A harpsichord may look just like a piano, but the difference between the two instruments is easy to hear. When a harpsichord’s keys are pressed, the strings inside the ______ are plucked, not struck.

[16] Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

“He was just the man for such a place, and it was just the place for such a man.” This line is from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). It’s an example of antimetabole, a writing technique that ______ emphasis by repeating a statement in a reversed order.

[17] Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Technologies such as microphones and inkjet printers are made using piezoelectric materials, which generate an internal electric field when pressure is applied to them. The toxic nature of some of these materials recently led a team from the University of Sheffield to investigate how ______

[18] Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Each night in Gijón, Spain, a section of the city’s marina is bathed in a soft green glow. The source of the glow is the Árbol de la Sidra, a large sculpture made up of 3,200 recycled glass bottles. A lamp inside the tree-shaped structure ______ the green glass.

[19] Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

French philosopher René Descartes doubted whether he could prove his own existence. Eventually, he found proof in his famous phrase “I think, therefore I am.” The ______ complexity: only those who exist would be able to ponder their existence.

[20] Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Fans of the film Moana (2016) may not know that the deep and humorous voice behind the ______ belongs to comedian, actor, and musician Jemaine Clement. The versatile performer has appeared in everything from television commercials to action movies, but voice acting, specifically, has become a notable part of his career.

[21] Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Celebrated Tewa potter Maria Martinez (1887–1980) made her signature all-black ceramic vessels using a heating technique called reduction firing. This technique involves smothering the flame surrounding the clay vessel. ______the vessel takes on a shiny, black hue.  

[22] Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

In the early 1970s, Albert Popa took up graffiti art, spraying his work onto what was at the time an unconventional surface: concrete. ______ Albert’s son David has chosen an unusual canvas for his new art project, Fractured. In this remarkable work, the artist draws charcoal faces onto fragmented ice floes in Finland, creating the visual effect of a face slowly fracturing.

[23] Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Mary Ellen Pleasant, a successful entrepreneur during the gold rush era, earned the moniker “Mother of Human Rights in California” after successfully challenging discrimination in the state. ______ in 1866, she sued a streetcar company for denying her and other Black riders service, a suit she eventually won when the California Supreme Court declared it illegal for carriers to exclude passengers based on race.

[24] Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

The Inca of South America used intricately knotted string devices called quipus to record countable information, like population data and payments. ______ they may have used quipus to record more complex information, like stories and myths, according to researchers.

[25] Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

In the 1930s, the Imperial Sugar Cane Institute in India sought to limit the country’s dependence on imported sugarcane.

The institute enlisted botanist Janaki Ammal to breed a local variety of sugarcane.

She crossbred the imported sugarcane species Saccharum officinarum with grasses native to India.

She succeeded in creating sugarcane hybrids well suited to India’s climate. 

[26] The student wants to emphasize Janaki Ammal’s achievement. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

Scientists have developed a “freeze-thaw” battery that can retain 92% of its charge after twelve weeks.

The battery contains molten salt (a type of salt that liquifies when heated and solidifies at room temperature).

When the salt is in a liquid state, energy flows through the battery.

When the salt is in a solid state, energy stops flowing and is stored in the battery.

The stored (frozen) energy can be used by reheating (thawing) the battery.

[27] The student wants to specify how the salt enables energy storage. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Whether Carmen Lomas Garza is creating small paintings and illustrations or large public artworks—such as Baile, a copper cutout of traditional Mexican dance in the San Francisco International Airport—she is ______ direct experience, drawing from memories of her childhood in Texas or details of her current surroundings in California.

[1] 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.

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

Recent measurements of the mass of the W boson (a subatomic particle) were notable not only for the mere fact that the particle’s mass differed from expectations but for the ______ of that difference: the measured mass of the W boson was seven standard deviations higher than predicted by the standard model of particle physics.

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

Birds sing to communicate over potentially great distances. For this reason, many researchers believe that birds in densely vegetated habitats generally sing at lower frequencies than birds living in comparatively sparse habitats, since dense vegetation tends to ______ the distance that high-frequency sounds can travel.

