WIXLIB

11Question-and-Answer Service Student Guide.Unauthorized copying or reuse of any part of this page is illegal.8Questions 20-28 are based on the following passage andsupplementary material.This passage is adapted from Emily Underwood, “Even in theWild, Mice Run on Wheels.” 2014 by American Association forthe Advancement of Science.Line51015202530354045In 2009, neurophysiologist Johanna Meijer set up anunusual experiment in her backyard. In an ivy-tangledcorner of her garden, she and her colleagues at LeidenUniversity in the Netherlands placed a rodent runningwheel inside an open cage and trained a motion-detectinginfrared camera on the scene. Then they put out a dish offood pellets and chocolate crumbs to attract animals to thewheel and waited.Wild house mice discovered the food in short order,then scampered into the wheel and started to run. Rats,shrews, and even frogs found their way to the wheel—more than 200,000 animals over 3 years. The creaturesseemed to relish the feeling of running without goinganywhere.The study “puts a nail in the coffin” of the debate overwhether mice and rats will run on wheels in a naturalsetting, says Ted Garland, an evolutionary physiologist atthe University of California, Riverside. More importantly,he says, the findings suggest that like (some) humans,mice and other animals may simply exercise because theylike to. Figuring out why certain strains of mice are moresedentary than others could help shed light on geneticdifferences between more active and sedentary people, headds.Even before Meijer got creative in her yard, researchersknew that captive mice are exercise maniacs. Inlaboratories and bedrooms, they frequently log more than5 km per night on stationary running wheels. Butscientists didn’t know why the animals did it.One thing was clear: they seem to enjoy it. Mice findexercise rewarding; just as they can be trained to press alever dozens of times to release a pellet of food, therodents will go to great lengths to unlock a running wheelwhen it has a brake on, and get back to spinning, Garlandsays. But is the drive to run normal, or is it an aberrant,obsessive behavior triggered by living in a shoebox-sizedcage?Meijer’s work seems to have answered that question.On average, the backyard mice she and colleaguesobserved ran in 1- to 2-minute stints, roughly the sameduration as that seen in lab mice. The team also set up asecond wheel in a nearby nature preserve of grassy dunesand attracted a similar crowd of enthusiasts. The animalskept running even when Meijer removed the food fromthe garden site, although they came in smaller numbers,she notes. Sometimes the rodents were so eager to runCO NTI N U E

11Question-and-Answer Service Student Guide556065The fact that the wild mice and other animals werebold enough to enter the cage and use the wheel is“very weird,” but perhaps not as surprising when oneconsiders that many domesticated animals also like torun on wheels, including dogs and chickens, saysJustin Rhodes, a neuroscientist at the University ofIllinois, Urbana-Champaign.Although the common house mice observed in thestudy tend to be more leery of novel structures thanother species—an evolutionary adaptation to thehuman penchant for building mousetraps—Garlandsuggests that the wheel may provide a more secureway for the animals to run than darting across anopen field. “There’s something attractive about beingable to get in a wheel and run unfettered.”Unauthorized copying or reuse of any part of this page is illegal.50that they couldn’t wait to take turns, she says: Atone point, a large mouse sent a smaller mouse flyingwhen it climbed on to the wheel and started runningin the opposite direction.9CO NTI N U E

1.CO NTI N U E10Unauthorized copying or reuse of any part of this page is illegal.1Question-and-Answer Service Student Guide

