Jack and his classmates had been demonstrating for the rights of migrant farm workers. They wanted farm owners to stop spraying crops with chemicals that made the farm workers sick. The protesters had “accidentally” marched onto the property of a wealthy farmer and been arrested for criminal __________. Jack wondered if his mother could come and bail him out.

The nomadic Romani people travel seasonally along specific routes that connect them to other bands of Romani. Their __________(2) nature has taken them from their origins in India to the Middle East in the eleventh century, to southeastern Europe in the fourteenth century, and to western Europe in the fifteenth century.

Although the making of New Year’s resolutions is an exceedingly _________ activity, there are some parallels in religion. Take Christians as an example. Many of them relinquish things such as favorite sweets and cigarettes during the Christian fasting period of Lent, though the intention is to make sacrifices rather than try to better oneself in a willing manner.

People came to comprehend the fact that the flagrant violation of human rights by Nazi and fascist countries was the underlying cause of the Second World War. And this very realization has provided us with the ________ for the tireless efforts that bring us to the time of extraordinary accomplishment here and now.

One stark reminder for job seekers who wish to find out about opportunities in different schools: some ___________ teachers have obtained what they believed were not tentative job offers, only to reach the schools and realize that the promised positions do not materialize. Regardless, with an acute demand for ESL teachers, motivated and tenacious job seekers will find success some day.

Despite the fact that linguistic paleontology is an ___________ exercise of the linguist's skill, it does have two notional shortcomings. One is that a magnificent innovation like the wheel is, in all likelihood, to be disseminated in the twinkling of an eye among countries, bearing its own name with it. It is not a challenge for linguistic paleontologists to identify such borrowed words.

The following text is adapted from Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement.

She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. Whereas her big sister's room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Briony's was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model farm spread across a deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way—towards their owner—as if about to break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled. In fact, Briony's was the only tidy upstairs room in the house.

Excerpt from Marian Y.L Wong and Peter M. Buston, Social Systems in Habitat-Specialist Reef Fishes: Key Concepts in Evolutionary Ecology, published in 2013.

Paragobiodon xanthosomus is an obligate coral-dwelling goby (Gobiidae) that resides in just one type of host coral, Seriatopora hystrix. Within groups, only the largest male and female breed monogamously with each other, and all other group members are nonbreeding subordinate females that are reproductively suppressed. ______________.

The following text is from Georgia Douglas Johnson’s 1962 poem “Common Dust.”

And who shall separate the dust
What later we shall be:
Whose keen discerning eye will scan
And solve the mystery?

The high, the low, the rich, the poor,
The black, the white, the red,
And all the chromatique between,
Of whom shall it be said:

Here lies the dust of Africa;
Here are the sons of Rome;
Here lies the one unlabelled,
The world at large his home!

Can one then separate the dust?
Will mankind lie apart,
When life has settled back again
The same as from the start?

Excerpt from Philip Ball, Did the Cracking Continent Trigger a Deep Freeze, published in 2004. 

Donnadieu and colleagues have run computer simulations of global climate change 750 million years ago during the break-up of Rodinia, a supercontinent in which nearly all of the present-day continents were welded together around the South Pole. As the vast land mass fragmented into smaller pieces, driven by the engine of continental drift, they found that evaporation from smaller seas between isolated continents increased the rainfall over land areas.

Excerpt from Leon Neyfakh, Why We Give to Charity, published in 2011.

Why anyone is ever selfless is a mystery that has fascinated, not to mention frustrated, scientists since Charles Darwin, who considered it a major problem for his theory of natural selection. If every creature on earth was in competition with every other, then how to explain bees sacrificing themselves for the good of the hive, or men and women running into burning buildings to save the lives of strangers? These questions have led researchers to posit that helping others, even when it costs us dearly, is simply part of being successful social animals. Despite our imperative to compete, we ultimately find it pays off to be generous.

Excerpt from Frederick Douglass, A Plea for Free Speech in Boston, published in 1860.

The world knows that last Monday a meeting assembled to discuss the question: “How Shall Slavery Be Abolished?” The world also knows that that meeting was invaded, insulted, captured, by a mob of gentlemen, and thereafter broken up and dispersed by the order of the mayor, who refused to protect it, though call upon to do so. If this had been a mere outbreak of passion and prejudice among the baser sort… hounded on by some wily politician to serve some immediate purpose, - a mere exception affair, - it might be allowed to rest with what has already been said. But the leaders of the mob were gentlemen. They were men who pride themselves upon their respect for law and order.

