Okay, put away the cell phone, turn off the computer, and cancel your plans for tonight. You’ve been studying almost nonstop all week, and you need to stay home, rest, and _____ your stamina.

Ken smiled seductively and said, “Think outside the box, my friend. Rules are made to be broken, and your strict _____ to them indicates that you aren’t aware of bigger possibilities…yet.”

What kind of teacher do you prefer? The taskmaster? Someone who’s tough on you and gets you to succeed by testing and provoking you? Or do you prefer a positive form of motivation? A teacher whose style is more _____, filled with words of encouragement and second chances?

I don’t mind it when the neighbors are noisy and there’s an occasional sound that goes bump in the night. However, one thing I cannot _____ is the loud bass of stereo speakers, thudding through the walls of my apartment.

Jason seemed devastated when he found out about his wife’s affair with her client. But he did some research on marital problems and was shocked by how common infidelity apparently is. When he learned that an estimated 80% of marriages experience infidelity, he no longer felt alone, he didn’t blame his wife for being human, and their relationship began to _____.

Most of the _____ from the broken window were found outside the house. This led the inspector to conclude that the break-in was staged. Perhaps the owner faked the robbery so he could claim insurance money.

In one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, a prince of Denmark, Hamlet, encounters the ghost of his murdered father. The spirit charges him to take revenge on the assassin. Unfortunately, the assassin is Hamlet’s own royal-blooded uncle, who has seized the throne by secretly murdering his own brother. Hamlet is reluctant to take action, so the ghost becomes rather _____, returning in a later scene to hold him to his task.

History has shown that, when an economic recession strikes, men tend to lose more jobs than women. If this current recession continues, it’s possible that women may, for the first time in history, become _____ in the U.S. workforce.

Negotiating with political activists can be very tricky, since they are often demanding, critical, and easily provoked. A politician must learn to be delicate, to _____ each conversation so that, whenever possible, both sides will benefit.

This is no time to get _____ over what a potential boyfriend said to you last night. You need to keep a cool head to study for your finals.

Opponents of affirmative action claim that the definitions of affirmative action and discrimination are nearly identical. A quick check at dictionary.com on February 27, 2009, turned up the following definitions. Are the opponents right?

Cigarette ads have been banned on television, so why not in magazines? Just go to the bookstore and you’ll notice all the young people in the magazine section. At such an impressionable age, people are still being lured into a lifestyle that greatly increases their chances of dying an untimely death.

Lobbying, or the use of persons or groups to formally represent an organization or group of organizations before political bodies, is also an effective way to influence the government. The National Rifle Associate (NRA), for example, has a staff of lobbyists in Washington and a substantial annual budget. These lobbyists work to represent the NRA’s position on gun control and to potentially influence members of Congress when they vote on legislation that affects the firearms industry and the rights of gun owners.

Botanists classify soil in various ways, according to color, texture, and the type of plants it ideally supports. The most frequent way it is classified is by the size of the individual grains. For example, it can be separated into boulders, cobbles, gravel, sand, and silt. Describing the consistency of soil often involves combining two or more of these categories, as in 5 percent silt, 70 percent sand, and 25 percent gravel.

It was three a.m. by the time Traci got home, and all the lights in the house were off. After slipping out of her shoes, she climbed the stairs without making a sound. The bedroom door was open, but it was completely dark, and she couldn’t see her husband. She could hear him breathing, though, and as she pointed the gun at the bed, her hand was shaking.

Too much emphasis on moral values and too little emphasis on the economy make American citizens into pawns for corrupt politicians. Many working-class people today are voting for candidates who promise to support their old-fashioned values, such as by opposing abortion, gay marriage, big government, affirmative action, embryonic stem-cell research, pornography, “liberal” college professors, and Darwinian evolution. They are spending their emotional and political capital on fighting to keep monuments to the Ten Commandments in public spaces while failing to notice that they are working longer hours for less money, their jobs are being exported abroad, health insurance is becoming less affordable, their pension funds are being laid to waste by corporate mishandling, the environment is being degraded, their children’s future is being mortgaged, energy costs are rising rapidly, and the rich are getting richer while they are struggling to pay the rent.

