Information and Ideas

Chief Editor

Mar 23, 2024

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in 1934 physicist Eugene Wigner posited the existence of a crystal consisting entirely of electrons in a honeycomb-like structure. The so-called Wigner crystal remained largely conjecture, however, until Feng Wang and colleagues announced in 2021 that they had captured an image of one. The researchers trapped electrons between two semiconductors and then cooled the apparatus, causing the electrons to settle into a crystalline structure. By inserting an ultrathin sheet of graphene above the crystal, the researchers obtained an impression--the first visual confirmation of the Wigner crystal. Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Difficulty: Medium

Researchers have obtained the most definitive evidence to date of the existence of the Wigner crystal.

Researchers have identified an innovative new method for working with unusual crystalline structures.

Graphene is the most important of the components required to capture an image of a Wigner crystal.

It's difficult to acquire an image of a Wigner crystal because of the crystal's honeycomb structure.

O Pioneers! is a 1913 novel by Willa Cather. In the novel, Cather portrays Alexandra Bergson as having a deep emotional connection to her natural surroundings: ________Which quotation from O Pioneers! most effectively illustrates the claim?

Difficulty: Easy

"She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring."

"Alexandra talked to the men about their crops and to the women about their poultry. She spent a whole day with one young farmer who had been away at school, and who was experimenting with a new kind of clover hay. She learned a great deal."

"Alexandra drove off alone. The rattle of her wagon was lost in the howling of the wind, but her lantern, held firmly between her feet, made a moving point of light along the highway, going deeper and deeper into the dark country."

"It was Alexandra who read the papers and followed the markets, and who learned by the mistakes of their neighbors. It was Alexandra who could always tell about what it had cost to fatten each steer, and who could guess the weight of a hog before it went on the scales closer than John Bergson [her father] himself."

In the early nineteenth century, some Euro-American farmers in the northeastern United States used agricultural techniques developed by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people centuries earlier, but it seems that few of those farmers had actually seen Haudenosaunee farms firsthand. Barring the possibility of several farmers of the same era independently developing techniques that the Haudenosaunee people had already invented, these facts most strongly suggest that _________Which choice most logically completes the text?

Difficulty: Hard

those farmers learned the techniques from other people who were more directly influenced by Haudenosaunee practices.

the crops typically cultivated by Euro-American farmers in the northeastern United States were not well suited to Haudenosaunee farming techniques.

Haudenosaunee farming techniques were widely used in regions outside the northeastern United States.

Euro-American farmers only began to recognize the benefits of Haudenosaunee farming techniques late in the nineteenth century.