Back to Reading & Writing

Inferences

Reading & Writing · Information and Ideas · 74 questions · every one comes with a full explanation.

Practice this skill
  1. 1Marta Coll and colleagues' 2010 Mediterranean Sea biodiversity census reported approximately 17,000 species, nearly double the number reported in Carlo Bianchi and Carla Morri's 20Hard · Information and Ideas
  2. 2In her 2021 article "Throwaway History: Towards a Historiography of Ephemera," scholar Anne Garner discusses John Johnson (1882–1956), a devoted collector of items intended to be dMedium · Information and Ideas
  3. 3Researchers recently found that disruptions to an enjoyable experience, like a short series of advertisements during a television show, often increase viewers' reported enjoyment. Hard · Information and Ideas
  4. 4Many of William Shakespeare's tragedies address broad themes that still appeal to today's audiences. For instance, Romeo and Juliet, which is set in the Italy of Shakespeare's timeHard · Information and Ideas
  5. 5In the early nineteenth century, some Euro-American farmers in the northeastern United States used agricultural techniques developed by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people centurieHard · Information and Ideas
  6. 6Some businesses believe that when employees are interrupted while doing their work, they experience a decrease in energy and productivity. However, a team led by Harshad Puranik, wMedium · Information and Ideas
  7. 7The domestic sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) descends from a wild plant native to South America. It also populates the Polynesian Islands, where evidence confirms that Native HawaiiHard · Information and Ideas
  8. 8Microbes that live in shallow lakes and ponds produce methane, a harmful greenhouse gas. Ecologist Ralf Aben and his team wanted to see how different types of shallow-water plants Easy · Information and Ideas
  9. 9Scholars have noted that F. Scott Fitzgerald's writings were likely influenced in part by his marriage to Zelda Fitzgerald, but many don't recognize Zelda as a writer in her own riMedium · Information and Ideas
  10. 10In their book Smart Pricing, Jagmohan Raju and Z. John Zhang consider musicians' use of the nontraditional "pay as you wish" pricing model. This model generally offers listeners thEasy · Information and Ideas
  11. 11One theory behind human bipedalism speculates that it originated in a mostly ground-based ancestor that practiced four-legged "knuckle-walking," like chimpanzees and gorillas do toHard · Information and Ideas
  12. 12Arthur Conan Doyle's stories about detective Sherlock Holmes were published between 1887 and 1927. They have inspired countless successful adaptations, including comic strips, moviEasy · Information and Ideas
  13. 13Songbirds learn to respond to and imitate their species' songs from an early age. With each generation, small differences are introduced that result in distinct variations—called dMedium · Information and Ideas
  14. 14One challenge when researching whether holding elected office changes a person's behavior is the problem of ensuring that the experiment has an appropriate control group. To revealHard · Information and Ideas
  15. 15One aspect of in-person shopping that online shopping can't replicate is the opportunity to touch a product before buying it. Does this difference matter? In an experiment, researcEasy · Information and Ideas
  16. 16German theater practitioner Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) believed that theater should elicit an intellectual rather than an emotional response from audiences, provoking them to consiHard · Information and Ideas
  17. 17Archaeologists and historians used to believe that the Maya civilization during its Classic period (roughly 250–900) lacked agricultural marketplaces. One reason for this belief waHard · Information and Ideas
  18. 18In a study of the mechanisms underlying associative memory—or the ability to learn and remember connections between inherently unrelated things—neuroscientists Kei Igarashi, JasminMedium · Information and Ideas
  19. 19Although military veterans make up a small proportion of the total population of the United States, they occupy a significantly higher proportion of the jobs in the civilian governMedium · Information and Ideas
  20. 20Scientists studying Mars long thought the history of its crust was relatively simple. One reason for this is that geologic and climate data collected by a spacecraft showed that thHard · Information and Ideas
  21. 21Archaeologists have been debating the origin of a rare form of lead found in Shang dynasty (1766–1046 BCE) bronze artifacts since its presence was discovered in China in the 1990s.Easy · Information and Ideas
  22. 22Herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs could grow more than 100 feet long and weigh up to 80 tons, and some researchers have attributed the evolution of sauropods to such massive sizes to Medium · Information and Ideas
  23. 23The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is projected to maintain operation until at least 2030, but it has already revolutionized high-resolution imaging of solar-system bodies in visibleHard · Information and Ideas
  24. 24Geoglyphs are large-scale designs of lines or shapes created in a natural landscape. The Nazca Lines were created in the Nazca Desert in Peru by several Indigenous civilizations ovHard · Information and Ideas
  25. 25Some Astyanax mexicanus, a river-dwelling fish found in northeast Mexico, have colonized caves in the region. Although there is little genetic difference between river and cave A. Hard · Information and Ideas
  26. 26Dutch painters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often showed tables filled with large wheels of cheese or carved shards of butter. Some art historians, noting that dairy Medium · Information and Ideas
  27. 27Colonized by Spain in the 1600s, New Mexico is home to a dialect of Spanish that differs significantly from dialects spoken in Spain's other former colonies in the Americas. Most nMedium · Information and Ideas
  28. 28Off-off-Broadway theaters emerged in the late 1950s as a rebellion against mainstream Broadway theaters in New York, freeing artists to create productions that were more experimentEasy · Information and Ideas