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

The following text is from Betty Smith’s 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Francie, a young girl, visits the library often.

Francie thought that all the books in the world were in that library and she had a plan about reading all the books in the world. She was reading a book a day in alphabetical order and not skipping the dry ones. She remembered that the first author had been Abbott. She had been reading a book a day for a long time now and she was still in the B’s. Already she had read about bees and buffaloes, Bermuda vacations and Byzantine architecture. For all her enthusiasm, she had to admit that some of the B’s had been hard going. But Francie was a reader.

[5] Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

The people of medieval Europe have traditionally been seen as uninterested in cleanliness and hygiene, but modern research has shown that this is largely a myth. According to historian Eleanor Janega, most medieval towns in Europe had at least one public bathhouse, which often offered both full-immersion baths and—more affordably—steam baths. While such amenities were available mainly to town dwellers, regular bathing in rivers and streams or daily sponge baths at home were common practices throughout medieval Europe.

[6] Which choice best describes the function of the underlined portion?

When classical pianist Martha Argerich performs, it appears as if the music is coming to her spontaneously. She’s highly skilled technically, but because of how freely she plays and her willingness to take risks, she seems relaxed and natural. Her apparent ease, however, is due to a tremendous amount of preparation. Despite Argerich’s experience and virtuosity, she never takes for granted that she knows a piece of music. Instead, she approaches the music as if encountering it for the first time and tries to understand it anew.

[7] Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

Text 1

An excavation in Chiquihuite Cave in central Mexico has upended the belief that approximately 13,000 years ago, a group known as the Clovis people were the first human inhabitants of North America. More than 200 crude stone tools were found embedded in a layer of earth that is up to 33,150 years old, revealing that humans occupied the cave thousands of years before the Clovis people reached the continent.

Text 2

The objects uncovered in Chiquihuite Cave are intriguing, but it is premature to characterize them as tools. The stone pieces are so roughly shaped that they may have simply fractured from rocks during natural geological activity in the cave. Moreover, their unearthing has thus far not been accompanied by discoveries of other signs of human activity or even traces of human DNA from surfaces.

[8] Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to the underlined claim in Text 1?

Many literary theorists distinguish between fabula, a narrative’s content, and syuzhet, a narrative’s arrangement and presentation of events. In the film The Godfather Part II, the fabula is the story of the Corleone family, and the syuzhet is the presentation of the story as it alternates between two timelines in 1901 and 1958. But literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin maintained that fabula and syuzhet are insufficient to completely describe a narrative—he held that systematic categorizations of artistic phenomena discount the subtle way in which meaning is created by interactions between the artist, the work, and the audience.

[9] Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is an 1892 short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In the story, the narrator expresses mixed feelings about her surroundings: ______

[11] Which quotation from “The Yellow Wallpaper” most effectively illustrates the claim?

As media consumption has become increasingly multiplatform and socially mediated, active news acquisition has diminished in favor of an attitude known as “news finds me” (NFM), in which people passively rely on their social networks and ambient media environments for information about current events. Homero Gil de Zúñiga and Trevor Diehl examined data on a representative group of adults in the United States to determine participants’ strength of NFM attitude, political knowledge, and political interest. Although no major election took place sufficiently near the study for Gil de Zúñiga and Diehl to identify causality between NFM and voting behavior, they did posit that NFM may reduce voting probability through an indirect effect.

[13] Which finding, if true, would most directly support the idea advanced by Gil de Zúñiga and Diehl?

In dialects of English spoken in Scotland, the “r” sound is strongly emphasized when it appears at the end of syllables (as in “car”) or before other consonant sounds (as in “bird”). English dialects of the Upland South, a region stretching from Oklahoma to western Virginia, place similar emphasis on “r” at the ends of syllables and before other consonant sounds. Historical records show that the Upland South was colonized largely by people whose ancestors came from Scotland. Thus, linguists have concluded that ______

[14] Which choice most logically completes the text?

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 ______

[15] Which choice most logically completes the text?