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Form, Structure, and Sense

Reading & Writing · Standard English Conventions · 104 questions · every one comes with a full explanation.

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  1. 1The radiation that ______ during the decay of radioactive atomic nuclei is known as gamma radiation.Easy · Standard English Conventions
  2. 2Despite being cheap, versatile, and easy to produce, ______ they are made from nonrenewable petroleum, and most do not biodegrade in landfills.Hard · Standard English Conventions
  3. 3On April 5, 1977, Kitty Cone and 150 other disability rights activists entered a San Francisco federal building. After pleading for years—to no effect—for the passage of key antidiMedium · Standard English Conventions
  4. 4In recent years, economists around the world have created new tools that quantify the overall well-being of a country's citizens. Economists in India, for example, use an Ease of LEasy · Standard English Conventions
  5. 5Mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz used the metaphor of the "butterfly effect" to explain how seemingly minor events can have major impacts on future weather. According Easy · Standard English Conventions
  6. 6Bonnie Buratti of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory ______ data about Saturn's rings collected by the Cassini spacecraft when she made an interesting discovery: the tiny moons embedMedium · Standard English Conventions
  7. 7Rabinal Achí is a precolonial Maya dance drama performed annually in Rabinal, a town in the Guatemalan highlands. Based on events that occurred when Rabinal was a city-state ruled Hard · Standard English Conventions
  8. 8During the American Civil War, Thomas Morris Chester braved the front lines as a war correspondent for the Philadelphia Press. Amplifying the voices and experiences of Black soldieHard · Standard English Conventions
  9. 9In 1903, environmentalist John Muir guided President Theodore Roosevelt on a scenic, sprawling trip through California's Yosemite Valley. Upon returning from the three-day excursioEasy · Standard English Conventions
  10. 10To survive when water is scarce, embryos inside African turquoise killifish eggs ______ a dormant state known as diapause. In this state, embryonic development is paused for as lonEasy · Standard English Conventions
  11. 11In 1637, the price of tulips skyrocketed in Amsterdam, with single bulbs of rare varieties selling for up to the equivalent of $200,000 in today's US dollars. Some historians _____Easy · Standard English Conventions
  12. 12Professional American football player Fred Cox invented one of the world's most popular toys. In the 1970s, he came up with the idea for the Nerf football, which ______ of the hardMedium · Standard English Conventions
  13. 13Formed in 1967 to foster political and economic stability within the Asia-Pacific region, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations was originally made up of five members: ThailanEasy · Standard English Conventions
  14. 14Atoms in a synchrotron, a type of circular particle accelerator, travel faster and faster until they ______ a desired energy level, at which point they are diverted to collide withEasy · Standard English Conventions
  15. 15Led by Syrian American astronomer Shadia Habbal, the Solar Wind Sherpas are an intrepid team of scientists who travel the globe to study solar winds, the streams of particles emanaEasy · Standard English Conventions
  16. 16Farouk El-Baz, a geologist and space scientist, ______ part of the team that selected the lunar landing sites for the Apollo program during the 1960s and 1970s.Easy · Standard English Conventions
  17. 17In the 1970s, Janaki Ammal, a prominent botanist, emerged as a powerful voice in India's environmental conservation movement. Her exhaustive chromosomal survey of plants in Silent Hard · Standard English Conventions
  18. 18Obsidian is a kind of volcanic glass formed when lava cools so quickly that the atoms inside it cannot arrange themselves in a crystalline structure. You ______ more about obsidianEasy · Standard English Conventions
  19. 19The artistic talents of Barbara Chase-Riboud, most known for her 1979 historical novel Sally Hemings and the conversation it inspired, ______ limited to the realm of prose: she firHard · Standard English Conventions
  20. 20Public-awareness campaigns about the need to reduce single-use plastics can be successful, says researcher Kim Borg of Monash University in Australia, when these campaigns give conEasy · Standard English Conventions
  21. 21Midway through her 1968 jazz album A Monastic Trio, Alice Coltrane switches instruments, swapping the piano for the harp. With the same fluid style that Coltrane was famous for on Easy · Standard English Conventions
  22. 22Working from an earlier discovery of Charpentier's, chemists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna—winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry—re-created and then reprogrammeHard · Standard English Conventions
  23. 23Objects ranging from the Kikkoman soy sauce bottle to the Yamaha VMAX motorcycle to the Komachi bullet train ______ designed by twentieth-century industrial designer Kenji Ekuan.Easy · Standard English Conventions
  24. 24In the historical novel The Surrender Tree, Cuban American author Margarita Engle uses poetry rather than prose ______ the true story of Cuban folk hero Rosa La Bayamesa.Easy · Standard English Conventions
  25. 25In assessing the films of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, ______ have missed his equally deep engagement with Japanese artistic traditions such as Noh theater.Hard · Standard English Conventions
  26. 26Classical composer Florence Price's 1927 move to Chicago marked a turning point in her career. It was there that Price premiered her First Symphony—a piece that was praised for bleMedium · Standard English Conventions
  27. 27Like other amphibians, the wood frog (Rana sylvatica) is unable to generate its own heat, so during periods of subfreezing temperatures, it ______ by producing large amounts of gluEasy · Standard English Conventions
  28. 28While exploring Nevada's Gypsum Cave in 1930, Seneca and Abenaki archaeologist Bertha Parker made her most famous discovery: the skull of a now-extinct ground sloth (NothrotheriopsEasy · Standard English Conventions
  29. 29The sun never sets during the Arctic summer in the Far North. In response, reindeer in this region must change their sleep habits. Instead of resting when it gets dark, they rest wEasy · Standard English Conventions