Working out once per week is not enough. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends a minimum of eight to ten exercises of the major muscle groups at least two or three times per week. Your muscles need sufficient time to recover from a formal weight-training session, but you should remember that you must keep going back to the gym on a rigorous schedule in order to see results. Allow muscles about 48 hours to heal, but go no more than 96 hours between training sessions. If you wait too long your muscles will begin to atrophy and you’ll get nowhere.

In religion, gender ideology excludes women from participating in some aspects of ritual or from holding major leadership roles. In Bangladesh, for example, and in some African cultures, men are associated with the right side of the body and women are associated with the left. This right/left dichotomy also indicates good/evil, purity/pollution, and authority/submission—implying that women are evil, polluted, and that they should submit to the control of men. Also, foods traditionally procured by men (such as meat from the hunt) are more highly valued than those procured by women (such as roots and berries), even though the latter foods are a major supplement to overall nutrition. One particularly effective ideological mechanism that keeps women in subordinate positions is found among the Luo of western Kenya, whose creation myth blames women for committing the original sins that resulted a divine punishment for men: a life of hard work. These kinds of gender ideology are often seen as something that men use to victimize women. Often this may the case, but it bears remembering that both men and women believe in and support gender ideology.

Compensation theory is a model of human development that does a lot of damage to the integrity of the individual. It states that a person’s greatness arises primarily from the obstacles he or she faced as a child. For instance, Napoleon supposedly became a great leader, not because he was a unique character, but because he was “compensating” for how short he was. And the famous artist Jackson Pollock painted in his original and unusual way because of childhood issues involving urination. A theory so degrading to inspiration and depth of character deserves little more than contempt.

The Literary Digest magazine surveyed an astonishing 2.4 million Americans in 1936. The results showed that 57 percent were planning to vote for the Republican Alf Landon and 43 percent were planning to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Thus, a landslide Landon victory was expected, which would bring a return to Republican dominance in the presidency. Instead, Roosevelt won the election with 62 percent of the popular vote!

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¹I dreamed of traveling to the Big Apple ever since I first heard tales of an island metropolis known as the “greatest city in the world.” ²Of all the stories that grabbed me, the one that most intrigued me was its reputation as the “city that never sleeps.” ³On the day I finally arrived in New York, I went for a walk at 4 a.m. for about 100 blocks. ⁴They lied; this city was asleep.

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Which sentences in the above passage use personification?

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When the Titanic sank, about 700 survived out of the 2300 passengers and crew on board. Even if all the lifeboats had been filled to capacity, there would only have been room for 1,178. After the ship went down, hundreds of people bobbed on the surface, screaming for help.  The temperature of the water was 28 degrees, colder than freshwater ice. Most of the people in the water succumbed to hypothermia within minutes, while others may have died quickly from heart attacks. After a delay of several minutes, only one boat came back. By then all but six in the water were dead.

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What is the author’s point of view in the above passage?

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With a few exceptions, literary critics have resisted offering a complicated theory concerning Langston Hughes’ creativity. His relentless affability and charm, his deep, open love of the black masses, his devotion to their folk forms, and his insistence on writing poetry that they could understand, all have contributed to the notion that Langston Hughes was intellectually and emotionally shallow. One wonders, then, at the source of his creative energy, since the reviews of his work were obviously not encouraging at first. Whatever the source of his motivation, it drove him from 1921 to 1967.  He wrote so many poems, novels, short stories, plays, operas, popular histories, children’s books, and assorted other work. One wonders, too, in his aspect as a poet, why this apparently happy, apparently shallow man defined his creativity in terms of unhappiness. “For my best poems,” he says, “were all written when I felt the worst.  When I was happy, I didn’t write anything.”

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Armand isn’t evil; his system of morality is simply different. We should all learn to accommodate a diversity of approaches to good and evil. What may appear like the behavior of a psychopath to one person can be somewhat charming to the person who’s being manipulated. Armand is especially good at disposing of “the remains” after one of his business deals goes sour. Never have you seen such a tidy gentleman.

