"Amass" meansto gather or accumulate．"Abridge" meansto shorten, abbreviate, or truncate．"Laud" meansto acclaim or praise．"Mollify" meansto calm or pacify．"Rant" means toyell or rave．

If your friends were fighting you would want to make the situation better. This is the sense of "ameliorate." The same sense is carried by the less-common form, "meliorate" (sometimes a prefixed "a" will make a word mean its opposite—as in "moral" and "amoral," but in this case "ameliorate" and "meliorate" both meanto make better).

"Augment" meansto enlarge or extend．"Hone" means tosharpen or file."Exacerbate" meansto complicate or worsen．"Extol" means tocelebrate or glorify．"Deviate" meansto detour or change course．

"Converge" meansto congregate or gather together．"Ameliorate" meansto make better or refine．"Belie" meansto misrepresent or mislead．"Distend" meansto become larger and rounder from internal pressure．"Expedite" meansto cause something to happen faster．

"Kindle" meansto ignite or light．"Jeopardize" meansto risk or imperil．"Pilfer" meansto steal or rip off．"Juxtapose" meansto place two or more things side-by-side for comparison．"Scrutinize" meansto scan or review in detail．

"Assuage" meansto soothe or relieve．"Waver" meansto shift back and forth or be indecisive．"Inhibit" meansto restrict or inhibit．"Cadge" meansto beg or scrounge．"Emulate" meansto imitate the actions of someone or something．

"Glean" meansto pick out or collect．"Obviate" meansto make unneccesary．"Feign" meansto pretend or fake．“变干”是指to dehydrate or dry out．"Aver" meansto assert or maintain．

The people want the war to stop, so it is best to assume that they want the disputes between the nation to be resolved. The answer choice that most clearly displays this meaning is reconciled.

We can infer from the sentence that the water is not draining through the pipes. "A mass of food residue" is causing the problem. We could guess that the food is blocking the pipes, so we should predict that the food needs to be removed or expelled. "Inculcated" meansto have impressed something on the mindorto have some ideainstilledinto the brain．That makes no sense in this sentence! "Coddled" meanspamperedorspoiled, and we don't want to treat the mass kindly, we want to get rid of it! "Machinated" meansto have created an evil plot森的,所以它没有意义tence. "Compacted" is close in meaning to the word we want; it meanscondensedorcompressed, so it doesn't really fit the sentence, either. "Expunged" meansto have obliterated or completely removed something．That's our best choice.

From the context of the sentence, we know that Marge got to the restaurant early because she was able to avoid the construction by taking an alternate route. So, we are looking for a verb that meansto avoid．Since to "circumvent" something meansto navigate around an obstacle, "circumventing" is the correct answer.