A. Good writers use more verbs.

B. However, it is hard to write without verbs.

C. The reason is that if unnecessary words are reduced, the verb-percentage goes up as a mathematical necessity.

D. So “use verbs” is not really good advice; writers have to use verbs, and trying to add extra ones would not turn out well.

A. The French Revolution created a vision for a new moral universe: that sovereignty resides in nations; that a constitution and the rule of law govern politics; that people are equal and enjoy inalienable rights; and that church and state should be separate.

B. The French Revolution invented modern revolution —the idea that humans can transform the world according to a plan—and so has a central place in the study of the social sciences.

C. It ushered in modernity by destroying the foundations of the “Old Regime”—absolutist politics, legal inequality, a “feudal” economy (characterized by guilds, manorialism, and even serfdom), and an alliance of church and state.

D. That vision is enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, whose proclamation of “natural, imprescriptible, and inalienable” rights served as the model for the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

A. During the 24-hour darkness of the austral autumn and winter, the South Pole Telescope operates nonstop under impeccable conditions for astronomy.

B. The atmosphere is thin (the pole is more than 9,300 feet above sea level, 9,000 of which are ice), stable (due to the absence of the heating and cooling effects of a rising and setting Sun) and the pole has some of the calmest winds on Earth, blowing almost always from the same direction.

C. “The South Pole has the harshest environment on Earth, but also the most benign,” says William Holzapfel, a University of California at Berkeley astrophysicist, the on-site lead researcher at the South Pole Telescope.

D. From an astronomer’s perspective, not until the Sun goes down and stays down—March through September— does the South Pole get “benign.”

A. As "operating systems", Latin and French outlived the strategic pre-eminence of Rome and France.

B. Nor will Chinese, Russian, or Indian culture soon shoulder aside the American version-high or low- whose draw is embodied by Harvard and Hollywood.

C. Once a standard exists, it tends to perpetuate itself-just like the dollar, for all its ups and downs will not soon yield to the Euro or the Renminbi.

D. By such measures, no other rival, not even China, comes close to America, whatever the country's many familiar failings and riches of the rising rest.

A. The oldest fossil grasses are just 70 million years old, although grass may have evolved a bit earlier than that.

B. There have been land plants for 465 million years, yet there were no flowers for over two-thirds of that time.

C. The equally-familiar grasses appeared even more recently.

D. Flowering plants only appeared in the middle of the dinosaur era.