1.

How might the author counter the argument that the British had the interests of Arabs in the region in mind when they opposed the creation of Israel?
Creation of Israel, 1948

Although the United States supported the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which favored the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had assured
the Arabs in 1945 that the United States would not intervene without consulting both the Jews and the Arabs in that region. The British, who held a colonial mandate for Palestine until May
1948, opposed both the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine as well as unlimited immigration of Jewish refugees to the region. Great Britain wanted to preserve good
relations with the Arabs to protect its vital political and economic interests in Palestine.

Soon after President Truman took office, he appointed several experts to study the Palestinian issue. In the summer of 1946, Truman established a special cabinet committee under the
chairmanship of Dr. Henry F. Grady, an Assistant Secretary of State, who entered into negotiations with a parallel British committee to discuss the future of Palestine. In May 1946, Truman
announced his approval of a recommendation to admit 100,000 displaced persons into Palestine and in October publicly declared his support for the creation of a Jewish state. Throughout
1947, the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine examined the Palestinian question and recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. On November 29,
1947 the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948
when the British mandate was scheduled to end. Under the resolution, the area of religious significance surrounding Jerusalem would remain a corpus separatum under international control
administered by the United Nations.

Source: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/creation-israel

A. The author might point out that the British recognized the authority of the United Nations when it formed the Partition Resolution.

B. The author might argue that the British were more interested in the strategic position of the Palestinian territory than the well-being of the Arabs who lived there.

C. The author might argue that the British opposed the creation of Israel because they wanted to retain control of their political and economic interests in Palestine.

D. The author might point out that Great Britain was an ally of the United States, a country that supported the creation of the state of Israel.

2. The passage states that music has been found to activate brain regions that are involved with movement, planning, attention, and memory. According to the graphic, which part of the
brain is most likely involved with planning?
Music and the Human Brain

Research has proven that music actually causes the same effect on all human brains, despite any preferences we have, from Classical, to Hip-Hop or traditional German Polka. In his own
studies, Stanford University researcher Daniel Abrams said that, “Despite our differences in listening, the brain experiences music in a very consistent fashion across subjects.” He conducted
a study where four participants without any formal musical background underwent an MRI brain scan while listening to a symphony by William Boyce. The MRI confirmed an identical reaction
in all four brains. It initiated responses in regions that were involved with movement, planning, attention, and memory.

What this told Abrams was that music, no matter what kind, is something more unique and meaningful to us, with its own specific effects on the brain, as compared to how we process other
sounds like running water or traffic. Music has a much more complicated reaction in the brain.

Abrams’s results also support neuroscientist Jessica Grahn’s research, which debunked the famous theory that classical music, Mozart especially, makes people smarter. Instead, her studies
proved that the brain isn’t affected so much by what kind of music you like; it’s affected by how much you like what you’re listening to. After having adults and children listen to music they liked
or were familiar with, she asked them to perform cognitive tasks. She noticed that whether listening to classical music or an elementary school choir, those who listened to any music
beforehand that was familiar or of their personal preference did better overall because they were more stimulated and felt good.

Source: http://www.medicaldaily.com/your-brain-music-how-our-brains-process-melodies-pull-our-heartstrings-271007

This is Your Brain on Music continued...

This is Your Brain on Music: Brain Regions Activated by Listening to Music

Part of Brain Effect of Music on Brain Part
Corpus Callosum Joins the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
Cerebellum Movements when playing or listening to music such as foot tapping, dancing, playing instruments as well as emotional reactions to music.
Motor Cortex Movements such as playing instruments, dancing, foot tapping.
Prefrontal Cortex Creation, satisfaction and violation of expectations.
Amygdala Emotional reactions to music.
Nucleus Accumbus Emotional reactions to music.
Auditory Complex Reactions to hearing sounds; perception of tones.
Hippocampus Musical memory and context as well as music memorization.
Visual Cortex Reading music and watching it performed or one’s own movements while performing.
Sensory Cortex Tactile reactions to playing music and dancing.
Source: https://blog.bufferapp.com/music-and-the-brain

A. prefrontal cortex

B. auditory cortex

C. visual cortex

D. hippocampus

3. What is the main purpose of following section of the passage:

“Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window: was it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus, or were the holy angels moulting?
He was only a poor Master of Arts, he went on; and as the question somewhat touched upon divinity, he durst not venture to conclude.”
A Lodger for the Night

It was late in November 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull,
and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master
Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window: was it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus, or were the holy angels moulting? He was only a
poor Master of Arts, he went on; and as the question somewhat touched upon divinity, he durst not venture to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the company, treated
the young rascal to a bottle of wine in honor of the jest and the grimaces with which it was accompanied, and swore on his own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog
when he was Villon's age.

The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing; and the flakes were large, damp, and adhesive. The whole city was sheeted up. An army might have marched from end to end and not
a footfall given the alarm. If there were any belated birds in heaven, they saw the island like a large white patch, and the bridges like slim white spars, on the black ground of the river. High up
overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles
had been transformed into great false noses, drooping toward the point. The crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of the wind there was a dull sound of
dripping about the precincts of the church.

Source: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10135/pg10135-images.html

A. to establish Francis Villon as an intellectual but irreverent character

B. to make a statement about the nature of divinity

C. to highlight the tensions between Christians and Pagans in France in 1456

D. to suggest the true cause of snow within the world of the story
 4. Which region of the country spent the most per pupil in 2013?
States Spending the Most and Least on Education

From one part of the country to another public school spending varies widely. New York is the biggest spender, while Idaho and Utah spend only about a third of what New York does. The
U.S. Census Bureau’s data show wide variation in spending. Many factors affect the vast differences in spending. The following are a few of the factors.

School district spending is strong related to the money available. School districts spend almost all of the money that they receive. Those schools that depend more on state funding than on
local property taxes typically receive less money. School districts with the highest property values typically have the most money.

There’s a particularly large variation across states in wage and salary expenses. New York spends more than any other state -- $8,712 per student -- followed by Connecticut and New Jersey.
By comparison, some states spend as little as $3,000 per student in some cases. These usually tend to be the states with fewer teachers and lower wages. Schools that have teachers with
more experience or who employ teachers with advanced degrees spend more on salaries.

Employee benefits like teacher pensions, health insurance, and tuition reimbursement are a large part of school spending. Nationally, employee benefits for teachers account for about $1,700
in spending per pupil. The highest rates of spending are $4,127 per student in Alaska and $4,660 in New York.

The states with a higher cost of living tend to be the states that spend the most on education. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, costs are highest in the District of Columbia,
Hawaii and New York.

Class size is an important factor that determines how much a school district spends. In Utah’s primary schools, there are nearly 28 students per class. However, Maine, Tennessee, Vermont
and Wyoming average fewer than 18 students per class. Nevada’s high school classes have an average of 31 students, the largest size in the country.