11Question-and-Answer Service Student GuideThis passage is adapted from Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How YourUnconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. 2012 by Leonard Mlodinow.Line51015202530354045Twentieth-century psychologist Frederic Bartlettbelieved that the distortions he had observed in people’srecall could be accounted for by assuming that their mindsfollowed certain unconscious mental scripts, which wereaimed at filling in gaps and making information consistentwith the way they thought the world to be. Wonderingwhether our social behavior might also be influenced bysome unconscious playbook, cognitive psychologistspostulated the idea that many of our daily actions proceedaccording to predetermined mental “scripts”—that theyare, in fact, mindless.In one test of that idea, an experimenter sat in a libraryand kept an eye on the copier. When someone approachedit, the experimenter rushed up and tried to cut in front,saying, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xeroxmachine?” Unless the subject was making a great manymore than five copies, the experimenter has provided nojustification for the intrusion, so why yield? Apparently agood number of people felt that way: 40 percent of thesubjects gave the equivalent of that answer, and refused.The obvious way to increase the likelihood of compliance isto offer a valid and compelling reason why someone shouldlet you go first. And indeed, when the experimenter said,“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xeroxmachine, because I’m in a rush?” the rate of refusals fellradically, from 40 percent to just 6 percent. That makessense, but the researchers suspected that something elsemight be going on; maybe people weren’t consciouslyassessing the reason and deciding it was a worthy one.Maybe they were mindlessly—automatically—following amental script.That script might go something like this: Someone asksa small favor with zero justification: say no; someone asks asmall favor but offers a reason, any reason: say yes. The ideais easy to test. Just walk up to people approaching aphotocopier and to each of them say something like“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xeroxmachine, because xxx,” where “xxx” is a phrase that, thoughparading as the reason for the request, really provides nojustification at all. The researchers chose as “xxx” thephrase “because I have to make some copies,” which merelystates the obvious and does not offer a legitimate reason forbutting in. If the people making copies consciously weighedthis nonreason against their own needs, one would expectthem to refuse in the same proportion as in the case inwhich no reason was offeredUnauthorized copying or reuse of any part of this page is illegal.Questions 29-37 are based on the following passage andsupplementary material.11CO NTI N U E

155606570In their research report, those who conducted thisexperiment wrote that to unconsciously follow presetscripts “may indeed be the most common mode ofsocial interaction. While such mindlessness may attimes be troublesome, this degree of selective attention,of tuning the external world out, may be anachievement.” Indeed, here is the unconsciousperforming its usual duty, automating tasks so as tofree us to respond to other demands of theenvironment. In modern society, that is the essence ofmultitasking—the ability to focus on one task while,with the aid of automatic scripts, performing others.Unauthorized copying or reuse of any part of this page is illegal.50—about 40 percent. But if the very act of giving areason was important enough to trigger the “yes”aspect of the script, regardless of the fact that theexcuse itself had no validity, only about 6 percentshould refuse, as occurred in the case in which thereason provided—“I’m in a rush”—was compelling.And that’s exactly what the researchers found. Whenthe experimenter said, “Excuse me, I have five pages.May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to makesome copies?” only 7 percent refused, virtually thesame number as when a valid and compelling reasonwas given. The lame reason swayed as many people asthe legitimate one.1Question-and-Answer Service Student Guide12CO NTI N U E

11Question-and-Answer Service Student Guide.Unauthorized copying or reuse of any part of this page is illegal.13Questions 38-47 are based on the following passage.This passage is adapted from Elizabeth Pennisi, “How DoMicrobes Shape Animal Development?” 2013 by AmericanAssociation for the Advancement of Science.Line510152025303540Animals and plants have always shared space withbacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microbes, coevolvingthrough the millennia. In the mid-1800s, however,scientists came to view microbes primarily as enemiesand fought hard with antibiotics, vaccines, and goodhygiene to get the best of them. But the microscopicworld is so intertwined with macroscopic life that theidea that each multicellular animal exists as a separateindividual defined by its genome is falling by thewayside. There is a growing realization that microbesand their genes are partners in each animal’s journeyfrom egg through adulthood. “What we understand tobe the ‘individual’ develops as a consortium of animalcells and microbes,” says Scott Gilbert, a developmentalbiologist from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.“Microbes came before us, so all development thattakes place in all organisms has basically been takingplace in the presence of the microbiota,” adds SvenPettersson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.The evidence for coevolution in developmentalprocesses is coming from far corners of the animalkingdom. Whereas marine biologists once thought thatthe drifting larvae of coral, snails, and other oceangoinginvertebrates randomly settled down to become adults,they now know that many respond to cues frombacterial biofilms (colonies of microorganisms thatadhere to a surface) to pick their new homes. And whilemany animals develop in wombs or eggs apparently freeof microbes, they may still rely on microbes to set inmotion or complete certain aspects of postnataldevelopment. Mammals acquire microbial partners afterbirth and seem to have evolved strategies to encouragethe right species to settle in specific places. Human milk,for example, contains complex sugars that infantscannot digest but which promote the growth ofintestinal bifidobacteria.But what do these microbial partners do? Germfreemice have finally allowed researchers to beginaddressing this question. These are mice that lack theusual complement of gut bacteria because they are bredand raised in sterile environments and eat sterilizedfood. Studies of such mice make an increasingly strongcaseCO NTI N U E

