A. In 400 BC, Leonidas' 300 Spartans died at Thermopylae in Greece while their countrymen vied at Olympia.

B. Troops were forbidden to enter the sacred Olympic precinct; but they were there in 420 B.C. when a Spartan attack was feared. Spartans had been banned from competing.

C. And yet, Spartan-like, America was represented at the Games while she was still fighting in Vietnam.

D. Civilization has advanced since then and—commendably — Olympiads of 1916, 1940 and 1944 were cancelled due to worldwide conflagration.

A. A mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.

B. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.

C. Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

D. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed.

A. Rowling’s declarations on Twitter on what she “always thought” of a particular character are not only newsworthy, but a cause for pride.

B. Rowling seems eager to retain an influence on how we understand her books by revealing ostensibly new information about her characters.

C. Rowling’s chances for being a diverse author lie in the future, not the past.

D. Whether these character points were announced to readers via Twitter or alluded to within the Potter books, however, the meanings that we as a diverse international community of readers wish to take from them trump Rowling’s intentions as an author.

A. Consumers prefer reliability when it’s available, and giving the state’s imprimatur to legalized gambling goes a long way toward ensuring that.

B. Legalizing gambling would only ramp up the incentive to find new ways to fix games.

C. In Britain, betting shops were legalized in 1961, and giant gambling companies, like William Hill and Ladbrokes, watch out for suspiciously prescient bets.

D. Taking gambling into the light makes the marketplace more hostile to cheaters.

A. Since birds are the modern descendants of dinosaurs, they are likely to have once had teeth instead of beaks.

B. However, 100 million years ago a diverse range of non-avian dinosaurs spouted all manner of plumage, and like modern birds, doubtless made a great deal of use of them, even if they could not fly.

C. This fact became known way back in 1861 when paleontologists discovered a bird fossil, about 150 million years old, now classified as Archaeopteryx, which had teeth.

D. Researchers have now published details of how avian edentulism occurred in one common bird ancestor more than 100 million years ago.