Spending on school and executive administration accounts for a small amount of total spending. The District of Columbia and 13 states spend more than $1,000 per student on administrative
costs. On the opposite end, Utah spends $463 and Arizona spends $450 per student. Part of this has to do with the fact that school districts are much more fragmented in the high-spending
states, notably Illinois and New Jersey.

Many different types of policies affect funding of school systems. States employ varying funding formulas and maintain certain laws around special education or other requirements that end up
affecting how much districts spend. Cutting spending on education is usually unpopular. Many have criticized states like Arizona that have reduced spending on school aid.

State Spending Per Pupil in 2013

Source: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/releases/2015/cb15-98_graphic.pdf

A. the Northwest

B. the Southwest

C. the Northeast

D. the Southeast

5. Do any of the paragraphs in the passage stand out as not being as closely related as the others in terms of content?
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Located at the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers, Pittsburgh is known as both "the Steel City" for its more than 300 steel-related businesses, and as the "City of
Bridges" for its 446 bridges. The city features 30 skyscrapers, two inclines, a pre-revolutionary fortification and the Point State Park at the confluence of the rivers. The city developed as a vital
link of the Atlantic coast and Midwest, as the mineral-rich Allegheny Mountains made the area coveted by the French and British empires, Virginians, Whiskey Rebels, and Civil War raiders.

Pittsburgh is a leading manufacturer of shipbuilding, petroleum, foods, sports, transportation, computing, autos, and electronics. For part of the 20th century, Pittsburgh was behind only New
York and Chicago in corporate headquarters employment; it had the most U.S. stockholders per capita. America's 1980s deindustrialization laid off area blue-collar workers and thousands of
downtown white-collar workers when the longtime Pittsburgh-based world headquarters moved out. This heritage left the area with renowned museums, medical centers, parks, research
centers, libraries, a diverse cultural district and the most bars per capita in the United States.

Today Google, Apple, Bosch, Facebook, Uber, Nokia, Autodesk, and IBM are among 1,600 technology firms generating $20.7 billion in annual Pittsburgh payrolls. The area has served as the
long-time federal agency headquarters for cyber defense, software engineering, robotics, energy research and the nuclear navy. The area is home to 68 colleges and universities, including
research and development leaders Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. The nation's fifth-largest bank, eight Fortune 500 companies, and six of the top 300 U.S. law
firms make their global headquarters in the Pittsburgh area, while RAND, BNY Mellon, Nova, FedEx, Bayer and NIOSH have regional bases that helped Pittsburgh become the sixth-best area
for U.S. job growth. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh

A. Yes. The first paragraph is not as closely related as the second and third paragraphs.

B. Yes. The second paragraph is not as closely related as the first and third paragraphs.

C. Yes. The third paragraph is not as closely related as the first and second paragraphs.

D. No. Each of the paragraphs are equally related to each other in terms of content.
 6. Read the following excerpt from A Tale of Two Cities.
“He had now to attend while Mr. Stryver fitted the prisoner’s case on the jury, like a compact suit of clothes; showing them how the patriot, Barsad, was a hired spy and traitor, an
unblushing trafficker in blood, and one of the greatest scoundrels upon earth since accursed Judas—which he certainly did look rather like.”

What is the best definition of the word scoundrel?

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Mr. Cruncher had by this time taken quite a lunch of rust off his fingers in his following of the evidence. He had now to attend while Mr. Stryver fitted the prisoner’s case on the jury, like a
compact suit of clothes; showing them how the patriot, Barsad, was a hired spy and traitor, an unblushing trafficker in blood, and one of the greatest scoundrels upon earth since accursed
Judas—which he certainly did look rather like. How the virtuous servant, Cly, was his friend and partner, and was worthy to be; how the watchful eyes of those forgers and false swearers had
rested on the prisoner as a victim, because some family affairs in France, he being of French extraction, did require his making those passages across the Channel—though what those affairs
were, a consideration for others who were near and dear to him, forbade him, even for his life, to disclose.

How the evidence that had been warped and wrested from the young lady, whose anguish in giving it they had witnessed, came to nothing, involving the mere little innocent gallantries and
politenesses likely to pass between any young gentleman and young lady so thrown together;—with the exception of that reference to George Washington, which was altogether too
extravagant and impossible to be regarded in any other light than as a monstrous joke. How it would be a weakness in the government to break down in this attempt to practice for popularity
on the lowest national antipathies and fears, and therefore Mr. Attorney-General had made the most of it; how, nevertheless, it rested upon nothing, save that vile and infamous character of
evidence too often disfiguring such cases, and of which the State Trials of this country were full. But, there my Lord interposed (with as grave a face as if it had not been true), saying that he
could not sit upon that Bench and suffer those allusions.

Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/98/98-h/98-h.htm

A. a person who is funny and well liked

B. a dishonest and untrustworthy person

C. a dangerous or violent animal

D. a person who is easily scared

7.Why does the author of the passage bring up The Da Vinci Code?
The Louvre

The Louvre is owned by the French government; however, since the 1990s it has become more independent. Since 2003, the museum has been required to generate funds for projects. By
2006, government funds had dipped from 75 percent of the total budget to 62 percent. Every year, the Louvre now raises as much as it gets from the state, about €122 million. The
government pays for operating costs (salaries, safety and maintenance), while the rest – new wings, refurbishments, acquisitions – is up to the museum to finance. A further €3 million to €5
million a year is raised by the Louvre from exhibitions that it curates for other museums, while the host museum keeps the ticket money. As the Louvre became a point of interest in the
book The Da Vinci Code and the 2006 film based on the book, the museum earned $2.5 million by allowing filming in its galleries. In 2008, the French government provided $180 million of the
Louvre's yearly $350 million budget; the remainder came from private contributions and ticket sales.

The Louvre employs a staff of 2,000 led by Director Jean-Luc Martinez, who reports to the French Ministry of Culture and Communications. Martinez replaced Henri Loyrette in April 2013.
Under Loyrette, who replaced Pierre Rosenberg in 2001, the Louvre has undergone policy changes that allow it to lend and borrow more works than before. In 2006, it loaned 1,300 works,
which enabled it to borrow more foreign works. From 2006 to 2009, the Louvre lent artwork to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, and received a $6.9 million payment to be used for
renovations.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre

A. because it is about the Louvre

B. because the Louvre is home to the Mona Lisa, which was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci

C. because it increased the number of tourists at the Louvre

D. because the book and movie increased number of tourists that it brought to the Louvre and increased the Louvre’s funding
 8. Which of the following statements from the passage best supports the idea that the government has sometimes supported protestors?
For More than 100 Years, D.C. Has Drawn People to Protest

Marching on Washington may seem an obvious recourse for a national protest movement today, but it wasn’t until more than a century after the District of Columbia’s founding in 1791 that
protesters first marched on the Capitol. The Humanities Council of Washington, D.C., is marking the city’s 225th anniversary this year with a series of panel discussions, including one held in
August on the history of protest in the district. Panel members included Glenn Marcus, a historian who produced a D.C. Humanities-supported PBS documentary on the Bonus March of 1932;
Dorie Ladner, veteran of the civil rights movement in the South, who participated in the 1963 March on Washington; and Parisa Norouzi, cofounder of the advocacy group Empower D.C.

