almost silent, swift flow of hansoms [horse-drawn carriages]. Under his hat, worn with a slight backward tilt, his hair had been carefully brushed into respectful sleekness; for his business was with an Embassy. And Mr. Verloc, steady like a rock—a soft kind of rock—marched now along a street which could with every propriety be described as private.

Scent is tightly interwoven with our daily lives, often evoking significant memories and important social events. This connection is of growing interest to archaeologists who hope to use it to better understand ancient rituals, trade, social hierarchies, and medicine. Although the speed at which odor molecules dissipate makes identifying ancient scents challenging, advancements in biomolecular technologies show promise in unlocking ancient aromas from preserved artifacts. Archaeological studies making use of these advancements may provide new insights into past societies.

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, ______blank

Text 1

Films and television shows commonly include a long list of credits naming the people involved in a production. Credit sequences may not be exciting, but they generally ensure that everyone’s contributions are duly acknowledged. Because they are highly standardized, film and television credits are also valuable to anyone researching the careers of pioneering cast and crew members who have worked in the mediums.

Text 2

Video game scholars face a major challenge in the industry’s failure to consistently credit the artists, designers, and other contributors involved in making video games. Without a reliable record of which people worked on which games, questions about the medium’s development can be difficult to answer, and the accomplishments of all but its best-known innovators can be difficult to trace.

In 1973, poet Miguel Algarín started inviting other writers who, like him, were Nuyorican—a term for New Yorkers of Puerto Rican heritage—to gather in his apartment to present their work. The gatherings were so well attended that Algarín soon had to rent space in a cafe to accommodate them. Thus, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe was born. Moving to a permanent location in 1981, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe expanded its original scope beyond the written word, hosting art exhibitions and musical performances as well. Half a century since its inception, it continues to foster emerging Nuyorican talent.

The following text is adapted from Countee Cullen’s 1926 poem “Thoughts in a Zoo.” 

They in their cruel traps, and we in ours,  

Survey each other’s rage, and pass the hours  

Commiserating each the other’s woe,  

To mitigate his own pain’s fiery glow.  

Man could but little proffer in exchange  

Save that his cages have a larger range.  

That lion with his lordly, untamed heart  

Has in some man his human counterpart,

Some lofty soul in dreams and visions wrapped,  

But in the stifling flesh securely trapped.

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.

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 ______blank: 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.

The following text is adapted from María Cristina Mena’s 1914 short story “The Vine-Leaf.”

It is a saying in the capital of Mexico that Dr. Malsufrido carries more family secrets under his hat than any archbishop.

The doctor’s hat is, appropriately enough, uncommonly capacious, rising very high, and sinking so low that it seems to be supported by his ears and eyebrows, and it has a furry look, as if it had been brushed the wrong way, which is perhaps what happens to it if it is ever brushed at all. When the doctor takes it off, the family secrets do not fly out like a flock of parrots, but remain nicely bottled up beneath a dome of old and highly polished ivory.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a prominent classical music composer from England who toured the US three times in the early 1900s. The child of a West African father and an English mother, Coleridge-Taylor emphasized his mixed-race ancestry. For example, he referred to himself as Anglo-African. ______blank he incorporated the sounds of traditional African music into his classical music compositions.

Neural networks are computer models intended to reflect the organization of human brains and are often used in studies of brain function. According to an analysis of 11,000 such networks, Rylan Schaeffer and colleagues advise caution when drawing conclusions about brains from observations of neural networks. They found that when attempting to mimic grid cells (brain cells used in navigation), while 90% of the networks could accomplish navigation-related tasks, only about 10% of those exhibited any behaviors similar to those of grid cells. But even this approximation of grid-cell activity has less to do with similarity between the neural networks and biological brains than it does with the rules programmed into the networks.

One challenge when researching whether holding elected office changes a person’s behavior is the problem of ensuring that the experiment has an appropriate control group. To reveal the effect of holding office, researchers must compare people who hold elected office with people who do not hold office but who are otherwise similar to the office-holders. Since researchers are unable to control which politicians win elections, they therefore ______blank

As British scientist Peter Whibberley has observed, “the Earth is not a very good timekeeper.” Earth’s slightly irregular rotation rate means that measurements of time must be periodically adjusted. Specifically, an extra “leap second” (the 86,401st second of the day) is ______blank time based on the planet’s rotation lags a full nine-tenths of a second behind time kept by precise atomic clocks.

