The National Heritage Fellowship was created to honor exceptional folk and traditional artists in the United States for their _______. The Irish American accordionist Joe Derrane was chosen for the fellowship because he has contributed so much to the arts.

Some pieces of music might have many meanings—the compositions of Albertine Caron-Legris can _______ as many different interpretations as there are people to listen to them—and so as long as a listener's interpretation isn't willfully absurd or the result of inattention, it is difficult to justify the claim that the listener has misunderstood the piece.

The following text is from Virginia Woolf's 1919 novel Night and Day. The text describes a gathering of aspiring young artists and intellectuals.

One person after another rose, and, as with an ill-balanced axe, attempted to hew out his conception of art a little more clearly, and sat down with the feeling that, for some reason which he could not grasp, his strokes had gone awry. As they sat down they turned almost invariably to the person sitting next them, and rectified and continued what they had just said in public.

The following text is from Betty Smith's 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Francie, a young girl, visits the library often.

Francie thought that all the books in the world were in that library and she had a plan about reading all the books in the world. She was reading a book a day in alphabetical order and not skipping the dry ones. She remembered that the first author had been Abbott. She had been reading a book a day for a long time now and she was still in the B's. Already she had read about bees and buffaloes, Bermuda vacations and Byzantine architecture. For all her enthusiasm, she had to admit that some of the B's had been hard going. But Francie was a reader.

The following text is adapted from Adib Khorram's 2018 novel Darius the Great Is Not Okay. Darius, a teenager from the United States, is visiting his grandparents, Mamou and Babou, and other family members in Iran.

I was too tired to fall all the way asleep, and even though Mamou was soft and warm, leaning up against her wasn't a terribly comfortable position to sleep in. So I dozed and floated on the clouds of Farsi that blew my way from the front seat of Dayi [Uncle] Jamsheed's SUV.

It reminded me of when I was little, and Mom chanted to me in Farsi every night before bedtime. It's hard to describe Farsi chanting: the way Mom drew her voice out like the notes of a cello as she recited poems by Rumi or Hafez. I didn't know what they meant, but that didn't matter. It was quiet and soothing.