In 1893, members of the short-lived Populist Party, led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey, demanded government jobs and public investment in response to the hard times of the 1890s.
Dubbed Coxey’s Army, they were mocked by the press and struggled to make their way to D.C. Two men were killed in a confrontation with federal marshals after a contingent of Coxeyites
commandeered a train in Montana, and, once Coxey arrived from Ohio with 500 men, members of Congress contested the protesters’ very right to air their grievances. Coxey and others were
eventually arrested. L. Frank Baum likely drew inspiration from these events for his 1900 children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Like Dorothy and company, the Coxeyites reached their
goal, but left disappointed and disillusioned.

Still Coxey’s Army drew national attention to its cause and established the idea that the disaffected could come to the seat of the federal government directly to have their grievances heard.
When the Bonus Army—a group of World War I veterans out of work during the Depression and demanding early payment of their service bonuses—marched on Washington in the summer of
1932, they received a much better reception, at least initially. Twenty thousand veterans from across the country camped throughout the district and built a shantytown just across the
Anacostia River. They marched peacefully on the Capitol and lobbied representatives. But after the Senate voted down the Bonus Bill and the occupation stretched into its second month,
federal tolerance began to wane.

After Congress adjourned, the administration moved to have the marchers evicted from their camps by police. Two protesters were shot during an altercation at one of the camps, leading
Hoover to call in MacArthur’s troops. The veterans, who, as Marcus pointed out, had endured tear-gas attacks in the trenches of Europe, were again teargassed, this time by their fellow
soldiers. Against Hoover’s orders, MacArthur marched his troops across the bridge into Anacostia and set fire to the marchers’ camp.

Despite its horrific ending, the Bonus Army “laid the groundwork” for the massive civil rights and antiwar protests of the second half of the twentieth century, according to Marcus. “It showed
that citizens could come and have their voice heard in the spaces around the Capitol,” and established D.C. as a “demonstration space.” The Bonus Bill was eventually passed in 1936 (over
Franklin Roosevelt’s veto), and the Bonus Army’s example prompted the drafting of the 1944 GI Bill. Government cooperation with protesters reached a new high in the March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom of 1963. President Kennedy’s administration not only tolerated the protest, but worked with organizers to create an event that would mobilize national support for
Kennedy’s civil rights bill. The form the march took reflected a changed political environment. The goal was to affect public opinion through a concerted publicity campaign—“the first mass-
marketed protest in the history of demonstrations in Washington,” Barber calls it—rather than appeal directly to members of Congress. Indeed, as Barber writes, Kennedy was wary of
confrontation and, at a meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. and others, warned against creating “an atmosphere of intimidation.”

The compromise among civil rights leaders and the administration was very different from the kind of direct action that Dorie Ladner had undertaken in the South. Ladner, a Mississippi native,
was drawn to the movement as a teenager by the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till. In 1963, she protested at the funeral of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, whom she’d eaten dinner
with the night he was murdered and who, Ladner said, had “raised [her] level of consciousness as it relates to social justice.” She got herself arrested on purpose at the funeral protest to avoid
being bitten by police dogs.

After Evers’s funeral, Ladner went north, where she worked in the office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in New York while the March on Washington was being planned.
She shared her first day in Washington with a quarter of a million marchers, and stood next to King, overlooking the massive crowd while he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. The steps of
the Lincoln Memorial that day were, as she described them, the “world’s biggest stage.”

Source: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2016/fall/statement/more-100-years-dc-has-drawn-people-protest

A. “MacArthur marched his troops across the bridge into Anacostia and set fire to the marchers’ camp.”

B. “President Kennedy’s administration not only tolerated the protest, but worked with organizers . . .”

C. “Two men were killed in a confrontation with federal marshals.”

D. “She got herself arrested on purpose at the funeral protest to avoid being bitten by police dogs.”

9. Which of the following characters is NOT in the play?

What Happened the Day After the Boston Massacre?

On the morning of March 6, 1770, Boston was in crisis. The night before, British soldiers had fired their guns into a violent crowd, leaving four dead and seven wounded. This event was soon
labeled the Boston Massacre, a milestone on the path to the American Revolution.

Bostonians demanded that acting royal governor Thomas Hutchinson remove all soldiers from town. Would that action keep the peace or reward mob violence? Did Hutchinson even have the
authority to alter orders from London? Any choice would be fraught with consequences. This spring, modern crowds in Boston watched the discussion unfold again in a new play supported by
Mass Humanities called Blood on the Snow, staged inside the same walls where the governor and his advisers debated those questions in 1770.

Blood on the Snow is an experiment in combining public history and theater. It is produced by the Bostonian Society, the nonprofit organization that maintains the Old State House, the brick
building erected near the center of Boston in 1713 to house the town and provincial governments. The building is a major stop on the city’s Freedom Trail but, like all history museums, seeks
new ways to engage visitors.

One of the Old State House’s main rooms was designed for the governor to meet with his council, the gentlemen selected to advise the royal appointee but often at odds with him. In recent
years, the museum refurnished the Council Chamber using inventories from the mid 1700s. Visitors can sit in the governor’s upholstered chair at the long wooden table and examine
reproductions of official documents. Nat Sheidley, the society’s historian, came to view the space as “a set that wanted to be peopled.”

But how? The Old State House already uses other methods of bringing history to life: a program of costumed interpreters called “Revolutionary Characters” and an annual outdoor
reenactment of the massacre by dedicated volunteers. As he considered possibilities, Sheidley was struck by Boston’s response to the marathon bombing of 2013. Exploring how the
community reacted to an earlier calamity could move the Council Chamber beyond politics to show “human beings living through the trauma.”

To dramatize that moment, Sheidley had to find the right playwright. Patrick Gabridge brought experience in writing dramas about historical events and for specific sites. Just as important, he
came with a background in producing plays and had many contacts in Boston theater. He could assess the dramatic potential of the Council Chamber and recruit director Courtney O’Connor
and a cast of ten.

Gabridge’s commission called for a one-hour play that rendered the council’s March 6 debate gripping for modern audiences. The historical record offered some leeway, as accounts of that
meeting are incomplete and conflicting (pre-Revolutionary Bostonians argued about everything). Gabridge limited the cast, dropping some historical figures to ensure the audience could get to
know all those who remained.