Text 1

Fossils of the hominin Australopithecus africanus have been found in the Sterkfontein Caves of South Africa, but assigning an age to the fossils is challenging because of the unreliability of dating methods in this context. The geology of Sterkfontein has caused soil layers from different periods to mix, impeding stratigraphic dating, and dates cannot be reliably imputed from those of nearby animal bones since the bones may have been relocated by flooding.

Text 2

Archaeologists used new cosmogenic nuclide dating techniques to reevaluate the ages of A. africanus fossils found in the Sterkfontein Caves. This technique involves analyzing the cosmogenic nucleotides in the breccia—the matrix of rock fragments immediately surrounding the fossils. The researchers assert that this approach avoids the potential for misdating associated with assigning ages based on Sterkfontein’s soil layers or animal bones.

The work of molecular biophysicist Enrique M. De La Cruz is known for ______blank 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.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• In 2020, theater students at Radford and Virginia Tech chose an interactive, online format to present a play about woman suffrage activists.
• Their “Women and the Vote” website featured an interactive digital drawing of a Victorian-style house.
• Audiences were asked to focus on a room of their choice and select from that room an artifact related to the suffrage movement.
• One click took them to video clips, songs, artwork, and texts associated with the artifact.
• The play was popular with audiences because the format allowed them to control the experience.

In 2008, two years after the death of science fiction writer Octavia Butler, the Huntington Library in ______blank received a collection of more than 8,000 items, including Butler’s private notes, research materials, manuscripts, photos, and drawings. Today, the Octavia E. Butler Collection is one of the most researched archives at the library.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• As engineered structures, many bird nests are uniquely flexible yet cohesive.
• A research team led by Yashraj Bhosale wanted to better understand the mechanics behind these structural properties.
• Bhosale’s team used laboratory models that simulated the arrangement of flexible sticks into nest-like structures.
• The researchers analyzed the points where sticks touched one another.
• When pressure was applied to the model nests, the number of contact points between the sticks increased, making the structures stiffer.

Over twenty years ago, in a landmark experiment in the psychology of choice, professor Sheena Iyengar set up a jam-tasting booth at a grocery store. The number of jams available for tasting ______blank some shoppers had twenty-four different options, others only six. Interestingly, the shoppers with fewer jams to choose from purchased more jam.

Most of the planets that have been discovered outside our solar system orbit G-type stars, like our Sun. In 2014, ______blank researchers identified a planet orbiting KELT-9, a B-type star more than twice as massive and nearly twice as hot as the Sun. Called KELT-9b, it is one of the hottest planets ever discovered.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• Organisms release cellular material into their environment by shedding substances such as hair or skin.
• The DNA in these substances is known as environmental DNA, or eDNA.
• Researchers collect and analyze eDNA to detect the presence of species that are difficult to observe.
• Geneticist Sara Oyler-McCance’s research team analyzed eDNA in water samples from the Florida Everglades to detect invasive constrictor snake species in the area.
• The study determined a 91% probability of detecting Burmese python eDNA in a given location.

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, ______blank may have begun much earlier.

Gathering accurate data on water flow in the United States is challenging because of the country’s millions of miles of ______blank the volume and speed of water at any given location can vary drastically over time.

The following text is adapted from Edith Nesbit’s 1906 novel The Railway Children.

Mother did not spend all her time in paying dull [visits] to dull ladies, and sitting dully at home waiting for dull ladies to pay [visits] to her. She was almost always there, ready to play with the children, and read to them, and help them to do their home-lessons. Besides this she used to write stories for them while they were at school, and read them aloud after tea, and she always made up funny pieces of poetry for their birthdays and for other great occasions.

In superfluorescence, electrical charges known as dipoles emit light in synchronized bursts so intense that they are visible to the eye. Until recently, this phenomenon has only been observed at extremely cold temperatures because dipoles cannot synchronize at higher temperatures. But in a study, Melike Biliroglu and colleagues observed superfluorescence at room temperature in thin films made of perovskite and other similarly crystalline materials; the researchers propose that the formation of shock-absorbing quasiparticles called polarons in the material protects dipoles from thermal interference.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• In 2019, Emily Shepard and colleagues in the UK and Germany studied the effect of wind on auks’ success in landing at cliffside nesting sites.
• They found as wind conditions intensified, the birds needed more attempts in order to make a successful landing.
• When the wind was still, almost 100% of landing attempts were successful.
• In a strong breeze, approximately 40% of attempts were successful.
• In near-gale conditions, only around 20% of attempts were successful.

