ShmoopTube

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When you shmoop upon a star...

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Which words could fill in the blank so that

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the sentence below makes sense?

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Though astronomers once thought that there was a fixed number of stars in the universe,

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we now know that the number far blank earlier estimates and continues to grow even now.

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And here are the potential answers...

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This sentence gives us two major clues: people no longer believe that the universe contains

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a fixed number of stars, and those big balls of super-heated gas

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....uh, these big balls of super-heated gas keep on multiplying like

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space rabbits.

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So whatever word goes into the blanks has got to get across the idea that there are

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way more stars than scientists originally thought.

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"Outperforms" doesn't fit because it means that something does better than something else.

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"Expands" means that something gets bigger,

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so it doesn't work in this sentence either.

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If you plugged "exceeds" into this sentence,

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it would mean that the number of stars has increased.

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This is our number one contender so far.

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(D) doesn't work because "overbears" means that something dominates something else.

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Nothing about an increase in numbers here.

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"Relinquishes" describes when somebody gives something up, so we say no to (E).

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And that brings us back to (C).

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As in, "Correctomundo."

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