150556065707580that bifidobacteria and other gut bacteria guide thepostnatal maturation of the intestinal and immunesystems, and even parts of the brain, in mammals. Themicrobes turn on mammalian genes important forcellular differentiation (the process by which lessspecialized cells become more specialized) and producemetabolic products that may also affect development.Gut-associated lymphoid tissue and the capillary beds ofthe villi of the intestine fail to adequately develop ingermfree mice, for example.The evidence for a role for symbionts (the smallerparticipant in a relationship between two differentorganisms) in the postnatal developing brain is morepreliminary but nonetheless intriguing. More and moreconnections are being found between the gut microbiotaand behavior. In 2011, Pettersson and his colleaguestested anxiety levels and locomotor activity in germfreemice and found that the rodents are hyperactive and havea decreased level of anxiety compared with mice with ahealthy microbiota. There were also differences in theactivity of genes associated with motor activity andanxiety. There seems to be a window of activity for themicrobiota to influence behavior patterns: Colonizinggermfree mice with normal mouse microbes negatedthese differences in young, but not older, mice, theyreported.Some work suggests that gut microbes influencebehavior through the vagus nerve, which connects thebrain with the digestive system, but Pettersson and otherssuspect a role for blood-borne bacterial products as well.These products, which make up 10% or more of themetabolites in blood, may extend the reach of the gutmicrobiota throughout the body.That realization may mean that prenatal developmentin mammals isn’t as free from microbial influence aseveryone has thought. In mammals, the developing fetusis virtually bacteria-free; hence, researchers have focusedon finding a role for bacteria in development after birth.Yet blood-borne metabolites from a mother’s gut germscould exert an effect on a growing fetus. “That was one ofthe assumptions, that pregnancy did not involvemicrobes,” Gilbert says. “But it probably does.”Unauthorized copying or reuse of any part of this page is illegal.451Question-and-Answer Service Student Guide14CO NTI N U E

1.CO NTI N U E15Unauthorized copying or reuse of any part of this page is illegal.1Question-and-Answer Service Student Guide

22Question-and-Answer Service Student GuideWriting and Language Test35 M I NU TES, 4 4 QUESTIONSTurn to Section 2 of your answer sheet to answer the questions in this section.Each passage below is accompanied by a number of questions. For some questions, youwill consider how the passage might be revised to improve the expression of ideas. Forother questions, you will consider how the passage might be edited to correct errors insentence structure, usage, or punctuation. A passage or a question may be accompanied byone or more graphics (such as a table or graph) that you will consider as you make revisingand editing decisions.Some questions will direct you to an underlined portion of a passage. Other questions willdirect you to a location in a passage or ask you to think about the passage as a whole.After reading each passage, choose the answer to each question that most effectivelyimproves the quality of writing in the passage or that makes the passage conform to theconventions of standard written English. Many questions include a “NO CHANGE” option.Choose that option if you think the best choice is to leave the relevant portion of thepassage as it is.Crowdfunding for MusiciansFor musicians, signing a contract with a recordcompany to produce an album is a dream that only alucky few achieve. But musicians don’t have to rely onthis traditional model for getting their music out to theworld anymore. They would do well to consider analternate method called crowdfunding. Crowdfunding isthe practice of soliciting money 1 from where thepublic—typically through Internet platforms such asKickstarter and PledgeMusic—to fund personal projects.Musicians can create fund-raising 2campaigns. Acampaign can cover expenses such as renting a studio,.Questions 1-11 are based on the following passage.1A. NO CHANGEB. fromC. byD. out of2Which choice most effectively combines thesentences at the underlined portion?A. campaigns while coveringB. campaigns, and they do so to coverC. campaigns to coverD. campaigns, and then they covermaking an16CO NTI N U E

2campaign reaches its financial goal, pledgers receiverewards based on how much they initially contributed.3 Even before Kickstarter and PledgeMusic, bandswere using the Internet business model to fund theirmusic. One of these early success stories was the Britishband Marillion. In 1996 the band’s members set up theirown website to help finance their upcoming NorthAmerican tour, and they 4 manage to raise 60,000from their fans. A few years later, facing conflict withtheir record label and management team, they turnedagain to the public, 5 asking fans to preorder their nextalbum—essentially as a way of funding its production.Unauthorized copying or reuse of any part of t

Oct 07, 2020 · PSAT Practice Test # 15 Make time to take the practice test. It is one of the best ways to get ready for the PSAT. 15. Questionand-Answer ervice tuent uie. Reading Test. 60 MINUTES,