From Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay *Self-Reliance* (1841). Select the word that fits the blank. "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to ______."

Emerson's metaphor is agricultural: the *plot of ground*, the *kernel of nourishing corn*, the *toil*. The blank must name what one does to that plot of ground so that corn can come — i.e. **cultivate** it. "Till" (to plough and prepare ground for crops) is the precise term and fits the agricultural register Emerson has set up. - "Sell" and "abandon" would prevent the corn from coming, contradicting the sentence. - "Defend" is in the wrong frame — defense doesn't bring forth grain; cultivation does. The broader figure Emerson is making is that each person has a particular task or vocation given to them and must work at it themselves — corn does not come from another's field. *Till* is essential to that figure.