Blood on the Snow centers on acting governor Hutchinson, who begins the play by asking, “Who will wash away all that blood?” Other characters include brand names Samuel Adams and
John Hancock and such lesser-known politicians as Samuel Dexter, along with the council’s doorkeeper, maintaining order in his own way. Gabridge brought into the room Andrew, an
enslaved man, to provide an eyewitness account of the shooting and to remind viewers of the limits on Massachusetts liberty. (The cast remains all male.) At the end of the hour, the governor
chooses to ask the local army commander to move the troops away. “Peace for now,” he says. Of course, audiences know that war broke out in the province five years later.

The Council Chamber itself was a major force in the production. Those 1713 walls provided an extra measure of authenticity during both rehearsals and performances. Audience members
spoke of the experience as being like “time traveling.” Nearly every show was sold out, including matinees for high school classes arranged with the National Parks of Boston.

Sheidley and Gabridge hope the Bostonian Society will find the funding to revive Blood on the Snow in 2017. They talk about the potential for similar dramas at other sites along the Freedom
Trail or elsewhere. Not every historic site has a space like the Old State House’s Council Chamber: large enough to seat a sizable audience, furnished with modern recreations instead of
irreplaceable artifacts. But the most important lesson in creating any such drama, Gabridge says, is “you don’t fight the room.” Each project like this is best designed around its particular site
and everything that space brings, including its historical resonances.

Source: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2016/summer/statement/what-happened-the-day-after-the-boston-massacre-0

A. Samuel Adams

B. John Hancock

C. Samuel Dexter

D. George Washington
 10. According to the passage, what happened during the Cold War?

A Curator's Pocket History of the CIA

In July 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought William J. Donovan, the World War I hero and powerful New York lawyer, into the Executive Branch as the Coordinator of Information, a
first step toward the creation of a national intelligence agency.

In June 1942, some six months after the United States entered World War II, Roosevelt turned the Office of the Coordinator of Information into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),
subordinating it to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Wartime imperatives meant that Donovan’s limitless imagination, drive, and willingness to take risks were now unleashed, and he proceeded to
build an intelligence service by energetic fits and starts. The OSS grew quickly, taking on responsibilities for espionage and unconventional warfare in addition to research and analysis. No
holds were barred; few Americans worried that there might be any gentlemen on the other side. The war already looked like it would be a bitter fight to the finish.

The OSS was an independent intelligence agency with a strategic charter and a number of in-house functions. It was to a large extent self-contained. It hired, trained, equipped, and deployed
its own personnel. It could both collect and analyze information to produce useful intelligence. It conducted paramilitary, espionage, and counterespionage operations that often complemented
each other. It even had a research and development branch that produced novel spy equipment. The organization’s logistics, security, medical, finance, and training offices provided the
necessary support. Many of the original members of the OSS were Director Donovan’s friends and colleagues. Among them were well-to-do New York lawyers and socialites— hence the joke
that the OSS really stood for “Oh So Social.” But the OSS was far more than a group of gentlemen spies. Along with a few misfits, the OSS attracted talented and adventuresome souls from
many walks of life. Two-thirds of the OSS members came out of the military, many of them daredevils who volunteered for risky missions that no one explained to them until they had signed
up—and sometimes not even then. The rest of the workforce was civilian and, especially in the Research & Analysis Branch, included some of the best minds in America. While not a
champion of diversity for its own sake, Donovan was ahead of his time in offering opportunities to anyone with the right qualifications. Some 4,500 OSS employees were women. At least one
prominent OSS analyst, Ralph Bunche, was African American.

The OSS did not win World War II for the Allies but did make important contributions to the war effort. Donovan argued that the OSS, or something like it, should survive the war. He foresaw a
centralized organization that would report directly to the President. Donovan’s many bureaucratic enemies objected to his proposals, arguing that the OSS was a wartime expedient that should
be dissolved at the end of the war. The issue was still unresolved when President Roosevelt died in April 1945.

Donovan tried his best to garner the support of the new President, Harry S. Truman, but Donovan’s rivals gained and held the upper ground. In the end, Truman signed an executive order for
the “Termination of the Office of Strategic Services and Disposition of its Functions” along with a lukewarm personal letter to Donovan thanking him for his “capable leadership.” At this point,
Donovan had to focus on dissolving his organization in the space of less than two weeks and preserving the record of its accomplishments.

Donovan was not long gone from Washington before the need for some sort of centralized intelligence agency reasserted itself. As the US digested the lessons of World War II, the Cold War
with the Soviet Union intensified. The Soviets were threatening American interests worldwide, especially in fragile Western European countries still recovering from the war. Clearly, the United
States needed to strengthen its intelligence function and generally streamline the relationships between the Army and Navy. The result was the National Security Act of 1947, which created
the US Air Force, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and, not least, the Central Intelligence Agency. Many of the plans that Donovan had advocated found their way into CIA’s enabling
act.

Like the OSS, the new Central Intelligence Agency housed a number of functions; it too would become a one-stop intelligence shop. The CIA took over an organization that had grown out of
the OSS, the Office of Special Operations, which was mainly responsible for running spies. In 1948, the National Security Council created the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) to conduct
paramilitary and psychological warfare, two more OSS functions. OPC first operated under joint CIA-State Department supervision before becoming an integral part of the CIA in 1950.
Rounding out the picture were analysts such as those in the Office of Reports and Estimates, originally charged with briefing the President. To do all of this work, the CIA hired a number of
OSS veterans, three of whom would eventually become Directors of Central Intelligence and all of whom would leave their imprint on the new agency.

Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/a-curators-pocket-history-of-the-cia/Curator-Pocket-History-CIA.pdf

A. The Soviet Union tried to undermine American interests all over the world, most of all in Western Europe as it recovered from World War II.

B. An unusual climatic event occurred that made the world very cold.

C. There was a battle between the United States and Russia in the Arctic Circle.

D. Japan tried to invade the United States

 11. Read the following excerpt from the passage.

“The researchers have established a field site to validate their model . . . They hope their work can help farmers more efficiently use resources while also reducing contamination of
water sources and downstream habitats.”

Which of the following does the excerpt imply about the way farmers use nitrogen fertilizer?
What's Good for Crops Is Not Always Good for the Environment

What's good for crops is not always good for the environment. Nitrogen, a key nutrient for plants, can cause problems when it leaches into water supplies.

Now, scientists have developed a model to calculate the age of nitrogen in corn and soybean fields, which could lead to improved fertilizer application techniques to promote crop growth while
reducing leaching. Researchers Praveen Kumar and Dong Kook Woo of the University of Illinois published their results in the journal Water Resources Research, a publication of the American
Geophysical Union.

"By understanding how long nitrogen stays in the soil and the factors that drive that, we can improve the precision at which we apply nitrogen for agriculture productivity," Kumar said. "We may
be able to apply fertilizer specifically in areas that are deficient in nitrogen, in precisely the amount that the plants need to uptake, rather than just applying it uniformly. Potentially, we could
see a significant reduction in fertilizer amounts.”