  29. 29North American gray wolves usually have mixed gray and white fur, but some members of the species have a version of a gene, or gene variant, that gives them a mostly black coat insEasy · Information and Ideas
  30. 30If some artifacts recovered from excavations of the settlement of Kuulo Kataa, in modern Ghana, date from the thirteenth century CE, that may lend credence to claims that the settlHard · Information and Ideas
  31. 31Indigenous cultures possess unique knowledge of the medicinal uses of plants. According to a 2021 study, 73 percent of the medicinal uses of plants native to North America are reflHard · Information and Ideas
  32. 32When the Vinland Map, a map of the world purported to date to the mid-1400s, surfaced in 1957, some scholars believed it demonstrated that European knowledge of the eastern coast oMedium · Information and Ideas
  33. 33It's common for jazz musicians and fans to refer to certain songs as having "swing," indicating that the songs provoke a strong feeling, like the impulse to tap one's foot or danceMedium · Information and Ideas
  34. 34The Indus River valley civilization flourished in South Asia from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE. Many examples of the civilization's writing system exist, but researchers haven't yet deciphMedium · Information and Ideas
  35. 35To investigate the history of plate subduction—when one of Earth's tectonic plates slides beneath another—Sarah M. Aarons and colleagues compared ancient rocks from the Acasta GneiMedium · Information and Ideas
  36. 36Ratified by more than 90 countries, the Nagoya Protocol is an international agreement ensuring that Indigenous communities are compensated when their agricultural resources and knoHard · Information and Ideas
  37. 37Laura 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 heightenedHard · Information and Ideas
  38. 38The 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 Hard · Information and Ideas
  39. 39Many 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 cHard · Information and Ideas
  40. 40The 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 firstMedium · Information and Ideas
  41. 41Researchers Suchithra Rajendran and Maximilian Popfinger modeled varying levels of passenger redistribution from short-haul flights (flights of 50 to 210 minutes, from takeoff to lHard · Information and Ideas
  42. 42Euphorbia 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 wiMedium · Information and Ideas
  43. 43Henry Ossawa Tanner's 1893 painting The Banjo Lesson, which depicts an elderly man teaching a boy to play the banjo, is regarded as a landmark in the history of works by Black artiHard · Information and Ideas
  44. 44In many cultures, a handshake can create trust between people. Engineer João Avelino and his team are designing a robot to shake hands with a human in order to improve human-robot Easy · Information and Ideas
  45. 45In a study of the cognitive abilities of white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus imitator), researchers neglected to control for the physical difficulty of the tasks they used to evaluHard · Information and Ideas
  46. 46A team of biologists led by Jae-Hoon Jung, Antonio D. Barbosa, and Stephanie Hutin investigated the mechanism that allows Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress) plants to accelerate flHard · Information and Ideas
  47. 47A heliograph is a semaphore device used for sending optical communications—usually in the form of Morse code—by reflecting flashes of sunlight off a mirror. Heliographs were used fHard · Information and Ideas
  48. 48Martin Dančák, Wewin Tjiasmanto, and colleagues have identified a new carnivorous plant species (Nepenthes pudica) in Indonesia. Like other carnivorous plants, N. pudica has pitfalEasy · Information and Ideas
  49. 49By running computer simulations of the development of our solar system, André Izidoro, Rajdeep Dasgupta, and colleagues concluded that the Sun may have been surrounded by three giaMedium · Information and Ideas
  50. 50Ancestral Puebloans, the civilization from which present-day Pueblo tribes descended, emerged as early as 1500 B.C.E. in an area of what is now the southwestern United States and dHard · Information and Ideas
  51. 51Birds of many species ingest foods containing carotenoids, pigmented molecules that are converted into feather coloration. Coloration tends to be especially saturated in male birdsHard · Information and Ideas
  52. 52Among social animals that care for their young, such as chickens, macaque monkeys, and humans, newborns appear to show an innate attraction to faces and face-like stimuli. ElisabetHard · Information and Ideas
  53. 53Aerogels are highly porous foams consisting mainly of tiny air pockets within a solidified gel. These lightweight materials are often applied to spacecraft and other equipment requHard · Information and Ideas
  54. 54In the South Pacific, New Caledonian crows use two different kinds of stick tools. One tool is complex. The crows shape a stick from a rare plant into a hook. The other tool is basEasy · Information and Ideas
  55. 55In documents called judicial opinions, judges explain the reasoning behind their legal rulings, and in those explanations they sometimes cite and discuss historical and contemporarMedium · Information and Ideas
  56. 56Georgia Douglas Johnson wrote many plays in the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, professional theater companies rarely put on plays by Black women, so few of Johnson's plays made it tEasy · Information and Ideas
  57. 57Many mosquito repellents contain natural components that work by activating multiple odor receptors on mosquitoes' antennae. As the insects develop resistance, new repellents are nMedium · Information and Ideas
  58. 58Alice Guy-Blaché directed hundreds of films between 1896 and 1920. She wanted audiences to feel like they were watching real people on screen. She would encourage actors in her filEasy · Information and Ideas
  59. 59Volunteering, or giving time for a community service for free, is a valuable form of civic engagement because helping in a community is also good for society as a whole. In a surveHard · Information and Ideas
  60. 60Tides can deposit large quantities of dead vegetation within a salt marsh, smothering healthy plants and leaving a salt panne—a depression devoid of plants that tends to trap standHard · Information and Ideas