Studying tools unearthed at a cave site on the western coast of Italy, archaeological Paola Villa and colleagues have determined that prehistoric Neanderthal groups fashioned them from shells of clams that they harvested from the seafloor while wading or diving or that washed up on the beach. Classhells become thin and eroded as they wash up on the beach, while those on the seafloor are smooth and sturdy, so the research team suspects that Neanderthals prized the tools made with seafloor shells. However, the team also concluded that those tools were likely more challenging to obtain, noting that _______

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table to support the research team's conclusion?

While attending school in New York City in the 1980s, Okwui Enwezor encountered few works by African artists in exhibitions, despite New York's reputation as one of the best places to view contemporary art from around the world. According to an arts journalist, later in his career as a renowned curator and art historian, Enwezor sought to remedy this deficiency, not by focusing solely on modern African artists, but by showing how their work fits into the larger context of global modern art and art history.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the journalist's claim?

In 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 discarded, including bus tickets and campaign pamphlets. Johnson recognized that scholarly institutions considered his expansive collection of ephemera to be worthless--indeed, it wasn't until 1968, after Johnson's death, that Oxford University's Bodleian Library acquired the collection, having grasped the items' potential value to historians and other researchers. Hence, the example of Johnson serves to _______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

A common assumption among art historians is that the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century displaced the painted portrait in the public consciousness. The diminishing popularity of the portrait miniature, which coincided with the rise of photography, seems to support this claim. However, photography's impact on the portrait miniature may be overstated. Although records from art exhibitions in the Netherlands from 1820 to 1892 show a decrease in the number of both full-sized and miniature portraits submitted, this trend was established before the invention of photography.

Based on the text, what can be concluded about the diminishing popularity of the portrait miniature in the nineteenth century?

Believing that living in an impractical space can heighten awareness and even improve health, conceptual artists Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa designed an apartment building in Japan to be more fanciful than functional. A kitchen counter is chest-high on one side and knee-high on the other; a ceiling has a door to nowhere. The effect is disorienting but invigorating: after four years there, filmmaker Nobu Yamaoka reported significant health benefits.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

The most recent iteration of the immersive theater experience Sleep No More, which premiered in New York City in 2011, transforms its performance space--a five-story warehouse--into a 1930s-era hotel. Audience members, who wander through the labyrinthine venue at their own pace and follow the actors as they play out simultaneous, interweaving narrative loops, confront the impossibility of experiencing the production in its entirety. The play's refusal of narrative coherence thus hinges on the sense of spatial fragmentation that the venue's immense and intricate layout generates.

What does the text most strongly suggest about Sleep No More's use of its performance space?

Violins made by Antonio Stradivani and other craftspeople in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Cremona, Italy, produce a sound that is considered superior to that of modern stringed instruments. Some experts have claimed that the type of wood used to create Cremonese violins is responsible for their prized sound, but modern and Cremonese violins are made of the same kinds of wood: maple and spruce. New analysis, however, has revealed unique indications that the wood in the older violins was chemically treated by the makers, leading researchers to suggest that ________

Which choice most logically completes the text?

To better understand the burrowing habits of Alpheus bellulus (the tiger pistol shrimp), some studies have used resin casting to obtain precise measurements of the shrimps' burrows. Resin casting involves completely filling an empty burrow with a liquid plastic that hardens to create a three-dimensional model; however, recovering the model inevitably requires destroying the burrow. In their 2022 study, Miyu Umehara and colleagues discovered that an x-ray computed tomography (CT) scanner can accurately record a burrow's measurements both at a moment in time and throughout the entire burrow-building process, something that's impossible with resin casting because ________

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Many archaeologists will tell you that categorizing excavated fragments of pottery by style, period, and what objects they belong to relies not only on standard criteria, but also on instinct developed over years of practice. In a recent study, however, researchers trained a deep-learning computer model on thousands of images of pottery fragments and found that it could categorize them as accurately as a team of expert archaeologists. Some archaeologists have expressed concern that they might be replaced by such computer models, but the researchers claim that outcome is highly unlikely.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the researchers' claim?

The following text is from Edith Nesbit's 1902 novel Five Children and It. Five young siblings have just moved with their parents from London to a house in the countryside that they call the White House.

It was not really a pretty house at all; it was quite ordinary, and mother thought it was rather inconvenient, and was quite annoyed at there being no shelves, to speak of, and hardly a cupboard in the place. Father used to say that the ironwork on the roof and coping was like an architect's nightmare. But the house was deep in the country, with no other house in sight, and the children had been in London for two years, without so much as once going to the seaside even for a day by an excursion train, and so the White House seemed to them a sort of Fairy Palace set down in an Earthly Paradise.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Cats can judge unseen people's positions in space by the sound of their voices and thus react with surprise when the same person calls to them from two different locations in a short span of time. Saho Takagi and colleagues reached this conclusion by measuring cats' levels of surprise based on their ear and head movements while the cats heard recordings of their owners' voices from two speakers spaced far apart. Cats exhibited a low level of surprise when owners' voices were played twice from the same speaker, but they showed a high level of surprise when the voice was played once each from the two different speakers.

According to the text, how did the researchers determine the level of surprise displayed by the cats in the study?

Scientists have long believed that giraffes are mostly silent and communicate only visually with one another. But biologist Angela Stoger and her team analyzed hundreds of hours of recordings of giraffes in three European zoos and found that giraffes make a very low-pitched humming sound. The researchers claim that the giraffes use these sounds to communicate when it's not possible for them to signal one another visually.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support Stoger and her team's claim?