Plants take up nitrogen as a nutrient from the soil through their roots. Nitrogen is added to the soil through fertilizer application or by microbes in the soil breaking down organic compounds.
However, if the soil contains more nitrogen than the plants need, nitrogen leaches out into the water and can accumulate in lakes, rivers and oceans.

Overdosing the Environment

"Nitrogen, usually in the form of nitrate fertilizer, is needed for healthy crop production, but too much is not a good thing, since the excess can contaminate water supplies," said Richard
Yuretich, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Earth Sciences. "Knowing how long nitrate resides in the soil will lead to more efficient agriculture that maximizes
plant health without overdosing the environment.”

Kumar and Woo developed a numerical model to calculate how long inorganic nitrogen has been in the soil, using a corn-corn-soybean rotation common in the Midwest. Fresh fertilizer
application or microbial production of nitrates and ammonium are considered "age zero" in the numerical model. From there, the researchers computed age by the chemical reactions or
transformations nitrogen goes through in the soil, mediated by moisture, temperature and microbes.

Comparing Corn and Soybeans

The model revealed two surprising findings when comparing the average age of nitrogen in the topsoil with that in deeper layers, and in comparing cornfields with soybean fields.

"The biggest surprise was that we found a lower average age of nitrogen in soybean fields," Woo said. "We use fertilizer on corn, not soybeans. Yet even though we count that fresh fertilizer
as age zero, we found a lower average age of nitrogen in soybean fields. We found that is mainly because soybeans uptake the old nitrogen, so the average age is reduced.”

When looking at the layers of soil, the researchers initially expected that nitrogen would follow a similar age path to water: newer on top, and growing older as it migrates down through the soil.
However, they found that the nitrogen topsoil had a relatively high average age when compared with the water. Looking closer, they realized that one of the forms of nitrogen -- ammonium --
accumulated in the topsoil.

"Ammonium has a positive charge, which adheres to the soil particles and prevents it from leaching to the deeper layers," Woo said. "Because of that, we observe relatively higher nitrogen
age in the upper layers, compared with the age of the nitrate that dissolves in water, which doesn't have that barrier and can migrate down through the soil.”

Helping Farmers Use Resources Wisely

The researchers have established a field site to validate their model by analyzing the composition of nitrogen, oxygen and water in runoff. They hope their work can help farmers more
efficiently use resources while also reducing contamination of water sources and downstream habitats.

"The idea of using age for chemical analysis is not new, but no one has studied nitrogen age in the context of an agricultural setting," Kumar said. "By doing that, we are able to reveal patterns
of stagnation in the soil, which is different than just using the concentration of nitrogen. The main idea is that there is a better way to apply fertilizer over a landscape than we do presently. We
should be looking into more precise approaches.”

Source: https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=139263

A. Most farmers in the United States will stop using inorganic nitrogen fertilizer within the next 20 years.

B. Nitrogen fertilizer helps worms grow.

C. The cost of nitrogen fertilizer will likely go up in the future.

D. Farmers sometimes overuse nitrogen fertilizer.

 12. In the passage, what two elements does the author draw on to assert his argument about test scores?
From “One and the Many,” by Peter Gibbon

Should American education treat children as individuals or have the same goals for all students?

Encouraged by education historian Diane Ravitch, E. D. Hirsch wrote Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, a book published in 1987 that made him famous, in part because
of the appendix, which listed 5,000 words, dates, epigrams, authors, inventions, and scientific discoveries he believed every citizen should know. Americans bought hundreds of thousands of
copies.

Drawing on his research on the reading habits of students and on the incendiary 1983 government report A Nation at Risk, Hirsch asserted in Cultural Literacy that test scores (particularly the
SATs) were declining and that American industry lacked a skilled work force. The explanation for poorly performing schools and economic malaise was a lack of shared knowledge among
children and adults.

Over a 20-year period, Hirsch expanded and elaborated on these ideas in three more books: The Schools We Need (1996), The Knowledge Deficit (2006), and The Making of
Americans (2009). The problem with American schools, according to Hirsch, was not poverty, mediocre teachers, or class size, but a curriculum that was not orderly, that discounted facts and
information, and that failed to recognize the connection between background knowledge and fluent reading. The problem was a pedagogy that disdained and was dismissive of testing and
placed too much emphasis on small group work, rather than on direct instruction. His remedy: “the right sort of curriculum, particularly in their [students’] early years.”

What is the Hirsch vision? Background knowledge, in which Americans are deficient, should be introduced early through an explicitly taught, sequential, interdisciplinary curriculum. Such a
program would avoid repetition and allow disadvantaged students a chance to catch up. To implement his vision, Hirsch and his team created nearly 1,000 Core Knowledge Schools with
accompanying workbooks in 47 states. Many of these schools are charter schools, and they generally claim that improved test scores validate Hirsch’s sequential curriculum.

Source: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2016/fall/feature/one-and-the-many

A. research on American industry and on the need for a more skilled workforce

B. a study on poorly performing schools and on the lack of shared knowledge among children and adults

C. the government report, A Nation at Risk, and Gibbon’s own research on students’ reading habits

D. All of the above

13. Which of the following sentences reflects that A.I. software helps scientists to make better use of the rover’s time on Mars missions?
Laser-targeting A.I. Yields More Mars Science

Artificial intelligence is changing how we study Mars. A.I. software on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has helped it zap dozens of laser targets on the Red Planet this past year, becoming a
frequent science tool when the ground team was out of contact with the spacecraft. This same software has proven useful enough that it's already scheduled for NASA's upcoming mission,
Mars 2020.

A new paper in Science: Robotics looks at how the software has performed since rolling out to Curiosity's science team in May 2016. The AEGIS software, or Autonomous Exploration for
Gathering Increased Science, has been used to direct Curiosity's ChemCam instrument 54 times since then. It's used on almost every drive when the power resources are available for it,
according to the paper's authors.

The vast majority of those uses involved selecting targets to zap with ChemCam's laser, which vaporizes small amounts of rock or soil and studies the gas that burns off. Spectrographic
analysis of this gas can reveal the elements that make up each laser target.

AEGIS allows the rover to get more science done while Curiosity's human controllers are out of contact. Each day, they program a list of commands for it to execute based on the previous
day's images and data. If those commands include a drive, the rover may reach new surroundings several hours before it is able to receive new instructions. AEGIS allows it to autonomously
zap rocks that scientists may want to investigate later.

"Time is precious on Mars," said lead author Raymond Francis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Francis is the lead system engineer for AEGIS' deployment on the
Curiosity rover. "AEGIS allows us to make use of time that otherwise wasn't available because we were waiting for someone on Earth to make a decision.“

AEGIS has helped the science team discover a number of interesting minerals. On separate occasions, higher quantities of chlorine and silica were discovered in nearby rocks -- information
that helped direct science planning the following day.

