Words in Context Lv Medium (Part2)

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?

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?

In 2008 a complete set of ancient pessoi (glass game pieces) was uncovered from beneath a paving stone in modernday 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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

Although science fiction was dominated mostly by white male authors when Octavia Butler, a Black woman, began writing, she did not view the genre as ______: Butler broke into the field with the publication of several short stories and her 1976 novel Patternmaster, and she later became the first science fiction writer to win a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

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?

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?