Excerpt from Oswald J. Schmitz, The New Ecology: Rethinking a Science for the Anthropocene, published in 2017.

Excerpt from Ed Yong, The Gene That Paints Birds Red, published in 2016.

In the 1300s, Spanish explorers discovered a small bird living in the islands off the Western coasts of Portugal and Morocco, with dull green feathers but a sweet lyrical voice. The bird became fashionable in the courts of Spain and England, and the people started breeding it, gradually changing its plumage to a wide variety of colors, from dark black to bright yellow. It’s the latter that the bird is most associated with. It is, of course, the canary.

The following text is adapted from Nikolai Gogol’s 1835 short story "The Mysterious Portrait.” The main character is a talented aspiring artist.

It sometimes vexed him when he saw how a strange artist, French or German, sometimes not even a painter by profession, but only a skilful dauber, produced, by the celerity of his brush and the vividness of his colouring, a universal commotion, and a massed in a twinkling a funded capital.

The older children in the Smith family took a variety of jobs to pay the rent, put food on the table, and buy thrift-shop clothes. They also assumed responsibility for seeing to it that the younger children ____________ well in school. They never ceased trying to achieve their father’s vision of education as the means to escape poverty.

With their two thin, almost-transparent wings, the mosquitoes can fly forward, backward, and sideways at speeds up to thirty miles an hour. Also on the thorax are six long, very slender legs. The mosquito’s legs are unique in that they are as long or longer than _________ insect’s entire body. It’s the legs that we human beings see most clearly.

It seems that very few people can let the new year roll in without considering how they can ameliorate their lives and render the coming year better than the previous one. ___________, the making of New Year’s resolutions is a tradition originating in the early Babylonians. One of their most common resolutions was a pledge to return borrowed farm equipment!

oday’s young people may be aware that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. fought the discrimination against blacks, something so rampant in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Also, they probably have learned that he received a great deal of acclaim for his work. ________, in 1964 he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

People dream during both the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep and non-REM times. Some assert that dreams are a sort of re-making of some psychologically crucial occasions__________ attribute meanings of dreams to long lists of everything people perceive in their dreams, but the plain truth is that many questions remain unanswered concerning the science of dreams.

There was an assumption that if individuals were notified of the critical condition they confronted, that is, an acute shortage of water, they would alter their behavior and use water more sparingly. Unfortunately, the assumption was incorrect. As a matter of fact, some citizens even did just the very opposite of what was expected of them_________ more water than ever before.

Despite the earliest appearance of the modern concept of human rights during the 18th century, it was on December 10, l948 _______ the story started seriously, with the embracing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN general assembly. The declaration sprang from the debris of World War II in hopes of initiating a novel, better time of international relations...

According to previous studies, light-harvesting phytoplankton, a supplier of copious amounts of food, gather about 60 terawatts of solar energy. Even if marine organisms living on phytoplankton turn only 1% of that power into mixing the oceans, that’s totally tantamount to ___________ winds and tides, some scientists contend.

___________ the size of the urns uncovered in an ancient Greek cemetery in the late 1800s was utterly extraordinary, the archaeologists were even more excited about the urns’ adornment. The minute painting on the urns was absolutely unique, and the artist is now hailed as a genius launching an artistic movement that gave birth to some of the most prominent Greek pottery paintings ever created.

Is the introduction of floating islands an instant success as projected by experts? The studies in both India and the United States have demonstrated that floating islands are indeed capable of controlling the effects of polluted runoff _________ should make use of this pragmatic solution to the problem of the world’s shrinking wetlands.

Star clusters are vital in that they supply a sample of stars at the same age ______ the same chemical content, and at the same distance from Earth－which renders them practical for assessing theories of stellar development. Scientists can probe into star clusters in other galaxies, thus enabling astronomers to have a better understanding of star-formation processes.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• The study explores the cognitive capacities of bees in natural environments.
• Bees can navigate complex environments, learn concepts, and display emotion-like behavior. 
• Researchers attempted to show that bees can play football, or at least mimic it by incentivizing them with a sugary reward.
• Researchers separated bees into three groups: one watched the trained bees move the ball, another observed the ball move by itself, and a third did not receive any demonstration.
• Bees observing a demonstration moved the ball much quicker with a higher success rate than those without.
• Is this behavior simply copying or can they improve?
• Current findings suggest that with convincing evidence a miniature brain is not simple but can solve complex tasks. Research indicates bees can solve tasks unseen in their evolutionary process through observation.