"The goal is to provide more information for the science team," said Tara Estlin of JPL, co-author and team lead for AEGIS. "AEGIS has increased the total data coming from ChemCam by
operating during times when the rover would otherwise just be waiting for a command.“

Before AEGIS was implemented, this downtime was so valuable that the rover was instructed to carry out "blind" targeting of ChemCam. As it was carrying out commands, it would also fire
the laser, just to see if it would gather interesting data. But the targeting was limited to a pre-programmed angle, since there was no onboard ability to search for a target.

"Half the time it would just hit soil -- which was also useful, but rock measurements are much more interesting to our scientists," Francis said.

With the intelligent targeting AEGIS affords, Curiosity can be given parameters for very specific kinds of rocks, defined by color, shape and size. The software uses computer vision to search
out edges in the landscape; if it detects enough edges, there's a good chance it has found a distinct object, Francis said.

Then the software can rank, filter and prioritize those objects based on the characteristics the science team is looking for.

AEGIS can also be used for fine-scale pointing -- what Francis calls "pointing insurance." When Curiosity's operators aren't quite confident they'll hit a very narrow vein in a rock on the first try,
they sometimes use this ability to fine-tune the pointing, though it only came up twice in the past year.

The upcoming Mars 2020 rover will also include AEGIS, which will be included in the next-generation version of ChemCam, called SuperCam. That instrument will also be able to use AEGIS
for a remote RAMAN spectrometer that can study the crystal structures of rocks, as well as a visible and infrared spectrometer.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico leads the U.S. and French team that jointly developed and operates ChemCam. IRAP is a co-developer and
shares operation of the instrument with France's national space agency (CNES), NASA and Los Alamos. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Curiosity mission for
NASA.

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/laser-targeting-ai-yields-more-mars-science

A. "AEGIS allows us to make use of time that otherwise wasn't available because we were waiting for someone on Earth to make a decision."

B. “With the intelligent targeting AEGIS affords, Curiosity can be given parameters for very specific kinds of rocks, defined by color, shape and size.”

C. “But the targeting was limited to a pre-programmed angle, since there was no onboard ability to search for a target.”

D. “Then the software can rank, filter and prioritize those objects based on the characteristics the science team is looking for.”
 14. According to the passage, which of the following sentences best summarizes the problem that nitrogen poses to the environment?
What's Good for Crops Is Not Always Good for the Environment

What's good for crops is not always good for the environment. Nitrogen, a key nutrient for plants, can cause problems when it leaches into water supplies.

Now, scientists have developed a model to calculate the age of nitrogen in corn and soybean fields, which could lead to improved fertilizer application techniques to promote crop growth while
reducing leaching. Researchers Praveen Kumar and Dong Kook Woo of the University of Illinois published their results in the journal Water Resources Research, a publication of the American
Geophysical Union.

"By understanding how long nitrogen stays in the soil and the factors that drive that, we can improve the precision at which we apply nitrogen for agriculture productivity," Kumar said. "We may
be able to apply fertilizer specifically in areas that are deficient in nitrogen, in precisely the amount that the plants need to uptake, rather than just applying it uniformly. Potentially, we could
see a significant reduction in fertilizer amounts.”

Plants take up nitrogen as a nutrient from the soil through their roots. Nitrogen is added to the soil through fertilizer application or by microbes in the soil breaking down organic compounds.
However, if the soil contains more nitrogen than the plants need, nitrogen leaches out into the water and can accumulate in lakes, rivers and oceans.

Overdosing the Environment

"Nitrogen, usually in the form of nitrate fertilizer, is needed for healthy crop production, but too much is not a good thing, since the excess can contaminate water supplies," said Richard
Yuretich, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Earth Sciences. "Knowing how long nitrate resides in the soil will lead to more efficient agriculture that maximizes
plant health without overdosing the environment.”

Kumar and Woo developed a numerical model to calculate how long inorganic nitrogen has been in the soil, using a corn-corn-soybean rotation common in the Midwest. Fresh fertilizer
application or microbial production of nitrates and ammonium are considered "age zero" in the numerical model. From there, the researchers computed age by the chemical reactions or
transformations nitrogen goes through in the soil, mediated by moisture, temperature and microbes.

Comparing Corn and Soybeans

The model revealed two surprising findings when comparing the average age of nitrogen in the topsoil with that in deeper layers, and in comparing cornfields with soybean fields.

"The biggest surprise was that we found a lower average age of nitrogen in soybean fields," Woo said. "We use fertilizer on corn, not soybeans. Yet even though we count that fresh fertilizer
as age zero, we found a lower average age of nitrogen in soybean fields. We found that is mainly because soybeans uptake the old nitrogen, so the average age is reduced.”

When looking at the layers of soil, the researchers initially expected that nitrogen would follow a similar age path to water: newer on top, and growing older as it migrates down through the soil.
However, they found that the nitrogen topsoil had a relatively high average age when compared with the water. Looking closer, they realized that one of the forms of nitrogen -- ammonium --
accumulated in the topsoil.

"Ammonium has a positive charge, which adheres to the soil particles and prevents it from leaching to the deeper layers," Woo said. "Because of that, we observe relatively higher nitrogen
age in the upper layers, compared with the age of the nitrate that dissolves in water, which doesn't have that barrier and can migrate down through the soil.”

Helping Farmers Use Resources Wisely

The researchers have established a field site to validate their model by analyzing the composition of nitrogen, oxygen and water in runoff. They hope their work can help farmers more
efficiently use resources while also reducing contamination of water sources and downstream habitats.

"The idea of using age for chemical analysis is not new, but no one has studied nitrogen age in the context of an agricultural setting," Kumar said. "By doing that, we are able to reveal patterns
of stagnation in the soil, which is different than just using the concentration of nitrogen. The main idea is that there is a better way to apply fertilizer over a landscape than we do presently. We
should be looking into more precise approaches.”

Source: https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=139263

A. Nitrogen is a gas that makes up the earth’s atmosphere.

B. Some plants need nitrogen to survive.

C. When farmers put too much nitrogen on their fields, it can run off and pollute water supplies.

D. Nitrogen can get into the air and cause cancer in humans.
 15. Which of the following is a theme of the passage?
Before Prohibition, Breweries Made Advertising an Art

On a dark night in rural Wisconsin, Miller marketing guru A. C. Paul gets lost in the Northwoods. No doubt having sampled his own wares, he staggers through the wilderness, trying in vain to
find his way out. Then a beautiful woman appears in the moon and steers him back to civilization. Or so the legend goes. In 1903, the so-called “girl in the moon” became the face of Miller
High Life beer. Albeit with a significant makeover, she continues to grace bottle necks to this day.

