The Apalachicola River delta in Florida is where the river flows into the Gulf of Mexico. As the river reaches the gulf, it forms smaller channels where sediments carried by the river are deposited and form many deltaic lobes, or wetland formations. The shape and size of the delta are _____ by the gulf’s tides, which shift sediments along the coast and reshape the deltaic lobes over time.

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

Lisa Linn Kanae is a celebrated contemporary Hawaiian author whose work is _____ by a rich literary history. From the traditional stories of the Kanaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiian people, to the works of writers such as David Malo, the literary heritage of Hawai‘i is distinctive and vibrant.

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

Archaeologists have identified a plethora of beads fashioned from Tritia gibbosula shells in many Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites across western North Africa, including El Mnasra Cave, Morocco. In a 2021 paper, El Mehdi Sehasseh et al. attribute these artifacts' ___ to the evolution and propagation of symbolic behavior (e.g., use of personal ornaments) in humans and the availability of T. gibbosula during the MSA.

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, Reyjane P. Oliveira and colleagues’ 2017 study of the evolutionary trajectory of the Malagasy grass genus Chasechloa 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?

Established knowledge of prehistoric societies primarily stems from analysis of durable historical artifacts, including stone tools, but Mercedes Murillo-Barroso and team have contributed new insights with a unique analysis of plant-based items. Plant-based artifacts, including straw baskets, are seldom studied due to their perishable nature. This relative scarcity made it all the more exciting when the team examined remains of well-preserved organic artifacts discovered in a cave in Spain and determined that they dated even further back than previously thought.

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

 In 2023 Nobel Prize-winning physicist Giorgio Parisi published In a Flight of Starlings, a collection of essays on scientific subjects. Acclaimed author Sam Kean, who uses the form of nonfiction narrative to explore scientific discoveries, is interested in the collection less for its aesthetic merit than for its focus on “the false starts... and mistakes that beset real scientific research every day.” Kean argues that all too often, scientists omit this “human stuff” from written accounts of their research and thus ultimately “fail to explain how science really gets done.”

Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

 The following text is from William Shakespeare’s circa 1611 play The Winter’s Tale. Camillo has been away from his home in Sicily and serves in the court of Polixenes, the king of Bohemia. He has asked Polixenes for permission to return to Sicily.

POLIXENES: I pray thee, good Camillo, be no more importunate. ’Tis a sickness denying thee anything, a death to grant this.

CAMILLO: It is fifteen years since I saw my country. Though I have for the most part been aired abroad, I desire to lay my bones there. Besides, the penitent king, my master, hath sent for me, to whose feeling sorrows I might be some allay—or I o’erween [presume] to think so—which is another spur to my departure.

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

 The following text is from Narcís Oller’s 1898 poem "Yesterday and To-Day" (translated by Agnes Blake Poor in 1918). The poem is about an old statue of the Greek goddess Venus, which now lies on the ground in a state of disrepair.

How long ago, by summer breezes fanned,

Here stood the newborn Venus, fresh and fair;

All palpitating from the master's hand,

The last touch of his chisel lingering there.

"And surely this shall last!" he proudly thought;

"Fixed in immortal marble is my fame!"

Just here, where human hand has surely wrought,

Some crumbling letters may have spelled his name.

In the text, what does the speaker say that the artist believed about his sculpture?

Ranking of Environmental and Sociocultural Benefits of Urban Agriculture (scale of 1 to 25; 1 = highest)

Esther Sanyé-Mengual, Kathrin Specht, and their team surveyed three groups of people in Bologna, Italy—leaders of urban agriculture projects, stakeholders in urban agriculture (e.g., food researchers and urban farming associations), and the general public—to compare their views about the extent to which urban agriculture contributes to 25 social or ecological services that the team identified. The researchers used these ratings to rank the services for each group, with a ranking of 1 indicating that participants thought urban agriculture benefits that service the most. Using only the rankings shown in the table, a city planner in Bologna who is promoting a new urban agriculture project concludes that advertisements aimed at stakeholders should emphasize the project’s benefit to the enhancement of pollination.

Which choice best describes data in the table that support the city planner’s conclusion?

 In an international collaboration, Elaine Ostrander, Alan K. Outram, and other researchers probed the evolutionary history of size variation in modern dogs. Scientific consensus held that early dogs had large body mass and that a genetic driver of smaller size in some breeds (e.g., bulldogs) developed only within the last 20,000 years as a result of selective breeding for characteristics favored by humans. Ostrander et al. assert that this explanation is flawed, having discovered that a mutation responsible for variants of IGF1, a gene found in many mammals that regulates production of insulin-like growth factor 1, is ubiquitous in domestic dog breeds.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the researchers' assertion?