  30. 30British scientists James Watson and Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize in part for their 1953 paper announcing the double helix structure of DNA, but it is misleading to say that WaEasy · Standard English Conventions
  31. 31In the 1950s, a man named Joseph McVicker was struggling to keep his business afloat when his sister-in-law Kay Zufall advised him to repurpose the company's product, a nontoxic, cMedium · Standard English Conventions
  32. 32When they were first discovered in Australia in 1798, duck-billed, beaver-tailed platypuses so defied categorization that one scientist assigned them the name Ornithorhynchus paradHard · Standard English Conventions
  33. 33Known as Earth's "living skin," biocrusts are thin layers of soil held together by surface-dwelling microorganisms such as fungi, lichens, and cyanobacteria. Fortifying soil in ariHard · Standard English Conventions
  34. 34In order to prevent nonnative fish species from moving freely between the Mediterranean and Red Seas, marine biologist Bella Galil has proposed that a saline lock system be installEasy · Standard English Conventions
  35. 35The African Games Co-production Market, one of over 180 annual international conferences supporting video game development, ______ the growth of the African gaming industry by helpEasy · Standard English Conventions
  36. 36In 1966, Emmett Ashford became the first African American to umpire a Major League Baseball game. His energetic gestures announcing when a player had struck out and his habit of baMedium · Standard English Conventions
  37. 37The classic children's board game Chutes and Ladders is a version of an ancient Nepalese game, Paramapada Sopanapata. In both games, players encounter "good" or "bad" spaces while Easy · Standard English Conventions
  38. 38Literary agents estimate that more than half of all nonfiction books credited to a celebrity or other public figure are in fact written by ghostwriters, professional authors who arEasy · Standard English Conventions
  39. 39Based on genetic evidence, archaeologists have generally agreed that reindeer domestication began in the eleventh century CE. However, since uncovering fragments of a 2,000-year-olMedium · Standard English Conventions
  40. 40In the early twentieth century, Joseph Kekuku and other Hawaiian ______ in the mainland United States to the bright and lilting sound of the kīkā kila, or Hawaiian steel guitar. ThEasy · Standard English Conventions
  41. 41Ten of William Shakespeare's plays are classified as histories. Although each one of these plays, which include Henry V and Richard III, ______ on a single historical figure (speciHard · Standard English Conventions
  42. 42Smaller than poppy seeds, tardigrades are tiny, but they are tough. These minuscule animals can survive for thirty years without food or water, and ______ can withstand extreme temEasy · Standard English Conventions
  43. 43African American Percy Julian was a scientist and entrepreneur whose work helped people around the world to see. Named in 1999 as one of the greatest achievements by a US chemist iMedium · Standard English Conventions
  44. 44The US Geological Survey wants to map every human-made structure in the United States, and it is asking volunteers to help. Cassie Tammy Wang and Ashish D'Souza are just two of theEasy · Standard English Conventions
  45. 45Far from being modern inventions, ______ more than 5,000 years ago.Medium · Standard English Conventions
  46. 46Cheng Dang and her colleagues at the University of Washington recently ran simulations to determine the extent to which individual snow ______ affect the amount of light reflectingMedium · Standard English Conventions
  47. 47In his groundbreaking book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, Vivek Bald uses newspaper articles, census records, ships' logs, and memoirs to tell the __Easy · Standard English Conventions
  48. 48In the canon of North African literature, Moroccan author Driss Chraïbi's 1954 novel The Simple Past (Le Passé simple) looms large. A coming-of-age story, a social meditation, and Hard · Standard English Conventions
  49. 49When writing The Other Black Girl (2021), novelist Zakiya Dalila Harris drew on her own experiences working at a publishing office. The award-winning book is Harris's first novel, Easy · Standard English Conventions
  50. 50In winter, the diets of Japanese macaques, also known as snow monkeys, are influenced more by food availability than by food preference. Although the monkeys prefer to eat vegetatiEasy · Standard English Conventions
  51. 51Planetary scientist Briony Horgan and her colleagues have determined that as much as 25 percent of the sand on Mars is composed of impact spherules. These spherical bits of glass fHard · Standard English Conventions
  52. 52Compared to that of alumina glass, ______ silica glass atoms are so far apart that they are unable to re-form bonds after being separated.Hard · Standard English Conventions
  53. 53Food and the sensation of taste are central to Monique Truong's novels. In The Book of Salt, for example, the exiled character of Bình connects to his native Saigon through the fooEasy · Standard English Conventions
  54. 54Earth is not a perfect sphere. Due to the ______ gravitational pull, Earth bulges out on the sides closest to and farthest from the Moon. This distorting pull is known as a tidal fEasy · Standard English Conventions
  55. 55In Death Valley National Park's Racetrack Playa, a flat, dry lakebed, are 162 rocks—some weighing less than a pound but others almost 700 pounds—that move periodically from place tMedium · Standard English Conventions
  56. 56The human brain is primed to recognize faces—so much so that, due to a perceptual tendency called pareidolia, ______ will even find faces in clouds, wooden doors, pieces of fruit, Medium · Standard English Conventions
  57. 57In 2016, engineer Vanessa Galvez oversaw the installation of 164 bioswales, vegetated channels designed to absorb and divert stormwater, along the streets of Queens, New York. By rHard · Standard English Conventions
  58. 58Official measurements of the Mississippi River's length vary: according to the US Geologic Survey, the river is 2,300 miles long, whereas the Environmental Protection Agency recordMedium · Standard English Conventions
  59. 59Richard Spikes was a prolific African American inventor known for his contributions to automotive engineering. Between 1907 and 1946, he patented many inventions, ______ an automobEasy · Standard English Conventions
  60. 60Even though bats prefer very sweet nectar, the plants that attract them have evolved to produce nectar that is only moderately sweet. A recent study ______ why: making sugar is eneEasy · Standard English Conventions