The Gleaners, painted in the realist style by Jean-François Millet, depicts peasants picking stray wheat from a field after the harvest. The realists’ emphasis on accurately portraying the experiences of average working people was largely a rejection of the romantic style evident in many paintings by Paul Delaroche, which instead ______ their subjects’ beauty or heroism while hiding all imperfection.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

The minor planet 1061 Paeonia was named after the plant genus that includes peonies. But most minor planets are given only an identification number, largely due to there being over 500,000 such bodies known at present. So while the task of finding a unique name for each minor planet was _____ when few had been discovered, so many minor planets have since been discovered that the task has become nearly impossible.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

The term “agglomeration economies” refers to the economic benefits enjoyed by firms in the same industry that _____ in a region. For example, in the computer manufacturing industry in the United Kingdom, firms that locate near one another can more readily take advantage of increased potential for information sharing among firms that fosters greater technological innovation.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

In the decades after Mexico won its independence from Spain, literature became a medium through which the new nation _____ its autonomous identity, with authors like Manuel Payno and Justo Sierra Méndez helping to shape what would become a distinctly Mexican literary tradition.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

Researchers examining data from the New Horizons space probe, which passed Pluto in 2015, were puzzled by a 27-mile-long crater on Pluto’s icy surface. Although Pluto is mostly covered in frozen methane and nitrogen, the surface near the crater seemed to show the presence of water ice and ammonia—both of which are associated with eruptions from ice volcanoes.

Additionally, the shape and appearance of the crater did not suggest that it was formed by impact.

Based on this evidence, scientist Dale Cruikshank and his team hypothesized that the crater was likely once a massive ice volcano.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?