"Amass" means to gather or accumulate. "Abridge" means to shorten, abbreviate, or truncate. "Laud" means to acclaim or praise. "Mollify" means to calm or pacify. "Rant" means to yell 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 mean to make better).

"Augment" means to enlarge or extend. "Hone" means to sharpen or file. "Exacerbate" means to complicate or worsen. "Extol" means to celebrate or glorify. "Deviate" means to detour or change course.

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

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

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

"Glean" means to pick out or collect. "Obviate" means to make unneccesary. "Feign" means to pretend or fake. "Desiccate" means to dehydrate or dry out. "Aver" means to 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" means to have impressed something on the mind or to have some idea instilled into the brain. That makes no sense in this sentence!  "Coddled" means pampered or spoiled, and we don't want to treat the mass kindly, we want to get rid of it! "Machinated" means to have created an evil plot, so it doesn't make sense in the sentence. "Compacted" is close in meaning to the word we want; it means condensed or compressed, so it doesn't really fit the sentence, either. "Expunged" means to 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 means to avoid. Since to "circumvent" something means to navigate around an obstacle, "circumventing" is the correct answer.