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The point of view in the above selection is:

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¹The U.S. Citizenship Test has an invalid question on it: “What is the most important right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution?” ²The correct answer, according to the test-maker, is “the right to vote.” ³Any candidate who deserves to become a citizen will balk at this test question because “the most important right a citizen has” is a matter of opinion, and opinions cannot be true or false. ⁴Therefore, there cannot be any “correct” answer to the question, just as there cannot be any correct opinion. ⁵A government of “free people” has no business putting a leading question on its tests that brainwash would-be citizens into thinking and feeling in a “correct” way. ⁶Opinions in a true democratic republic cannot be portrayed as correct or incorrect, so the test question is ultimately invalid, should not be included on the test, and should be banned by law.

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In sentence 5, the author suggests that the U.S. government is brainwashing people.  This is an example of:

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Adolescent suicide rates have risen dramatically in the past several decades. In the United States, the rise reflects an enormous increase for males but not for females. Males typically use more violent and more final methods such as guns (65 percent of all male suicides compared with 40 percent of female suicides); female methods are more passive and protracted and sometimes less successful (for example, poison: 36.8 percent of female suicides compared with 13.3 percent of male suicides).

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Candice Pert and Solomon Snyder rocked the scientific world by showing that morphine exerts its effects by binding to specialized receptors in the brain. This discovery raised a perplexing question: Why would the brain be equipped with receptors for morphine, a substance from a plant? It occurred to Pert and others that they were on the edge of a new frontier in biology and medicine. Pert reasoned that the nervous system must have its own, endogenous (internally produced) morphine-like substances. Investigators decided to call these as-yet undiscovered substances endorphins—internally produced drugs that resemble morphine and other opiates. In short order, a number of endogenous, morphine-like substances were identified. Subsequent studies revealed that endorphins and their receptors are everywhere distributed in all the cells of the human body and that they clearly contribute to the control of pain, as well as to a vast variety of other unexplored phenomena, such as how moods affect growth and healing. This brilliant discovery revolutionizes medicine, opening the possibility for a new kind of molecular medicine—based not only on opiates, but upon other kinds of molecules that can bind to receptors in our cells.

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¹There was one bookstore I visited recently in Orlando, Florida. ²Books everywhere throughout its many rooms, floor to ceiling—and all of them were filled with subjects like remembering glamorous past lives, finding your “soul mate,” soothing your fears of mortality and loneliness by proclaiming that it is possible to contact dead relatives. ³Reading the book jackets gave me the feeling of escaping from reality into a comfortable, spiritual place beyond this world.  ⁴Almost everything in the store seemed to suggest retreating from the difficulties of life, like crawling back into the womb, making the individual feel safe and special or warm and fuzzy. ⁵I marveled at how the staff maintained the inventory so enthusiastically and in such quantity.  ⁶It took a while to find a few of the more rare and edgy books, but the Tibetan Buddhism section offered some engaging reading. ⁷But I can’t help wondering if the owner would send those books back if she had time to notice the not-so-cheerful color plates of Buddhist demons and hungry ghosts.

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“Almost everything in the store seemed to suggest retreating from the difficulties of life, like crawling back into the womb, making the individual feel safe and special or warm and fuzzy.”  The italicized words in this sentence provide an example of:

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Survival for you and me is not as difficult as it is for the animals, thanks to the power of the human brain and its ability to create culture. Humans, like animals, have routine behaviors, of course, but these behaviors are not instincts. They are not built-in. Routines are part of our culture, and the routines of a person’s particular culture can be changed to suit a changing environment. Even in catastrophes like the Ice Age, the smartest humans, who could modify their hunting and gathering behaviors almost immediately, adapted quickly and survived. Meanwhile other species around them simply died out.

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Between the years of 1400 and 1200 B.C.E., the first of the supposedly great religious prophets appeared. He was the Persian Zoroaster, and he founded the religion of Zoroastrianism. His vision of the universe influenced Judaism and the subsequent religions, Christianity and Islam. And it has continued to trouble the Western world from that time on. There are many striking parallels between Zoroastrian myth and those of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Zoroaster’s main thrust—which so typically characterizes the West’s aggressive, dualistic outlook—is the idea that the world has become corrupted by “evil” and that it must be redeemed by applying “good” principles to it. It is regarded as broken or unclean, and it must be repaired or cleaned by the moral actions of humanity—as though hitting the world with a hammer might fix it. The universe therefore is seen as divided against itself, and Earth exists as a battleground for the two opposites “good” and “evil,” banging their heads together. Waging war thereby became a central theme of Western culture, embedded in its very religions.

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