Command of Evidence Lv Hard (Part3)

Aerial robots vary considerably in their holding force; the Ultra-Fast Robot Hand, for example, has a holding force of 56 newtons, more than twice that of the Permanent Magnet Hand and more than four times that of the Yale Model T. Since an aerial robot must lift its own weight along with its cargo, engineer Jiawei Meng and colleagues used a ratio of each robot’s holding force to the robot’s weight to calculate payload capacity, with higher ratios corresponding to greater capacity, concluding that the Ultra-Fast Robot Hand has a higher payload capacity than the Yale Model T.

Which choice best describes data in the graph that support Meng and colleagues’ conclusion?

“The Poet Walt Whitman” is an 1887 essay by José Martí, a Cuban author and political activist, originally written in Spanish. In the essay, Martí explores the value of literature, arguing that a society’s spiritual well-being depends on the character of its literary culture: ______

Which quotation from a translation of “The Poet Walt Whitman” most effectively illustrates the claim?

Biologist Valentina Gómez-Bahamón and her team have investigated two subspecies of the fork-tailed flycatcher bird that live in the same region in Colombia, but one subspecies migrates south for part of the year, and the other doesn’t. The researchers found that, due to slight differences in feather shape, the feathers of migratory forked-tailed flycatcher males make a sound during flight that is higher pitched than that made by the feathers of nonmigratory males. The researchers hypothesize that fork-tailed flycatcher females are attracted to the specific sound made by the males of their own subspecies, and that over time the females’ preference will drive further genetic and anatomical divergence between the subspecies.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support Gómez-Bahamón and her team’s hypothesis?

In vertical inheritance, parents pass genes to their offspring, but in horizontal transfer (HT), one species, often bacteria, passes genetic material to an unrelated species. In a 2022 study, herpetologist Atsushi Kurabayashi and his team investigated HT in multicellular organisms—namely, snakes and frogs in Madagascar. The team detected BovB—a gene transmitted vertically in snakes—in many frog species. The apparent direction of gene transfer seems counterintuitive because frogs usually don’t survive encounters with snakes and so wouldn’t be able to transmit the newly acquired gene to offspring, but the team concluded that BovB is indeed transmitted from snakes to frogs, either directly or indirectly, via HT.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the team’s conclusion?

Percentage of Available Eggs Eaten by Cane Toad Tadpoles

Amphibian species (common name)	Percentage of eggs eaten	Native to Australia	Produces bufadienolide
Little red tree frog	1%	yes	no
Cane toad	90%	no	yes
Short-footed frog	7%	yes	no
Striped burrowing frog	10%	yes	no
Dainty green tree frog	1%	yes	no

Native to Latin America, the cane toad was introduced to Australia in the 1930s. In recent decades, tadpoles in the Australian population have been shown to consume eggs of their own species. A 2022 study showed that when presented with cane toad eggs as well as eggs of native Australian amphibians, cane toad tadpoles disproportionately consumed eggs of their own species. This behavior results from their attraction to bufadienolide, a chemical produced by the eggs of cane toads but not by the eggs of native amphibians. However, using data from this study, a student wishes to argue that the presence of bufadienolide doesn’t entirely explain the cane toad tadpoles’ preference for certain eggs over others.

Which choice best describes data from the table that support the student’s argument?

Ablation Rates for Three Elements in Cosmic Dust, by Dust Source

Element	SPC	AST	HTC	OCC
iron	20%	28%	90%	98%
potassium	44%	74%	97%	100%
sodium	45%	75%	99%	100%

Earth’s atmosphere is bombarded by cosmic dust originating from several sources: short-period comets (SPCs), particles from the asteroid belt (ASTs), Halley-type comets (HTCs), and Oort cloud comets (OCCs). Some of the dust’s material vaporizes in the atmosphere in a process called ablation, and the faster the particles move, the higher the rate of ablation. Astrophysicist Juan Diego Carrillo-Sánchez led a team that calculated average ablation rates for elements in the dust (such as iron and potassium) and showed that material in slower-moving SPC or AST dust has a lower rate than the same material in faster-moving HTC or OCC dust. For example, whereas the average ablation rate for iron from AST dust is 28%, the average rate for ______

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table to complete the example?

