The National Heritage Fellowship was created to ______ exceptional folk and traditional artists in the United States. One artist who received the fellowship, the taiko drummer Seiichi Tanaka, was chosen for his lifetime contributions to the arts. Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

Broods of periodical cicadas (inch-long winged insects) emerge for six weeks in late spring on a cycle of either 13 or 17 years. In 2024, the emergences of the Great Southern Brood (on a 13-year cycle) and the Northern Illinois Brood (on a 17-year cycle) coincided in the Midwest and Southeast United States, ______ that happens only once every 221 years. Sixteen states were covered with a trillion cicadas. Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

Japanese animator and director Hayao Miyazaki often includes fantasy elements in otherwise realistic settings in his movies, but he tends to ______ details and exposition about those elements. Miyazaki simply presents fantastical characters and actions with little backstory or explanation, encouraging viewers to embrace the presence of the extraordinary in everyday life. Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

The following text is from Charles Chesnutt’s 1905 novel The Colonel’s Dream. Mr. French and Mr. Kirby work together. Mr. French, the senior partner, who sat opposite Kirby, was an older man—a safe guess would have placed him somewhere in the debatable ground between forty and fifty; of a good height, as could be seen even from the seated figure, the upper part of which was held erect with the unconscious ease which one associates with military training. As used in the text, what does the word “good” most nearly mean?

Portoviejo, Ecuador, was named a City of Gastronomy by UNESCO in 2019, a title that ______ that Portoviejo has a unique and vibrant food culture worthy of celebration. Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

Svante Pääbo and other researchers studying the history of organisms have long utilized ancient DNA—DNA recovered from ancient organic material that has been preserved under natural conditions. However, J. Mason Heberling and David J. Burke’s 2019 study of the evolutionary trajectory of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi instead relied on historical DNA—genomic data incidentally preserved in specimens that are housed in natural history collections —thus capitalizing on the research potential offered by a vast but hitherto relatively underutilized source of insight into the biological past. Which choice best describes the function of the underlined portion in the text as a whole?

Curious about how people visually perceive objects in their dreams, Stephen LaBerge and team recruited lucid dreamers—people aware that they’re dreaming as it’s happening—for a research study. These participants were reliably able to signal when they had entered a dream state; the team then observed participants’ eye movements as they slept.The smoothness with which participants’ eyes tracked objects in their dreams closely matched how sighted people who are awake visually track objects around them, suggesting to the team that the brain perceives dream objects as the product of something other than pure imagination. Which choice best states the function of the underlined portion in the text as a whole?

Text 1: Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has a more rigorous structure than its sequel,Capital and Ideology. While the first book’s chapters all contribute to bolstering a clear, coherent argument about income inequality, the second book’s digressions on subjects such as an analysis of Hayao Miyazaki’s film The Wind Rises do not just make the book tedious but also muddy its reasoning. Text 2:Capital and Ideology has different aims than Piketty’s earlier books. It should be judged not just in the context of Piketty’s previous work but placed next to books like William T. Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down, in which the stated theme of justifications for violent acts is mainly an excuse for a polymath to map his own min d. Even when sections do not explicitly support the central thesis, they link to each other in intriguing ways. None of them should be considered extraneous. Based on the texts, the author of Text 1 would most likely agree with the author of Text 2 on which point?

Musician and astronomer Darsan Swaroop Bellie researches gravitational waves. These invisible waves move very quickly through space. They cannot be viewed through a telescope, but they do make sounds that can be detected with special equipment. In his musical composition Dance of the Black Holes, Bellie demonstrates what gravitational waves might sound like as two black holes merge in space. With this composition and others, Bellie hopes to make aspects of science more accessible. According to the text, what is the subject of Bellie’s research?

The End-Triassic mass extinction happened approximately 201 million years ago, when about 80 percent of species (including many species of bivalves) died off. Researchers have proposed the effects of a sudden release of carbon dioxide as one mechanism that may have brought on this mass extinction. But mass extinctions, while abrupt in geological terms, unfold over thousands or millions of years: it’s likely that multiple factors drove widespread species loss. Based on the text, the author would most likely agree with which statement about the End-Triassic mass extinction?