Archaeologists and historians used to believe that the Maya civilization during its Classic period (roughly 250–900) lacked agricultural marketplaces. One reason for this belief was that these scholars misunderstood the ecology of the regions the Maya inhabited. Marketplaces typically emerge because different individuals or groups want to trade resources they control for resources they don’t control. Scholars seriously underestimated the ecological diversity of the Maya landscape and thus assumed that ______blank

Songbirds learn to respond to and imitate their species’ songs from an early age. With each generation, small differences are introduced that result in distinct variations—called dialects—among geographically isolated populations of the same species. A research study examined whether twelve-day-old Ficedula hypoleuca (pied flycatcher) nestlings prefer local dialects over the unfamiliar dialects of nonlocal F. hypoleuca populations: the more begging calls the nestlings made in response to a song, the stronger their preference. The researchers found that nestlings produced more begging calls in response to their own dialect than to nonlocal dialects. Since song preference plays a role in songbird mate selection, the finding suggests that ______blank

Text 1

On April 26th, 1777, Sybil Ludington rode 40 miles by horse through Putnam County, New York, to gather up local militia. British forces were burning nearby Danbury, Connecticut, and Ludington wanted to rally rebel troops to meet them. Although she was only 16 years old at the time, her brave feat made Ludington one of the heroes of the American Revolution. Since then, Ludington has been widely celebrated, inspiring postage stamps, statues, and even children’s TV series. 

Text 2

Historian Paula D. Hunt researched the life and legacy of Sybil Ludington but found no evidence for her famous ride. Although many articles and books have been written about Ludington, Hunt believes writers may have been inventing details about Ludington as they retold her story. Ludington is revered by Americans today, but there simply isn’t a strong historical record of her heroic ride.

Text 1

The live music festival business is growing in event size and genre variety. With so many consumer options, organizers are finding ways to cement festival attendance as a special experience worth sharing. This phenomenon is linked to the growing “experiential economy,” where many find it gratifying to purchase lived experiences. To ensure a profitable event, venues need to consider the overall consumer experience, not just the band lineup.

Text 2

Music festival appearances are becoming a more important part of musicians’ careers. One factor in this shift is the rising use of streaming services that allow access to huge numbers of songs for a monthly fee, subsequently reducing sales of full-length albums. With this shift in consumer behavior, musicians are increasingly dependent on revenue from live performances.

African American Percy Julian was a scientist and entrepreneur whose work helped people around the world to see. Named in 1999 as one of the greatest achievements by a US chemist in the past hundred years, ______blank led to the first mass-produced treatment for glaucoma.

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 ______blank transform the traditionally solemn umpire role into a dynamic one.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• The Atlantic Monthly magazine was first published in 1857.
• The magazine focused on politics, art, and literature.
• In 2019, historian Cathryn Halverson published the book Faraway Women and the “Atlantic Monthly.”
• Its subject is female authors whose autobiographies appeared in the magazine in the early 1900s.
• One of the authors discussed is Juanita Harrison.

One aspect of in-person shopping that online shopping can’t replicate is the opportunity to touch a product before buying it. Does this difference matter? In an experiment, researchers asked one group of participants to touch a mug and a toy, while another group was prohibited from touching the two items. The participants were then asked how much money they’d pay for the items. People who got to touch the items were willing to pay much more money for them than were people who weren’t allowed to touch the items. This finding suggests that ______blank

German theater practitioner Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) believed that theater should elicit an intellectual rather than an emotional response from audiences, provoking them to consider social and political realities that extend beyond the characters and events depicted onstage. Brecht’s influence can be seen in English playwright Caryl Churchill’s 1979 play Cloud 9: although the play sometimes invites empathetic reactions, it primarily works to engage audiences in an interrogation of patriarchy and colonialism, which it does by placing audiences at a distance, thereby encouraging them to ______blank