While there were some tasks the candidate could _______, others she had to attend to herself.

Although caterpillars and spiders belong to

distinctly different classes of arthropods and

come to produce silk quite independently, the silks they produce have remarkably _______ compositions.

Concrete actually is _______, like a sponge—it

can absorb up to 10 percent of its weight in water.

His dislike of _______ made him regard

people who flaunted their wealth or

accomplishments as _______.

Some of Kandinsky’s artistic innovations are

now so much a part of our visual world that

they appear on everything from wallpaper to

women’s scarves without causing the

slightest _________.

Short stories, in Hemingway’s phrase, have

plots that show only “the tip of the iceberg”;

such stories _______ a _______ shape below

but do not describe that shape in detail.

The title Rage of a Privileged Class seems

________, for such a privileged group would

seem on the surface to have no _________

sustained anger with anyone.

Darwin’s ideas, which viewed nature as the result of cumulative, _________ change, triumphed over the older, catastrophist theories, which _________ that mountains and species were created by a few sudden and dramatic events.

Though their lack of external ears might suggest otherwise, mole rats are able to use _________ to communicate.

The word tephra, from the Greek word meaning ash, has come into use among geologists to describe the assortment of fragments, ranging from blocks of material to dust, that is _______ into the air during a volcanic eruption.

While most commentators’ reaction to the candidate’s acceptance speech was ____, a highly positive reaction came from columnist William Safire, who called it a rhetorical triumph.

Scientists are hard-line _____; only after failing to ____ a controversial theory do they accept the evidence.

The founder of the Children’s Defence Fund, Marian Wright Edelman, strongly _________ the lack of financial and moral support for children in America today.

Excavation is, in essence, an act of _________:

to clear a site down to the lowest level means

that all the upper levels are completely

obliterated.

Hummingbirds use spider silk to strengthen

nest walls to better _______ the weight and

pressure of wriggling hatchlings.

A map purporting to show that Vikings charted North America long before Columbus, ____ as a fraud in 1974, could turn out to be ____ after all, according to California scientists.

Although the poet Stevie Smith had a childhood that was far from ____, she always envied children, believing they alone had the ideal life.