inf 40-51

40.
Overgrazing by purple sea urchins has caused many kelp forests along North America’s west coast to be replaced by urchin barrens—areas stripped of vegetation and covered in purple sea urchins. Urchins in barrens persist in a state of starvation that lessens their nutritional value—and thus their appeal—to many predators. Sarah Gravem and colleagues placed sunflower sea stars, a once-abundant predator species suffering massive population declines in recent years, in aquariums that each contained a nutritionally poor and a nutritionally rich purple sea urchin. The researchers found that the sea stars selected the nutritionally rich urchin in 42.7% of trials and the nutritionally poor urchin in 37.5% of trials, suggesting that ______

• A. sunflower sea stars are willing to hunt sea urchins, but if given a choice, they will prey on other more nutritious marine animals instead.

• B. sunflower sea stars are reluctant to feed on both nutritionally poor and nutritionally rich sea urchins and are therefore unlikely to thrive in kelp forests.

• C. sunflower sea stars are less likely to consume sea urchins in barrens than other species of sea stars are, putting sunflower sea stars at a high risk of extinction.

• D. sunflower sea stars do not always avoid foraging on nutritionally poor sea urchins, making sunflower sea star population recovery a potentially important tool for controlling urchin barrens.

41.
Euphorbia esula (leafy spurge) is a Eurasian plant that has become invasive in North America, where it displaces native vegetation and sickens cattle. E. esula can be controlled with chemical herbicides, but that approach can also kill harmless plants nearby. Recent research on introducing engineered DNA into plant species to inhibit their reproduction may offer a path toward exclusively targeting E. esula, consequently ______

• A. making individual E. esula plants more susceptible to existing chemical herbicides.

• B. enhancing the ecological benefits of E. esula in North America.

• C. enabling cattle to consume E. esula without becoming sick.

• D. reducing invasive E. esula numbers without harming other organisms.

42. 42.
    Researchers Suchithra Rajendran and Maximilian Popfinger modeled varying levels of passenger redistribution from short-haul flights (flights of 50 to 210 minutes, from takeoff to landing) to high-speed rail trips. Planes travel faster than trains, but air travel typically requires 3 hours of lead time for security, baggage handling, and boarding that rail travel doesn’t, so short-haul routes take similar amounts of time by air and by rail. However, the model suggests that as rail passenger volumes approach current capacity limits, long lead times emerge. Therefore, for rail to remain a viable alternative to short-haul flights, ______

• A. rail systems should offer fewer long-haul routes and airlines should offer more long-haul routes.

• B. rail systems may need to schedule additional trains for these routes.

• C. security, baggage handling, and boarding procedures used by airlines may need to be implemented for rail systems.

• D. passengers who travel by rail for these routes will need to accept that lead times will be similar to those for air travel.

43.
The Haitian Declaration of Independence was issued in 1804, bringing to an end the revolution against colonial France that began in 1791. Written in French, which was not the first language of most Haitians but which was used throughout Europe as the language of international diplomacy, the declaration notes that Haiti will not bring rebellion to other Caribbean nations, promises to respect the sovereignty of its neighbors—widely understood as a reassurance to the United States—and sets up Haiti as an example for future struggles against colonizers (an implicit reference to the many colonies then found in the Americas). So even though the declaration is explicitly addressed to the Haitian people, it’s reasonable to conclude that ______

• A. aspects of the declaration were modeled on similar documents from other countries.

• B. the French government may have been surprised by the declaration.

• C. many Haitian people opposed the revolution and the declaration.

• D. the declaration actually had several intended audiences.

44.
Many animals, including humans, must sleep, and sleep is known to have a role in everything from healing injuries to encoding information in long-term memory. But some scientists claim that, from an evolutionary standpoint, deep sleep for hours at a time leaves an animal so vulnerable that the known benefits of sleeping seem insufficient to explain why it became so widespread in the animal kingdom. These scientists therefore imply that ______

• A. prolonged deep sleep is likely advantageous in ways that have yet to be discovered.

• B. most traits perform functions that are hard to understand from an evolutionary standpoint.

• C. it is more important to understand how widespread prolonged deep sleep is than to understand its function.

