Name _______________________

Date _____________
Scrambled Paragraphs

In the 10 years following the unveiling of The Night Watch, Rembrandt's overall artistic output
diminished drastically and he produced no painted portraits; either he received no portrait
commissions or he stopped accepting such commissions.
____ (Q) Speculation about what happened after The Night Watch has contributed to the
"Rembrandt myth," according to which the artist became largely misunderstood and was ignored.
____ (R) There is also no evidence that he was ever "ignored," although he was often the target
of his contemporary critics' barbs.
____ (S) It has, therefore, been put forth that Rembrandt's crisis may have been purely an artistic
one: that he had seen his methods stretched to their practical limits.
____ (T) Often also blamed for Rembrandt's supposed downfall are the death of his wife and the
supposed rejection of The Night Watch by those who commissioned it.
____ (U) But modern research has found no evidence that the painting was rejected or that
Rembrandt experienced deep devastation upon his wife's death.

Pontiac subscribed to the religious beliefs of Neolin, a prophet among the Delaware Indians
during the 1760s.
____ (Q) To continue their dependence on European ways would condemn the Indians to eternal
suffering.
____ (R) Therefore, the reason why the Native Americans in the Ohio Country currently suffered
at the hands of the English was because they had forgotten the true ways of their people.
____ (S) Neolin encouraged his fellow Indians to forsake all English goods and customs because
he felt that the natives' dependence on these items had infuriated their gods.
____ (T) The irony is that although Neolin urged the natives to reject all European customs,
missionaries from the Moravian Church heavily influenced his views of the Great Spirit who
could save the natives from eternal suffering.
____ (U) Pontiac concurred with Neolin's views about autonomy from the English, but also felt
the Native Americans had to remain militarily strong to drive the Europeans out of the Ohio
Country.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense,
13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed
Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores.
____ (Q) Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.
____ (R) In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy (1917-63) notified
Americans about the presence of the missiles.
____ (S) Following this news, many people feared the world was on the brink of nuclear war.
____ (T) However, disaster was avoided when the U.S. agreed to Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev's (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the U.S.
promising not to invade Cuba.
____ (U) He further explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it
clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force, if necessary, to neutralize this perceived threat
to national security.

In the late nineteenth century, a German biochemist found the nucleic acids, long-chain polymers
of nucleotides, were made up of sugar, phosphoric acid, and several nitrogen-containing bases.
____ (Q) Later it was found that the sugar in nucleic acid can be ribose or deoxyribose, giving
two forms: RNA and DNA.
____ (R) In 1943, American Oswald Avery proved that DNA carries genetic information.
____ (S) Most people at the time thought the gene would be protein, not nucleic acid, but by the
late 1940s, DNA was largely accepted as the genetic molecule.
____ (T) Scientists still needed to figure out this molecule's structure to be sure, and to
understand how it worked.
____ (U) He even suggested DNA might actually be the gene.

When most of us think about evolution, we tend to think in terms of simple organisms evolving
into more complex ones.
____ (Q) In fact, those organisms that leave the most offspring behind, simple or complex, seem
to do best.
____ (R) It's no longer believed that humans are at the top of the evolutionary ladder, but
evolution does tend to drive organisms towards greater complexity, does it not?
____ (S) Well, this is not always so.
____ (T) Greater complexity is sometimes a consequence of evolution, but simplification can
also, therefore, be a winning strategy -- it all depends on the environment.
____ (U) Simple chemical reactions evolved into simple cells, which later evolved into more
complex organisms, and so on all the way up to humans.