While some say the mysterious girl in the moon was modeled after a daughter of the Miller family, Milwaukee nurse Linda Hoffman claims her own family ties: She is on a mission to prove that
her great uncle, Thomas Wallace Holmes, was the original artist and that he used her grandmother, Ruth Strauss, as his model. Whatever her origins, the girl in the moon helped launch a
marketing phenomenon that swept the nation. Mythical creatures like angels, elves, and goats in tuxedos announced the beers of Wisconsin alongside cityscapes, brawny men, and, of
course, sultry women. The breweries’ campaigns brought two big changes: They laid the foundation for modern marketing, and they put Wisconsin on the map.

The turn of the twentieth century was a sweet spot for beer advertising. For one, industrial improvements had transformed local breweries from neighborhood watering holes into major
operations—places like Milwaukee were producing more beer than even their most devoted constituents could drink, and now they had the railways to ship it. Meanwhile, the technology of
lithography had advanced to the point where companies could make bright, new color prints in batches large enough to circulate nationwide. In the years leading up to the start of Prohibition in
1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment outlawed the sale of alcohol, these developments helped Wisconsin brewers build a lasting reputation.

Milwaukee breweries “had a lot of hurdles to get over when they started trying to get their product and their name out there,” says Erika Petterson, curator of “Art on Tap: Early Wisconsin
Brewery Advertising,” an exhibition at the Museum of Wisconsin Art. “On the East Coast and in New York people laughed at them: ‘who are you? You’re this little backwater . . . on the edge of
nowhere.’” The first step toward a higher profile wasn’t to promote the product, or even the consumer, Petterson says—it was to market the place itself with bird’s-eye views of a glittering
industrial metropolis. “We were not these teeny-tiny towns anymore—we were progress.”

Wisconsin breweries courted clientele of all sorts. Just as they do today, they cast a wide net with humor, celebrity, and sex appeal—“pretty ladies have always been advertising beer,” says
Petterson. Most out of place to the modern eye, a print of a woman spoon-feeding Pabst to her baby introduces a series of ads for “tonics,” the medicinal beers that helped keep brewers in
business through thirteen years of Prohibition. “A Boon to Old and Young,” reads one of the ads, touting its product as a cure-all for exhaustion, mental health, old age, and breastfeeding. The
last of these, at least, has stuck, though the many mothers who subscribe to it today tend to use brewer’s yeast instead of the final product.

In many households, brewery ads from mailings and magazines took the place of more expensive visual art. “One of the advertising strategies was, the more beautiful the object, the longer
they’ll keep it up on their wall,” says Petterson. “It may be a little girl and her dog, and she’s adorable and the colors are pretty, but we’ll put ‘Potosi’ on the top, and they’ll see that every time
they look at it.” The new inks and printing styles used for marketing led to shifts in color theory that extended to more traditional forms of visual art.

“It’s not your standard art museum fare,” Petterson says, describing the collection of posters, calendars, tin trays, mugs, and even a towering mint-condition billboard of a racing yacht that
make up the exhibition. The items come from a handful of local historical societies, the Potosi National Brewery Museum, the Pabst Mansion in Milwaukee, and four die-hard collectors of
“breweriana.”

After the Twenty-first Amendment lifted Prohibition in 1933, beer advertising was never quite the same. This was, in part, because some state legislatures lagged behind the Constitution, and
the watershed that could have been was instead more of a trickle. The Federal Alcohol Administration began to limit advertising methods in 1935, and when television took off in the 1940s,
breweries struggled to adapt to the new medium.

More to the point, Petterson says, the pre-Prohibition cultural moment had passed. “There’s a rarity to it and a uniqueness. Once you get into some of that later stuff, that mass-produced,
really commercial stuff . . . it’s not quite the same for me.”

Source: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2016/fall/statement/prohibition-breweries-made-advertising-art

A. Museums would be more profitable if they had exhibitions about prohibition.

B. Wisconsin's economy was depressed before prohibition.

C. Art should not be used for advertising.

D. The advertising campaigns of breweries before prohibition made art that influenced modern-day marketing and helped make a name for Wisconsin.

16. Consider the following sentence:

“By the late nineteenth century . . . there were a thousand German-language newspapers being printed in the United States, accounting for about eighty percent of the country’s
foreign-language press.”

How does the quantitative information in the sentence help support the author’s argument about the importance of foreign-language newspapers to historians?
From “Benjamin Franklin’s German-Language Newspaper,” by Steve Moyer

In 1732, Benjamin Franklin published Die Philadelphische Zeitung—the first foreign-language newspaper in America. The news organ folded after only a few issues, but the legacy of not only
German, but also French, Spanish, Italian, and a smattering of papers in other languages, is a long story, rich in cultural history and insights into immigration and assimilation. By the late
nineteenth century, for example, there were a thousand German-language newspapers being printed in the United States, accounting for about eighty percent of the country’s foreign-
language press. By the early 1920s, however, there were nearly no German-language newspapers, due to declining advertising revenue for “everything German,” including beer, in the wake
of World War I and the Temperance Movement.

The Chronicling America website—produced by a partnership of NEH and the Library of Congress—provides access to nearly eight million pages of American newspapers published between
1836 and 1922. Papers chosen for digitization reflect the diversity of the country at the time. Regional, rather than national, interests and opinions prevail.

The inclusion of foreign-language newspapers in the mix, though, was a challenge, especially for German-language papers, which used the type style known as Fraktur. Based on the
blackletter style that mimicked handwriting from late Medieval and early Renaissance times, the characters have embellishments and different weights that proved burdensome during the
digitization process. A program that originated in Europe called IMPACT led the way in solving the technical problem, which then opened the way for the Library of Congress to revise its
guidelines for incorporating non-English content. Now Chronicling America comprises the dictionaries, grammars, and Optical Character Recognition software that allow it to accept nine non-
English languages, with more to come.

For social historians and genealogists today the foreign-language papers, which often printed detailed marriage announcements and death notices, are a polyglot boon.

Source: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/novemberdecember/curio/ben-franklins-german-language-newspaper

A. If eighty percent of nineteenth century foreign-language newspapers in America were in German, then it follows that a significant amount of American history might be found in
German-language newspapers.

B. If a thousand German-language newspapers were printed in the nineteenth century, then there is clearly a vast amount of German American history present in those German-language
newspapers.

C. The more than one thousand foreign-language newspapers being printed in the U.S. offer valuable insight into nineteenth century immigration and assimilation into American society
and culture.

D. All of the above are true.

 17. Which of the following sentences from the passage best supports the idea that AEGIS allows the rover to get more science done when human controllers are out of contact?
Laser-targeting A.I. Yields More Mars Science

Artificial intelligence is changing how we study Mars. A.I. software on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has helped it zap dozens of laser targets on the Red Planet this past year, becoming a
frequent science tool when the ground team was out of contact with the spacecraft. This same software has proven useful enough that it's already scheduled for NASA's upcoming mission,
Mars 2020.