• D. many traits that provide significant benefits for an animal also likely pose risks to that animal.

45.
Some ethicists hold that the moral goodness of an individual’s actions depends solely on whether the actions themselves are good, irrespective of the context in which they are carried out. Philosopher L. Sebastian Purcell has shown that surviving works of Aztec (Nahua) philosophy express a very different view. Purcell reveals that these works posit an ethical system in which an individual’s actions are judged in light of how well they accord with the individual’s role in society and how well they contribute to the community. To the extent that these works are representative of Aztec thought, Purcell’s analysis suggests that ______

• A. the Aztecs would have disputed the idea that the morality of an individual’s actions can be assessed by appealing to standards of behavior that are independent of the individual’s social circumstances. 

• B. the Aztecs would not have accepted the notion that the morality of an individual’s actions can be fairly evaluated by people who do not live in the same society as that individual.

• C. actions by members of Aztec society who contributed a great deal to their community could be judged as morally good even if those actions were inconsistent with behaviors the Aztecs regarded as good in all contexts.

• D. similar actions performed by people in different social roles in Aztec society would have been regarded as morally equivalent unless those actions led to different outcomes for the community. 

46.
The increased integration of digital technologies throughout the process of book creation in the late 20th and early 21st centuries lowered the costs of book production, but those decreased costs have been most significant in the manufacturing and distribution process, which occurs after the authoring, editing, and design of the book are complete. This suggests that in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, ______

• A. digital technologies made it easier than it had been previously for authors to write very long works and get them published.

• B. customers generally expected the cost of books to decline relative to the cost of other consumer goods.

• C. publishers increased the variety of their offerings by printing more unique titles but also printed fewer copies of each title.

• D. the costs of writing, editing, and designing a book were less affected by the technologies used than were the costs of manufacturing and distributing a book.

47. 47.
    Even with the widespread adoption of personal computers, many authors still choose to write and revise their novels by hand and only then transcribe the final version on a computer. It may be tempting to speculate about how a novel written this way would be affected if it had been exclusively typed instead, but each novel is a unique entity resulting from a specific set of circumstances. Therefore, ______

• A. in order to increase their efficiency, authors who currently write their novels largely by hand should instead work only on a computer.

• B. authors who do most of their drafting and revising by hand likely have more success than those who work entirely on a computer.

• C. novels written by hand take less time to produce, on average, than novels written on a computer do.

• D. there is no way to reasonably evaluate how a work would be different if it had been written by other means.

48. 48.
    Laura Mulvey has theorized that in narrative film, shots issuing from a protagonist’s point of view compel viewers to identify with the character. Such identification is heightened by “invisible editing,” or editing so inconspicuous that it renders cuts between shots almost unnoticeable. Conversely, Mulvey proposes that conspicuous editing or an absence of point-of-view shots would induce a more critical stance toward a protagonist. Consider, for example, the attic scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, a conspicuously edited sequence of tens of shots, few of which correspond to the protagonist’s point of view. According to Mulvey’s logic, this scene should affect viewers by ______

• A. obscuring their awareness of the high degree of artifice involved in constructing the montage.

• B. lessening their identification with the protagonist, if not alienating them from the character altogether.

• C. compelling them to identify with the film’s director, whose proxy is the camera, and not with the protagonist. 

• D. diverting their attention away from the film’s content and toward its stylistic attributes.

49. 
    49.
    In 2016 biological anthropologist Heather F. Smith and her team investigated the evolution of the appendix, an intestinal organ that is present in some mammals, including humans, but is generally thought to have no function. Studying 533 mammal species, the team found that the appendix has emerged independently across multiple lineages in separate instances and, significantly, hasn’t disappeared after emerging in specific lineages. Moreover, the team determined that species with the organ tend to have higher concentrations of lymphoid tissue, which supports immune responses, in the cecum, the organ the appendix is attached to. Therefore, the team hypothesized that the appendix likely ______

• A. was once present in many nonmammal species but has since disappeared from those lineages.

• B. has been preserved in certain mammal species because it benefits their immune systems.

• C. will emerge in a greater number of mammal species because it may serve a necessary function in the immune system.

• D. produced higher concentrations of lymphoid tissue in mammals in the past than it does currently.