Sensationalism--the purveyance of emotionally charged content. focused mainly on violent crime, to a broad public--has often been decried, but the full history of the phenomenon has yet to be written. Scholars have tended to dismiss sensationalism as unworthy of serious study, based on two pervasive though somewhat incompatible assumptions: first, that sensationalism is essentially a commercial product, built on the exploitation of modern mass media, and second, that it appeals almost entirely to a simple, basic emotion and thus has little history apart from the changing technological means of spreading it. An exploration of sensationalism's early history, however, challenges both assumptions and suggests that they have tended to obscure the complexity and historicity of the genre.

In the context in which it appears, "charged" most nearly means A. electrified

B. accused

C. attacked

D. fraught

E. admonished

Scientists have long debated the exact timing of the lunar cataclysm, a period approximately 4 billion years ago when Earth and the Moon were pummeled with asteroids. A clue to this puzzle may come from spherules, millimeter-sized droplets of molten rock formed after au asteroid collides explosively with a planet. Upon impact, the asteroid vaporizes both itself and the target rock, producing a vapor plume that condenses into spherules. These form a layer preserved in rock, whose age can be estimated using radiometric dating. Scientists know of fourteen of these spherule layers scattered across Earth, but none dates to the theorized lunar cataclysm time period. Four layers, however, are from between

3.47 and 3.24 billion years ago. indicating perhaps a slow decline in collisions. The primary purpose of the passage is to

A. challenge a basic assumption underlying a theory

B. analyze a flaw in a novel approach to a problem

C. describe different processes that could have produced the same phenomenon

D. explain how a class of data might be useful for answering a question

E. outline a theory that may reconcile conflicting interpretations of a phenomenon

As a part of an environmental study of a river, a random sample of trout was drawn from the river and the lengths of the trout were recorded. The average (arithmetic mean) length was 14.31 inches. If a length of 16.S9 inches was 1.50 standard deviations above the average, what was the standard deviation of the lengths of the trout in the sample?

A. 1.72 inches

A. Quantity A is greater.

B. Quantity B is greater.

C. The two quantities are equal.

D. The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.

What is the range of the seven numbers in the set T ?

A. Option A

B. Option B

C. Option C

D. Option D