Reading and Writing - Part 2

Interruptions in the supply chain for microchips used in personal electronics have challenged an economist’s assertion that retailers can expect robust growth in sales of those devices in the coming months. The delays are unlikely to ______ her projection entirely but will almost certainly extend its time frame.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

Within baleen whale species, some individuals develop an accessory spleen—a seemingly functionless formation of splenetic tissue outside the normal spleen. Given the formation’s greater prevalence among whales known to make deeper dives, some researchers hypothesize that its role isn’t ______; rather, the accessory spleen may actively support diving mechanisms.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

According to a US tax policy expert, state taxes are ______ other factors when considering an interstate move. Even significant differences in state taxation have almost no effect on most people’s decisions, while differences in employment opportunities, housing availability, and climate are strong influences.

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?

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?

The following text is adapted from Jane Austen’s 1814 novel Mansfield Park. The speaker, Tom, is considering staging a play at home with a group of his friends and family.

We mean nothing but a little amusement among ourselves, just to vary the scene, and exercise our powers in something new. We want no audience, no publicity. We may be trusted, I think, in choosing some play most perfectly unexceptionable; and I can conceive no greater harm or danger to any of us in conversing in the elegant written language of some respectable author than in chattering in words of our own.

Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

The following text is adapted from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1921 short story “John Redding Goes to Sea.” John is a child who lives in a town in the woods.

Perhaps ten-year-old John was puzzling to the folk there in the Florida woods for he was an imaginative child and fond of day-dreams. The St. John River flowed a scarce three hundred feet from his back door. On its banks at this point grow numerous palms, luxuriant magnolias and bay trees. On the bosom of the stream float millions of delicately colored hyacinths. [John Redding] loved to wander down to the water’s edge, and, casting in dry twigs, watch them sail away down stream to Jacksonville, the sea, the wide world and [he] wanted to follow them.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?

The following text is from Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth. Lily Bart and a companion are walking through a park.

Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations. The landscape outspread below her seemed an enlargement of her present mood, and she found something of herself in its calmness, its breadth, its long free reaches. On the nearer slopes the sugar-maples wavered like pyres of light; lower down was a massing of grey orchards, and here and there the lingering green of an oak-grove.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?

Ecologists have long wondered how thousands of microscopic phytoplankton species can live together near ocean surfaces competing for the same resources. According to conventional wisdom, one species should emerge after outcompeting the rest. So why do so many species remain? Ecologists’ many efforts to explain this phenomenon still haven’t uncovered a satisfactory explanation.

Ecologist Michael Behrenfeld and colleagues have connected phytoplankton’s diversity to their microscopic size. Because these organisms are so tiny, they are spaced relatively far apart from each other in ocean water and, moreover, experience that water as a relatively dense substance. This in turn makes it hard for them to move around and interact with one another. Therefore, says Behrenfeld’s team, direct competition among phytoplankton probably happens much less than previously thought.

Based on the texts, how would Behrenfeld and colleagues (Text 2) most likely respond to the “conventional wisdom” discussed in Text 1?

Number and Origin of Clamshell Tools Found at Different Levels Below the Surface in Neanderthal Cave

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 ______

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table to support the research team’s conclusion?

Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt have argued that experiencing awe—a sensation of reverence and wonder typically brought on by perceiving something grand or powerful—can enable us to feel more connected to others and thereby inspire us to act more altruistically. Keltner, along with Paul K. Piff, Pia Dietze, and colleagues, claims to have found evidence for this effect in a recent study where participants were asked to either gaze up at exceptionally tall trees in a nearby grove (reported to be a universally awe-inspiring experience) or stare at the exterior of a nearby, nondescript building. After one minute, an experimenter deliberately spilled a box of pens nearby.

Which finding from the researchers’ study, if true, would most strongly support their claim?