A new paper in Science: Robotics looks at how the software has performed since rolling out to Curiosity's science team in May 2016. The AEGIS software, or Autonomous Exploration for
Gathering Increased Science, has been used to direct Curiosity's ChemCam instrument 54 times since then. It's used on almost every drive when the power resources are available for it,
according to the paper's authors.

The vast majority of those uses involved selecting targets to zap with ChemCam's laser, which vaporizes small amounts of rock or soil and studies the gas that burns off. Spectrographic
analysis of this gas can reveal the elements that make up each laser target.

AEGIS allows the rover to get more science done while Curiosity's human controllers are out of contact. Each day, they program a list of commands for it to execute based on the previous
day's images and data. If those commands include a drive, the rover may reach new surroundings several hours before it is able to receive new instructions. AEGIS allows it to autonomously
zap rocks that scientists may want to investigate later.

"Time is precious on Mars," said lead author Raymond Francis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Francis is the lead system engineer for AEGIS' deployment on the
Curiosity rover. "AEGIS allows us to make use of time that otherwise wasn't available because we were waiting for someone on Earth to make a decision.“

AEGIS has helped the science team discover a number of interesting minerals. On separate occasions, higher quantities of chlorine and silica were discovered in nearby rocks -- information
that helped direct science planning the following day.

"The goal is to provide more information for the science team," said Tara Estlin of JPL, co-author and team lead for AEGIS. "AEGIS has increased the total data coming from ChemCam by
operating during times when the rover would otherwise just be waiting for a command.“

Before AEGIS was implemented, this downtime was so valuable that the rover was instructed to carry out "blind" targeting of ChemCam. As it was carrying out commands, it would also fire
the laser, just to see if it would gather interesting data. But the targeting was limited to a pre-programmed angle, since there was no onboard ability to search for a target.

"Half the time it would just hit soil -- which was also useful, but rock measurements are much more interesting to our scientists," Francis said.

With the intelligent targeting AEGIS affords, Curiosity can be given parameters for very specific kinds of rocks, defined by color, shape and size. The software uses computer vision to search
out edges in the landscape; if it detects enough edges, there's a good chance it has found a distinct object, Francis said.

Then the software can rank, filter and prioritize those objects based on the characteristics the science team is looking for.

AEGIS can also be used for fine-scale pointing -- what Francis calls "pointing insurance." When Curiosity's operators aren't quite confident they'll hit a very narrow vein in a rock on the first try,
they sometimes use this ability to fine-tune the pointing, though it only came up twice in the past year.

The upcoming Mars 2020 rover will also include AEGIS, which will be included in the next-generation version of ChemCam, called SuperCam. That instrument will also be able to use AEGIS
for a remote RAMAN spectrometer that can study the crystal structures of rocks, as well as a visible and infrared spectrometer.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico leads the U.S. and French team that jointly developed and operates ChemCam. IRAP is a co-developer and
shares operation of the instrument with France's national space agency (CNES), NASA and Los Alamos. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Curiosity mission for
NASA.

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/laser-targeting-ai-yields-more-mars-science

A. "AEGIS allows us to make use of time that otherwise wasn't available because we were waiting for someone on Earth to make a decision."

B. “The software uses computer vision to search out edges in the landscape . . .”

C. “On separate occasions, higher quantities of chlorine and silica were discovered in nearby rocks -- information that helped direct science planning the following day.”

D. “AEGIS has helped the science team discover a number of interesting minerals.”

18. Select the underlined word or phrase that contains non-standard or informal usage.

A. entered the Senate

B. he’d

C. protégé

D. No error

19. Select the answer choice that is least likely to logically complete the sentence.

It is believed that our universe contains over one hundred billion galaxies; _____, no one knows how many stars exist.

A. although

B. however

C. whereas

D. yet
20. Select the underlined word or phrase that contains non-standard or informal usage.

A. sped to the scene

B. driven off the road

C. minor

D. could of

21. Select the underlined word or phrase that is an error.

Rushing to the scene of the accident, Joan was terrified of what she may find when she arrived. Just minutes earlier, Joan had received an urgent phone call informing her that her
son, Brian, had been involved in a car accident; however, the police officer did not provide any additional details about the accident over the phone. The police officer only told Joan the
location of the accident, 112 Saul’s Road. Consequently, Joan dropped everything and started driving in that direction. Pulling up to the scene of the accident, Joan immediately
searched for her son. After finding Brian, she noticed that he had simply driven off the road and hit a stop sign. A small dent and scratch were on the passenger’s side front quarter
panel; otherwise, the car remained undamaged. More importantly, Brian was completely unharmed. Joan wrapped her arms around Brian and told him how relieved she was that he
was not injured and how much she loved him. Moreover, the police officer issued him a citation for reckless driving.

A. however

B. Consequently

C. otherwise

D. Moreover

22. Select the word that best completes the sentence.

Rob lost the school’s costume contest every year. He was determined, _____, to try one more time.

A. accordingly

B. likewise

C. furthermore

D. nevertheless

23. Choose the words in the correct order that complete the following sentence:

The school is celebrating _____ fiftieth anniversary this year, so _____ going to hold a huge spring carnival for current students and alumni.
A. its; it’s

B. it’s; it’s

C. it’s; its

D. its; its

24. Replace the underlined phrase with the correct revision.

A nun who devoted her life to serving the poor of India, Pope Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint.

A. Pope Frances declared a saint Mother Teresa.

B. Mother Teresa was declared a saint by Pope Francis.

C. Mother Teresa was declared by Pope Francis a saint.

D. The sentence is correct as is. No revision is necessary.

25. Choose the words that best complete the sentence.

Kelly could not refrain from taking a _____ at the guest list to see _____ coming to the birthday party that her husband is planning for her.

A. peak; who’s

B. peek; whose

C. peek; who’s

D. peak; whose

26. Select the sentence that is written in the least effective manner.

A. It is being argued by the residents that on-street parking should not be allowed in the neighborhood.

B. A water moccasin bit Austin as he walked along the edge of the pond.

C. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Misty swims three hundred meters, bikes eight kilometers, and runs ten miles to train for the upcoming triathlon.

D. Newly hatched sea turtles use the light of the horizon to make their way safely to the ocean.
27. Select the best revision for the following sentence:

Becky has been working extra hours and kind of hopes that she will be considered for a promotion at work this year.

A. Becky has been working extra hours and sort of hopes that she will be considered for a promotion at work this year.

B. Becky has been working extra hours and kind a hopes that she will be considered for a promotion at work this year.

C. Becky has been working extra hours and sort a hopes that she will be considered for a promotion at work this year.

D. Becky has been working extra hours and hopes that she will be considered for a promotion at work this year.