To make her art more widely available, graphic artist Elizabeth Catlett turned to linocuts. In linocut printing, an artist carves an image into a sheet of linoleum to create a stamp that is used to mass-produce prints. In the linocut series The Black Woman (1946-1947), Catlett depicts the everyday experiences of Black women alongside the achievements of well-known Black women. This pairing invites the viewer to draw connections among the women. The linocut process enabled Catlett's work to reach a wide audience and supported her aim to unite Black women through her art.

According to the text, what is significant about Catlett's use of linocut printing?

The following text is adapted from Charles W. Chesnutt's 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition.

Mrs. Ochitree was a woman of strong individuality, whose comments upon her acquaintance[s], present or absent, were marked by a frankness at times no less than startling. This characteristic caused her to be more or less avoided.
Mrs. Ochitree was aware of this sentiment on the part of her acquaintance[s], and rather exulted in it.

Based on the text, what is true about Mrs. Ochitree's acquaintances?

Black beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) are a nutritionally dense food, but they are difficult to digest in part because of their high levels of soluble fiber and compounds like raffinose. They also contain antinutrients like tannins and trypsin inhibitors, which interfere with the body's ability to extract nutrients from foods. In a research article, Marisela Granito and Glenda Alvarez from Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela claim that inducing fermentation of black beans using lactic acid bacteria improves the digestibility of the beans and makes them more nutritious.

Which finding from Granito and Alvarez's research, if true, would most directly support their claim?

Mosses can struggle in harsh desert conditions because these plants require enough sunlight for photosynthesis but not so much that they risk drying out. Researchers Jenna Ekwealor and Kirsten M. Fisher found several species of Syntrichia caninervis, a type of desert moss, growing under quartz crystals in California's Mojave Desert. To evaluate whether these semitransparent rocks benefited the moss, the researchers compared the shoot tissue, a measure of plant growth, of S. caninervis when growing on the soil surface versus when the moss was growing under the quartz rocks. They found that the shoot tissue was 62% longer for moss growing under the quartz as compared to moss on the soil surface, suggesting that ______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

The novelist Toni Morrison was the first Black woman to work as an editor at the publishing company Random House, from 1967 to 1983. A scholar asserts that one of Morrison's likely aims during her time as an editor was to strengthen the presence of Black writers on the list of Random House's published authors.

Which finding, if true, would most strongly support the scholar's claim?

"Ghosts of the Old Year" is an early 1900s poem by James Weldon Johnson. In the poem, the speaker describes experiencing an ongoing cycle of anticipation followed by regretful reflection: _______

Which quotation from "Ghosts of the Old Year" most effectively illustrates the claim?

Some animal-behavior studies involve observing wild animals in their natural habitat, and some involve capturing wild animals and observing them in a laboratory. Each approach has advantages over the other. In wild studies, researchers can more easily presume that the animals are behaving normally, and in lab studies, researchers can more easily control factors that might affect the results. But if, for example, the results from a wild study and a lab study of Western scrub-jays (Aphelocoma californica) contradict each other, one or both of the studies must have failed to account for some factor that was relevant to the birds' behavior.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Given that stars and planets initially form from the same gas and dust in space, some astronomers have posited that host stars (such as the Sun) and their planets (such as those in our solar system) are composed of the same materials, with the planets containing equal or smaller quantities of the materials that make up the host star. This idea is also supported by evidence that rocky planets in our solar system are composed of some of the same materials as the Sun.

Which finding, if true, would most directly weaken the astronomers' claim?

Two kinds of clamshell tools used by Neanderthals were dug up in a cave on the western coast of Italy. Archaeologist Paola Villa and her colleagues studied the tools and determined that Neanderthals either collected clams that had washed onto the beach or harvested clams from the seafloor and then sharpened the shells to make tools. The highest number of tools made from clamshells that were collected from the beach was found at a depth of _______

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

The Souls of Black Folk is a 1903 book by W.E.B. Du Bois. In the book, Du Bois suggests that upon hearing Black folksongs, he felt an intuitive and sometimes unexpected sense of cultural recognition: ______ 

Which quotation from The Souls of Black Folk most effectively illustrates the claim?

Biological Natacha Bodenhausen and colleagues analyzed the naturally occurring bacterial communities associated with the leaves and roots of wild Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant. The researchers found many of the same bacterial genera in both the plants' leaves and roots. To explain this, the researchers pointed to the general proximity of A. thaliana leaves to the ground and noted that rain splashing off soil could bring soil-based bacteria into contact with the leaves. Alternatively, the researchers noted that wind, which may be a source of bacteria in the aboveground portion of plants, could also bring bacteria to the soil and roots. Either explanation suggests that ______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

To assess the impact of invasive species on ecosystems in Africa, Benis N. Egoh and colleagues reviewed government reports from those nations about how invasive species are undermining ecosystem services (aspects of the ecosystem on which residents depend). The services were sorted into three categories: provisioning (material resources from the ecosystem), regulating (natural processes such as cleaning the air or water), and cultural (nonmaterial benefits of ecosystems). Egoh and her team assert that countries in each region reported effects on provisioning services and that provisioning services represent the majority of the reported services.

Which choice best describes data from the table that support Egoh and colleagues' assertion?

In the 1970s, a roughly 60,000-year-old piece of hyena bone marked with nine notches was discovered at a site in western France once inhabited by Neanderthals. Although many believe that only modern humans developed systems for notating numbers, one archaeologist asserts that this artifact may be a sign that Neanderthals also recorded numerical information. The notches on the bone are unevenly spaced but approximately parallel, and microscopic analysis reveals that they were made with a single stone tool; according to the archaeologist, this suggests that the notches were all made at one time by one individual as a means of counting something.

Which finding, if true, would most directly weaken the underlined claim?