Political scientists who favor the traditional view of voter behavior claim that voting in an election does not change a voter’s attitude toward the candidates in that election. Focusing on each US presidential election from 1976 to 1996, Ebonya Washington and Sendhil Mullainathan tested this claim by distinguishing between subjects who had just become old enough to vote (around half of whom actually voted) and otherwise similar subjects who were slightly too young to vote (and thus none of whom voted). Washington and Mullainathan compared the attitudes of the groups of subjects toward the winning candidate two years after each election.

Which finding from Washington and Mullainathan’s study, if true, would most directly weaken the claim made by people who favor the traditional view of voter behavior?

Perovskite solar cells convert light into electricity more efficiently than earlier kinds of solar cells, and manufacturing advances have recently made them commercially attractive. One limitation of the cells, however, has to do with their electron transport layer (ETL), through which absorbed electrons must pass. Often the ETL is applied through a process called spin coating, but such ETLs are fairly inefficient at converting input power to output power. André Taylor and colleagues tested a novel spray coating method for applying the ETL. The team produced ETLs of various thicknesses and concluded that spray coating holds promise for improving the power conversion efficiency of ETLs in perovskite solar cells.

Which choice best describes data from the graph that support Taylor and colleagues’ conclusion?

King Lear is a circa 1606 play by William Shakespeare. In the play, the character of King Lear attempts to test his three daughters’ devotion to him. He later expresses regret for his actions, as is evident when he ______

Which choice most effectively uses a quotation from King Lear to illustrate the claim?

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 ______

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table to complete the statement?

Choctaw/Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson turns punching bags used by boxers into art by decorating them with beadwork and elements of Native dressmaking. These elements include leather fringe and jingles, the metal cones that cover the dresses worn in the jingle dance, a women’s dance of the Ojibwe people. Thus, Gibson combines an object commonly associated with masculinity (a punching bag) with art forms traditionally practiced by women in most Native communities (beadwork and dressmaking). In this way, he rejects the division of male and female gender roles.

Which choice best describes Gibson’s approach to art, as presented in the text?

A team of biologists led by Jae-Hoon Jung, Antonio D. Barbosa, and Stephanie Hutin investigated the mechanism that allows Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress) plants to accelerate flowering at high temperatures. They replaced the protein ELF3 in the plants with a similar protein found in another species (stiff brome) that, unlike A. thaliana, displays no acceleration in flowering with increased temperature. A comparison of unmodified A. thaliana plants with the altered plants showed no difference in flowering at 22° Celsius, but at 27° Celsius, the unmodified plants exhibited accelerated flowering while the altered ones did not, which suggests that ______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

The forty-seven geothermal springs of Arkansas’ Hot Springs National Park are sourced via a process known as natural groundwater recharge, in which rainwater percolates downward through the earth—in this case, the porous rocks of the hills around Hot ______ collect in a subterranean basin.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Journalists have dubbed Gil Scott-Heron the “godfather of rap,” a title that has appeared in hundreds of articles about him since the 1990s. Scott-Heron himself resisted the godfather ______ feeling that it didn’t encapsulate his devotion to the broader African American blues music tradition as well as “bluesologist,” the moniker he preferred.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

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 ______ some shoppers had twenty-four different options, others only six. Interestingly, the shoppers with fewer jams to choose from purchased more jam.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

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.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

A study published by Rice University geoscientist Ming Tang in 2019 offers a new explanation for the origin of Earth’s ______ structures called arcs, towering ridges that form when a dense oceanic plate subducts under a less dense continental plate, melts in the mantle below, and then rises and bursts through the continental crust above.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

A firefly uses specialized muscles to draw oxygen into its lower abdomen through narrow tubes, triggering a chemical reaction whereby the oxygen combines with chemicals in the firefly’s abdomen to produce a glow. ______ when the firefly stops drawing in oxygen, the reaction—and the glow—cease.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

The student wants to emphasize how hot the Sun is relative to nearby stars. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

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

The student wants to explain how the House of Wisdom preserved the world’s knowledge. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

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

The student wants to present the study and its methodology. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

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

The student wants to emphasize a similarity between the two ways a magnificent frigatebird acquires food. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?