A. The imaginary worlds of fiction serve as means to escape the ties and the ennui of the real world and indulge vicariously in an alternate reality.

B. Reading fiction trains people in this domain, just as reading nonfiction books about, say, genetics or history builds expertise in those subject areas.

C. The defining characteristic of fiction is not that it is made-up but that it is about human, or humanlike beings and their intentions and interactions.

D. The solitary act of holing up with a book is actually an exercise in human interaction.

A. Sea ice acts as a blanket on top of the ocean, protecting the water from incoming solar energy and atmospheric heat.

B. This effect accelerates overall warming, which in turn melts more land ice and drives up sea levels.

C. Although the sea ice is shrinking, it does not add to water levels as it melts because it is already part of the ocean’s mass.

D. As that frozen coating disappears, its white surface is no longer there to reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere—so the ocean absorbs much more solar energy.

A. Party politics is all too often merely the surf, spray and scum of the ocean that is society – it’s the prevailing undercurrents, the slow shifting of tectonic plates, that count in the long run.

B. Emmanuel Macron’s victory in France’s legislative elections is the consummation of a political revolution which started with his triumph in the recent presidential election.

C. While on the surface the dominance of Macron’s party – founded less than two years ago – is a huge transformation of the political landscape in France, the low turnout suggests that this is skin deep.

D. In France, growing abstention is the powerful current that risks, eventually, pulling the country under.

A. Since Plato at least, we have held that subduing our passions to the iron rule of reason is our supreme aspiration; it is the ideal for human cognition.

B. If human beings can indeed be described as rational animals, it is due to the fact that humans, of all animals, are the only ones capable of irrational thoughts and action.

C. Ironically, we think that the more we are like Star Trek's unfeeling alien Mr. Spock, the more human we really are.

D. We delight in pretending that our most prized and most humanly attribute is our forebrain, which houses, we also pretend, our capacity for rational thought.

A. Inflation, which increases nominal but not real wages, is assumed to trick workers into accepting a lower remuneration for their services; it is thus an indirect wage cut that helps prevent an increase in unemployment.

B. An economic concept that serves as the linchpin for monetary policy makers is that wages are quite inflexible in a market economy, so unemployment is bound to shoot up whenever workers refuse to accept lower wages.

C. The stagflation of the 1970s proved quite convincingly that high unemployment and high inflation can very well co-exist, and given that wages may not be as rigid as many economists assume, any effort to micromanage the economy may well be a fool’s errand.

D. While framing monetary policies, central bank chiefs keep this inverse relationship in mind, trying to maintain a non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, which is the unemployment rate at which inflation too is just under control.