2018 Winter AV Benchmark

Each time one of us touches the soil of this land, we feel a sense of personal renewal. The national mood changes as the seasons change. We are moved by a sense of joy and exhilaration when the grass turns green and the flowers bloom. “Moved” most nearly means

• changed.
• stirred.
• relocated.
• postponed. 

“Freshwater under the seabed is much less salty than seawater,” Dr. Post says. “This means it can be converted to drinking water with less energy than seawater desalination, and it would also leave us with a lot less hyper-saline water. Freshwater on our planet is increasingly under stress and strain so the discovery of significant new stores off the coast is very exciting. It means that more options can be considered to help reduce the impact of droughts and continental water shortages.” Which choice most closely matches the meaning of “stress” as it is used?

• emphasis
• threat
• urgency
• worry

End users consume increasingly compact and intense forms of high-grade power, relying on suppliers to pursue and capture increasingly distant, dispersed, and dilute sources of raw fuel. The gap is forever widening, as the history of oil extraction reveals, but that doesn’t stop us—the more energy we consume, the more we capture. It’s a chain reaction, and it spirals up, not down. It is, if you will, a perpetual motion machine.
“Pursue” most nearly means

• seek.
• chase.
• engage in.
• proceed with.

On the printout was this slice of the northern sky, sprinkled with 1,000 distant galaxies, and smack in the middle, says Geller, was this remarkable stickman figure. The distribution of galaxies looked like a child’s drawing of a somewhat bowlegged person. It’s a whimsical name for a grand figure: the stickman extended 500 million light-years across the universe. Its torso was composed of hundreds of galaxies, a massive congregation known to astronomers as the Coma cluster. Its arms were two more sheets of galaxies streaming across the night sky.
“Grand” most nearly means

• luxurious.
• tasteful.
• gallant.
• imposing.

It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist. “Return” most nearly means

• reversal.
• reinstatement.
• repayment.
• response.

Hannah told her relative he should hire me, and he informed her that he wanted to hire someone with more experience and, just as important, with more class. He spoke as if I weren’t there, as if I were invisible, as if his face were hidden behind a perforated printout.
“Class” most nearly means

• division.
• grade.
• refinement.
• structure.

 These experiments suggested that people are pretty good, overall, at guessing how a group of others would evaluate them, on average. The overall correlation in these experiments between predicted impressions and the average actual impression of the group was quite high (.55, if you are quantitatively inclined). To put that in perspective, this is roughly the same magnitude as the correlation between the heights of fathers and the heights of sons (around .5). It is not perfect insight, but it is also very far from being clueless. In other words, you probably have a decent sense of what others generally think of you, on average. “Magnitude” most nearly means

• strength.
• influence.
• severity.
• reality.

So if Ceres formed in Pluto’s neighbourhood, how did it end up 2 to 4 billion kilometres away? Some researchers think that the orbits of the planets were once unstable. According to this idea—known as the Nice model—Uranus and Neptune went rampaging through the outer solar system around 3.9 billion years ago. As a result, many of the icy objects that formed in the outer solar system were pulled inward by the gravity of the two planets, and some ended up joining the rocky asteroids that were born in the asteroid belt. Ceres would simply be the largest of these immigrants. “The odds for this seem low, but it is not inconceivable,” says Bill Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “Simply” most nearly means

• wholly.
• sincerely.
• plainly.
• merely.

Karl J. Niklas, a Cornell University botanist, considers Martone’s evidence for lignin in C. cheilosporioides exceptionally strong. But he thinks that red and green algae evolved from separate endosymbiotic events. Still, the progenitors of the two algae may both have carried genes similar to those participating in the lignin production pathways seen today, he says. “Strong” most nearly means

• compelling.
• distinctive.
• impervious.
• vigourous.

Messy or tidy—which is better? Historically, the evidence has favored the tidy camp. The anthropologist Mary Douglas noted almost 50 years ago a connection between clean, open spaces and moral righteousness. More recently, psychologists have shown that the scent of citrus cleaning products is enough to raise people’s ethical standards and promote trust. Conversely, in another study, people were found to associate chaotic wilderness with death. “Promote” most nearly means?

• advocate
• publicize
• encourage
• endorse