Reasoning

Relevancy

The student wants to underscore the singularity of Newton's discovery.
The student wants to generalize the approach of the study conducted by smith, jones, and lee.
The analyst needs to compare the prices of two different stocks.
The artist intends to provide an explanation and example of "chiaroscuro"
The historian wishes to emphasize the importance of Einstein's theory of relativity
The critic plans to make a generalization about the themes of the books written by Hemingway
The engineer wants to contrast the features of two different car models.
The athlete intends to emphasize the difficulty of Usain Bolt's world record.
The psychologist plans to make a generalization about the effects of social media on teenagers.
Musician wants to compose a song about a personal experience.
Writer wants the student to create a presentation on the history of the internet.
Student wants to write a persuasive essay on the importance of recycling.
The chef wants to create a new recipe for a vegan dessert. The chef could then experiment with different combinations of ingredients to create a delicious and visually appealing dessert.
The fitness enthusiast started identifying the muscle groups they want to target, such as legs, arms, or core.
The artist considered the mood of the atmosphere someone wanted to convey in the painting so he choose a color palette and composed reflects that change mood.

Prioritizing

Arguments

Researchers Narelle Haworth and Amy Schramm studied bicycling behavior in Queensland, Australia. Haworth and Schramm asked adult bike riders questions about their level of experience, reasons for riding a bike, and route preferences. The researchers claim that experienced riders who mainly bike to work tend to prefer routes that reduce their travel time.

Biologists have generally believed that the diet of jaguars consists mostly of land-based mammals, but researchers studying a population of jaguars living in the Brazilian Pantanal, a tropical wetland, claim that jaguars can survive on a diet of more fish and aquatic reptiles than mammals.

Given that stars and planets initially form from the same gas and dust in space, some astronomers have posited that host stars (such as the Sun) and their planets (such as those in our solar system) are composed of the same materials, with the planets containing equal or smaller quantities of the materials that make up the host star. This idea is also supported by evidence that rocky planets in our solar system are composed of some of the same materials as the Sun.

Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt have argued that experiencing awe—a sensation of reverence and wonder typically brought on by perceiving something grand or powerful—can enable us to feel more connected to others and thereby inspire us to act more altruistically. Keltner, along with Paul K. Piff, Pia Dietze, and colleagues, claims to have found evidence for this effect in a recent study where participants were asked to either gaze up at exceptionally tall trees in a nearby grove (reported to be a universally awe-inspiring experience) or stare at the exterior of a nearby, nondescript building. After one minute, an experimenter deliberately spilled a box of pens nearby.

A student performs an experiment testing her hypothesis that a slightly acidic soil environment is more beneficial for the growth of the plant Brassica rapa parachinensis (a vegetable commonly known as choy sum) than a neutral soil environment. She plants sixteen seeds of choy sum in a mixture of equal amounts of coffee grounds (which are highly acidic) and potting soil and another sixteen seeds in potting soil without coffee grounds as the control for the experiment. The two groups of seeds were exposed to the same growing conditions and monitored for three weeks.

Ochre sea stars live in tidal pools along the shoreline of the Pacific Ocean. At night, they move to higher shore levels in search of prey. But scientists Corey Garza and Carlos Robles noticed that ochre sea stars stayed at lower levels at night after heavy rains. Garza and Robles hypothesized that a layer of fresh water formed by rainfall was a barrier to the sea stars. To test their hypothesis, the scientists did an experiment. They placed some sea stars in a climbable tank of seawater and other sea stars in a similar tank of seawater with a layer of fresh water on top. Then, the scientists watched the sea stars’ behavior at night.

External shopping cues are a type of marketing that uses obvious messaging—a display featuring a new product, for example, or a “buy one, get one free” offer—to entice consumers to make spontaneous purchases. In a study, data scientist Sam K. Hui and colleagues found that this effect can also be achieved with a less obvious cue: rearranging a store’s layout. The researchers explain that trying to find items in new locations causes shoppers to move through more of the store, exposing them to more products and increasing the likelihood that they’ll buy an item they hadn’t planned on purchasing.

Archaeologist Petra Vaiglova, anthropologist Xinyi Liu, and their colleagues investigated the domestication of farm animals in China during the Bronze Age (approximately 2000 to 1000 BCE). By analyzing the chemical composition of the bones of sheep, goats, and cattle from this era, the team determined that wild plants made up the bulk of sheep’s and goats’ diets, while the cattle’s diet consisted largely of millet, a crop cultivated by humans. The team concluded that cattle were likely raised closer to human settlements, whereas sheep and goats were allowed to roam farther away.

In countries with right-hand traffic, drivers who want to make a left turn at a traffic intersection with stoplights have to wait for either a gap in oncoming traffic or a designated left-turn signal to turn green. At busy intersections, this often causes a backup of vehicles waiting to turn left or being prevented from proceeding by left-turning vehicles in front of them. Transportation researcher Vikash V. Gayah claims that in urban areas eliminating the option to turn left at busy intersections—both with and without dedicated left-turn signals—would improve traffic flow and, as a result, reduce overall travel times even if such a restriction would require drivers to sometimes travel a slightly longer distance.

Many archaeologists will tell you that categorizing excavated fragments of pottery by style, period, and what objects they belong to relies not only on standard criteria, but also on instinct developed over years of practice. In a recent study, however, researchers trained a deep-learning computer model on thousands of images of pottery fragments and found that it could categorize them as accurately as a team of expert archaeologists. Some archaeologists have expressed concern that they might be replaced by such computer models, but the researchers claim that outcome is highly unlikely.