According to a team of neuroeconomists from the University of Zurich, ease of decision making may be linked to communication between two brain regions, the prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex. Individuals tend to be more decisive if the information flow between the regions is intensified, whereas they make choices more slowly when information flow is ______.

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

At the turn of the twentieth century, Black residents of Richmond, Virginia, had few formal options for banking and other f inancial services. To ______ this situation, Maggie Lena Walker chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in 1903. The bank went on to provide home loans and savings opportunities to thousands of Black families over the following decades. 

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

During a 2014 archaeological dig in Spain, Vicente Lull and his team uncovered the skeleton of a woman from El Algar, an Early Bronze Age society, buried with valuable objects signaling a high position of power. This finding may persuade researchers who have argued that Bronze Age societies were ruled by men to ______ that women may have also held leadership roles.

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

The following text is adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 short story “Drowne’s Wooden Image.” Drowne, a young man, is carving a wooden figure to decorate the front of a ship. Day by day, the work assumed greater precision, and settled its irregular and misty outline into distincter grace and beauty. The general design was now obvious to the common eye.

As used in the text, what does the word “assumed” most nearly mean?

The following text is adapted from Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), translated by Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair in 1923. Fabry and Busman are telling Miss Glory why their company manufactures robots.

FABRY: One Robot can replace two and a half workmen. The human machine, Miss Glory, was terribly imperfect. It had to be removed sooner or later. BUSMAN: It was too expensive.
FABRY: It was not effective. It no longer "answers" the requirements of modern engineering. Nature has no idea of keeping pace with modern labor. 

As used in the text, what does the word “answers” most nearly mean

Like the 1945 play it reimagines—Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba—Marcus Gardley’s 2014 play The House That Will Not Stand prominently features women. In both plays, the all-female cast ______ an array of female characters, including a strong mother and several daughters dealing with individual struggles.

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

The following text is adapted from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1921 short story “John Redding Goes to Sea.” John wants to travel far beyond the village where he lives near his mother, Matty.

[John] had on several occasions attempted to reconcile his mother to the notion, but found it a difficult task. Matty always took refuge in self-pity and tears. Her son’s desires were incomprehensible to her, that was all.

As used in the text, what does the phrase “reconcile his mother to” most nearly mean?

Handedness, a preferential use of either the right or left hand, typically is easy to observe in humans. Because this trait is present but less ______ in many other animals, animal-behavior researchers often employ tasks specially designed to reveal individual animals’ preferences for a certain hand or paw.

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

Some researchers believe that the genes that enable groundhogs and certain other mammals to hibernate through the winter by slowing their breathing and heart rates and lowering their body temperature may be ______ in humans: present yet having essentially no effect on our bodily processes.

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

The percentage of US forest land that a 2023 federal report identified as being either mature or old growth exceeds other recent estimates. Given how little ______ there is among scientists regarding the scope of these categories, this discrepancy shouldn’t be surprising: forest researchers regularly dispute one another’s classifications. 

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

In 2008 a complete set of ancient pessoi (glass game pieces) was uncovered from beneath a paving stone in modern day Israel. Due to their small size, pessoi were easily misplaced, making a whole set a rare find. This has led some experts to suggest that the set may have been buried intentionally; however, without clear evidence, archaeologists are left to ______ what happened.

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

The recently observed gamma ray burst GRB 230307A lasted for 200 seconds, ______ for a burst generated by the merger of neutron stars. Bursts caused by neutron mergers typically last fewer than 2 seconds.

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

Disproving the common misconception of Native art as ______, the painters whose work appears in the collection at the National Museum of the American Indian employ a range of styles. There are artists working in the traditional arts of their specific tribal communities, artists working in European modernist or American abstract expressionist art traditions, and artists blending various traditions into something wholly new.

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

In the Indigenous intercropping system known as the Three Sisters, maize, squash, and beans form an ______ web of relations: maize provides the structure on which the bean vines grow; the squash vines cover the soil, discouraging competition from weeds; and the beans aid their two “sisters” by enriching the soil with essential nitrogen.

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

Bicycle sharing systems allow users to rent a bicycle at one location within a city and return it to any other designated location in that city, which can cause serious problems of bicycle supply and user demand within the city’s system. Tohru Ikeguchi uses open-source data and statistical modeling to identify when a high number of users making one-way trips is likely to leave some locations within the system ______ bicycles and other areas with insufficient supply.

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

Stephen Hannock’s luminous landscape paintings are appealing to viewers but have elicited little commentary from contemporary critics, a phenomenon that may be due to the very fact that the paintings seem so ______. Many critics focus their attention on art that is cryptic or overtly challenging. 

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

Eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon thought the only character defect of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was his mild temperament—though the emperor was widely considered virtuous, his overly permissive nature led him to ______ the vices of those who surrounded him.

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

A journalist and well-respected art critic of nineteenth-century Britain, Lady Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake did not hesitate to publish reviews that went against popular opinion. One of her most divisive works was an essay questioning the idea of photography as an emerging medium for fine art: in the essay, Eastlake ______ that the value of photographs was informational rather than creative.

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

Economist Jingting Fan argues that the effects of international trade may display spatial variation at sub-national levels. For instance, imported goods may reduce expenses for a country’s average consumer, but for consumers living far from ports, high intranational transport costs could ______ the price advantages associated with imports.

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

The way in which individual elements are balanced within a photographic image tends to affect how viewers perceive it: symmetry tends to give the elements equal importance, asymmetry emphasizes differences, and radial balance (organizing the elements around a central point) emphasizes the center over the periphery. What a photograph conveys is therefore largely ______ how it is balanced.

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

To develop a method for measuring snow depth with laser beams, NASA physicist Yongxiang Hu relied on ______; identifying broad similarities between two seemingly different phenomena, Hu used information about how ants move inside colonies to calculate how the particles of light that make up laser beams travel through snow.

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

The following text is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.

[Jay Gatsby] was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This "quality" was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness.

As used in the text, what does the word “quality” most nearly mean

In Nature Poem (2017), Kumeyaay poet Tommy Pico portrays his ______ the natural world by honoring the centrality of nature within his tribe’s traditional beliefs while simultaneously expressing his distaste for being in wilderness settings himself.

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

Stars form in cloudlike swirls of gas and dust that cannot be touched‚ but astrophysicist Nia Imara believes these formations need not remain completely ______ to researchers: she uses simulation data and sophisticated 3D printers to produce interactive models of these stellar nurseries.

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

The work of molecular biophysicist Enrique M. De La Cruz is known for ______ traditional boundaries between academic disciplines. The university laboratory that De La Cruz runs includes engineers, biologists, chemists, and physicists, and the research the lab produces makes use of insights and techniques from all those fields.

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

Cuttlefish appear to be surprisingly ______ at exercising self-control: in a 2021 study conducted by behavioral ecologist Alexandra Schnell, these cephalopods routinely demonstrated restraint by delaying gratification, waiting for a favorite treat instead of instantly devouring a readily available meal. 

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