Perovskite solar cells convert light into electricity more efficiently than earlier kinds of solar cells, and manufacturing advances have recently made them commercially attractive. One limitation of the cells, however, has to do with their electron transport layer (ETL), through which absorbed electrons must pass. Often the ETL is applied through a process called spin coating, but such ETLs are fairly inefficient at converting input power to output power. André Taylor and colleagues tested a novel spray coating method for applying the ETL. The team produced ETLs of various thicknesses and concluded that spray coating holds promise for improving the power conversion efficiency of ETLs in perovskite solar cells.

Which choice best describes data from the graph that support Taylor and colleagues’ conclusion?

In the twentieth century, ethnographers made a concerted effort to collect Mexican American folklore, but they did not always agree about that folklore’s origins. Scholars such as Aurelio Espinosa claimed that Mexican American folklore derived largely from the folklore of Spain, which ruled Mexico and what is now the southwestern United States from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Scholars such as Américo Paredes, by contrast, argued that while some Spanish influence is undeniable, Mexican American folklore is mainly the product of the ongoing interactions of various cultures in Mexico and the United States.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support Paredes’s argument?

King Lear is a circa 1606 play by William Shakespeare. In the play, the character of King Lear attempts to test his three daughters’ devotion to him. He later expresses regret for his actions, as is evident when he ______

Which choice most effectively uses a quotation from King Lear to illustrate the claim?

Researchers hypothesized that a decline in the population of dusky sharks near the mid-Atlantic coast of North America led to a decline in the population of eastern oysters in the region. Dusky sharks do not typically consume eastern oysters but do consume cownose rays, which are the main predators of the oysters.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the researchers’ hypothesis?

Political scientists who favor the traditional view of voter behavior claim that voting in an election does not change a voter’s attitude toward the candidates in that election. Focusing on each US presidential election from 1976 to 1996, Ebonya Washington and Sendhil Mullainathan tested this claim by distinguishing between subjects who had just become old enough to vote (around half of whom actually voted) and otherwise similar subjects who were slightly too young to vote (and thus none of whom voted). Washington and Mullainathan compared the attitudes of the groups of subjects toward the winning candidate two years after each election.

Which finding from Washington and Mullainathan’s study, if true, would most directly weaken the claim made by people who favor the traditional view of voter behavior?

Several studies of sediment (e.g., dirt, pieces of rock, etc.) in streams have shown an inverse correlation between sediment grain size and downstream distance from the primary sediment source, suggesting that stream length has a sorting effect on sediment. In a study of sediment sampled at more than a dozen sites in Alpine streams, however, geologists Camille Litty and Fritz Schlunegger found that cross-site variations in grain size were not associated with differences in downstream distance, though they did not conclude that downstream distance is irrelevant to grain size. Rather, they concluded that sediment influx in these streams may have been sufficiently spatially diffuse to prevent the typical sorting effect from being observed.

Which finding about the streams in the study, if true, would most directly support Litty and Schlunegger’s conclusion?

Effects of Mycorrhizal Fungi on 3 Plant Species

Plant species	Mycorrhizal host	Average mass of plants grown in soil containing mycorrhizal fungi (in grams)	Average mass of plants grown in soil treated to kill fungi (in grams)
Corn	yes	15.1	3.8
Marigold	yes	10.2	2.4
Broccoli	no	7.5	7

Mycorrhizal fungi in soil benefits many plants, substantially increasing the mass of some. A student conducted an experiment to illustrate this effect. The student chose three plant species for the experiment, including two that are mycorrhizal hosts (species known to benefit from mycorrhizal fungi) and one nonmycorrhizal species (a species that doesn’t benefit from and may even be harmed by mycorrhizal fungi). The student then grew several plants from each species both in soil containing mycorrhizal fungi and in soil that had been treated to kill mycorrhizal and other fungi. After several weeks, the student measured the plants’ average mass and was surprised to discover that ______

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table to complete the statement?