1. International trading such as this required a monetary medium that was stronger and more general than the many feudal currencies. The Byzantine besant played this role up until the twelfth century, but once European trade took off it was no longer satisfactory. The West now reverted to the minting of gold coins that Charlemagne had abandoned.
The Byzantine besant was a

2. I had remained indoors all day, for the weather had taken a sudden turn to rain, with high autumnal winds, and the Jezail bullet which I had brought back in one of my limbs as a relic of my Afghan campaign throbbed with dull persistence. With my body in one easy-chair and my legs upon another, I had surrounded myself with a cloud of newspapers until at last, saturated with the news of the day, I tossed them all aside and lay listless, watching the huge crest and monogram upon the envelope upon the table and wondering lazily who my friend’s noble correspondent could be.
According to the passage, the writer was

3. Insect repellent never repels all the bugs, but you can find many remedies for stings and bites. Besides commercial ones, you can use tobacco or meat tenderizer, which has an enzyme (papain, from the papaya plant) that dissolves protein the insect left in you. But don’t get it in your eyes — it’ll dissolve your cornea, too.
A good title for this passage might be

4. Unlike the scattered settlements people lived in before the Early Middle Ages, European villages — those in the past and those surviving today — typically feature a cluster of homes and farmland grouped around a church and a cemetery. The village essentially replaced the old, rural settlements because people found it more convenient and practical to live nearer to neighbors.
According to the passage, villages were

5. Amongst the other gods, we sometimes see allusions to their particular power and honours, and to the quarrels that derive from them: Athene, Poseidon, Apollo, Artemis, and Hera take part in the battle at Troy, though Zeus strictly forbids it.
According to the passage,

6. Cognatic descent is more flexible than unilineal descent because it allows people to track their relationships to the families of each parent. Slightly less than half the world’s peoples traditionally use or have used this system; although people in the U.S. typically use the last name of the male parent in naming (which seems to imply unilineal descent), they’re actually interested in (and make social and economic use of) the relations of both parents’ families, so U.S. residents actually practice cognatic descent.
According to the passage, cognatic descent is the practice of tracing

7. Unlike the scattered settlements people lived in before the Early Middle Ages, European villages — those in the past and those surviving today — typically feature a cluster of homes and farmland grouped around a church and a cemetery. The village essentially replaced the old, rural settlements because people found it more convenient and practical to live nearer to neighbors.
According to the passage, villages were

8. Amongst the other gods, we sometimes see allusions to their particular power and honours, and to the quarrels that derive from them: Athene, Poseidon, Apollo, Artemis, and Hera take part in the battle at Troy, though Zeus strictly forbids it.
According to the passage,

9. Unlike the scattered settlements people lived in before the Early Middle Ages, European villages — those in the past and those surviving today — typically feature a cluster of homes and farmland grouped around a church and a cemetery. The village essentially replaced the old, rural settlements because people found it more convenient and practical to live nearer to neighbors.
According to the passage, medieval villages included

10. The early motion picture industry appealed primarily to vision. Radio appeals primarily to hearing. Today’s motion pictures and television make a combined appeal to vision and hearing. Other senses such as taste and smell play important roles in the food industry and the perfume industry.
This passage’s main theme is

11. Insect repellent never repels all the bugs, but you can find many remedies for stings and bites. Besides commercial ones, you can use tobacco or meat tenderizer, which has an enzyme (papain, from the papaya plant) that dissolves protein the insect left in you. But don’t get it in your eyes — it’ll dissolve your cornea, too.
A good title for this passage might be

12. The traditional view of the juror was as a passive vessel. According to this view, jurors could sit quietly through the trial and remember all that was said and done. However, modern educational theory suggests that people need to be “active” learners – focused on the subject, organizing new material, and asking questions about it so that they understand it.
According to the passage, jurors today need to

13. Several telescopes today monitor space for potentially harmful space debris, such as comets and asteroids. These pass by the Earth all the time, and NASA currently considers about a thousand asteroids ranging in size from basketballs to mountains to be potentially hazardous. This means they will probably pass very close to the Earth in the foreseeable future and have a chance of impacting the Earth. If an item about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) across impacted the Earth at the proper velocity, the explosion would raise so much dust that it would block out the sun, an event that would cripple agriculture to the point that humanity may starve before the dust settled.
According to the passage, a potentially hazardous asteroid could

14. To answer this question we need to consider whether any of the HSE content of bulk silicate Earth could have accreted prior to the Moon-forming event. The Moon is believed to have been formed during the last giant impact on Earth. Because of its large size (at least more massive than one-fourth of Mars), the projectile is expected to have been differentiated.
According to the passage, the projectile that created our moon was

15. On the birth of a second son, my junior by seven years, my parents gave up entirely their wandering life and fixed themselves in their native country. We possessed a house in Geneva, and a campagne on Belrive, the eastern shore of the lake, at the distance of rather more than a league from the city.
According to the passage, the writer’s parents