TASK DEFINITION: Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.
PROBLEM: Paragraph: This summer, she’ll test her rowing talent in a far more challenging environment, where small crews of rowers rarely go: the Pacific Ocean. Dawson is taking part in a 2,400-mile rowing race from Monterey, California, to Honolulu. She and three teammates are aiming to break a world record — 50 days, 8 hours, 14 minutes, set in 2014 — for a women’s rowing team. Dawson and her three teammates will begin rowing across the Pacific Ocean on June 2. She plans to post updates on her personal blog, http://row4climate.com/ and on her team’s blog, http://www.rippleeffectrowing.com/ But they also want to put a spotlight on the far-reaching impacts of humankind on the Earth by rowing across parts of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a vast gyre of pulverized plastic garbage occupying an area roughly four times the size of California. Dawson, who studied atmospheric sciences at the UW and will begin working on her doctorate at Stanford University this fall, plans to send photos and videos of the garbage patch. She hopes to record the journey on her blog and the team’s blog as she goes. “It’s going to be a hard, demanding journey — and that’s what it’s going to take to combat climate change,” said Dawson, 22, who was a member of the UW crew in 2016 and 2017. The four women will alternate two hours of rowing with two hours of sleep, 24 hours a day, for 40 to 50 days. They’ll be rowing a specially designed oceangoing rowboat they’ve named the Ripple Effect. Their journey is part of the third Great Pacific Race, organized by New Ocean Wave, a British company. It involves eight teams of rowers crossing the Pacific. They are the only all-women team in the race. Dargan Frierson, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the UW and one of Dawson’s former professors, described Dawson as “the type of person who tries to do things that seem impossible. “I hope it raises awareness about the types of changes we’re making to the environment,” he said “The oceans are different from when she was born (in 1996). They are a lot hotter, a lot more acidic. And, there’s a lot more plastic.” One day last week, Dawson and her coach, Conal Groom of the Seattle Rowing Center, carried a one-person shell out onto the water east of the Ballard Bridge. Dawson sat on the impossibly small seat and rowed the sleek shell past a line of brawny, battered commercial-fishing boats with names like Determined, Aleutian Challenger, Sea Venture and Botany Bay. Skimming along under a cloudy sky, she scattered a flock of ducks and passed a partly submerged plastic bag floating in the water. In an oceangoing race, “technique is useless,” said Groom, who rowed in the 2000 Summer Olympics. “It’s basically fitness. My job is to make sure she has enough training.” Dawson typically rows up to two hours a day in the morning. In the afternoon, she works out for another two hours, doing a range of fitness activities including cycling and weightlifting. When she’s not training, she’s working to raise $20,000 to help fund the journey. The race will hinge on things that are beyond her team’s control — weather, currents, waves. “And luck,” Groom said. Dawson has only met one of her teammates in person. Two are from Great Britain, and one is from Brazil. They connected over the internet. They’re coordinating the trip via daily Skype calls. They’ll meet in Monterey next month, for the final leg of training. The race begins June 2. “It’s going to be a crazy experience,” she said. Dawson has displayed a seriousness of purpose and fascination with the natural world that impressed adults when she was just a kid, growing up in Port Townsend. When she was 10 years old, she and her sister, Chloe, began volunteering at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center, where the girls met Libby Palmer, its co-founder. Palmer was struck by Dawson’s maturity, and her ability to do sustained, concentrated work and to absorb information like a sponge. In 2008, the science center started a four-year project to clean and reassemble the skeleton of an orca whale that had washed up on Dungeness Spit in 2001. Eliza and Chloe volunteered for four years, meticulously cleaning the bones and helping to assemble and position the 24-foot-long skeleton for display. Finding a fully intact orca carcass on a beach is rare — the mammals usually sink in open water when they die. Research revealed that the dead orca was heavily contaminated with toxins. “That was a wake-up call for me,” said Dawson. She’d grown up sailing and rowing in what seemed like the pristine waters around Port Townsend. How could a whale living in those same waters be full of toxins? The orca project sparked a growing interest in how the ocean was being changed by acidification and carbon dioxide. Those interests combined with her love of math and physics. “Climate change is a fact, not a belief,” she said. “It is mathematical equations. It is physics . it is clear the climate is changing, and it will affect everyone.” Frierson, the UW professor, met Dawson when she visited his lab as a high-school student and invited her to join his lab to do research as a freshman. “She has the determination, the intelligence that you don’t see in many students,” he said. He hopes students and faculty in atmospheric sciences will be able to aid Dawson’s journey — giving the team a heads-up about upcoming weather and other details like projections of wave heights. “Even just things like forecasting cloudiness might help her to know how long she can use her electric devices,” which are solar-powered, he said. “I’m hoping we can be useful to her, and get some good experience forecasting a place that’s not forecast that much.” Dawson is also working with EarthGames, a group of researchers, game developers and students who develop video and board games about the natural world, and who plan to release a game about Dawson’s journey shortly before it begins. This fall, she will start a doctorate program at Stanford University, where she plans to study why the Antarctic ice sheets are collapsing and what effect the retreating ice could have on sea-level rise. Dawson is confident in the boat, which has two very small cabins for resting and sleeping, and two seats for the rowers. An emergency vessel will be in the area, and a helicopter could airlift a rower to safety if the worst happened. “They’re going to have the latest technology — she’s such a whiz at everything technological,” Palmer said. “There’s nothing macho about their approach. They’re working with a lot of expert people who are lending her a hand.” The boat will contain all the food needed for the trip, most of it dehydrated, and is equipped with a desalinator to make potable water out of seawater, along with a GPS tracking device and a satellite phone. “I have a lot of trust in her, in knowing what her limits are,” Frierson said. “I just know this, from the academic side, that she’s not a person who tries to pretend she can do things she can’t.” ___ Information from: The Seattle Times, http://www.seattletimes.com Claim: Woman to row across ocean for environmental awareness.

SOLUTION: As a member of the University of Washington’s elite women’s varsity crew, Eliza Dawson honed her athletic skills on the sometimes-choppy waters of Lake Washington.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: In February 2020, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh announced that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. While U.S. President Donald Trump honored the controversial commentator with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, some social media users noted that Limbaugh had a history of making demeaning comments on his program. For instance, one widely shared video clip supposedly showed Limbaugh mocking actor Michael J. Fox and claiming that he was “exaggerating” symptoms of his Parkinson’s disease. Just A Quick Reminder Of The Time Rush Limbaugh Mocked Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's By Pretending To Shake Uncontrollably. pic.twitter.com/dX3L0jtnUv — Austin (@austin63867) February 3, 2020  This is a genuine clip of Limbaugh describing Fox on his program. Media Matters archived the full audio of this segment, which originally aired during an Oct. 23, 2006, episode of Limbaugh’s radio show. Here’s a partial transcript of the segment: In this commercial he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking and it’s purely an act. This is the only time I’ve ever seen Michael J. Fox portray any of the symptoms of the disease he has. He can control himself to keep himself in the frame of the picture. And he can control himself enough to keep his eyes right on the lens, the teleprompter. But his head and shoulders are moving all over the place. This is really shameless, folks. This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting. Fox, who is probably best known for playing young conservative Alex P. Keaton on the show “Family Ties” and the time-traveling high school student Marty McFly in the “Back to the Future” series, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991. In 2006, he filmed a 30-second ad for former Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill and her support of stem cell research: Limbaugh was commenting on this advertisement in the above-displayed clip. The segment stirred considerable controversy at the time and even drew an apology from Limbaugh. The Guardian reported: “Hours later the talkshow host was forced to retract. ‘I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong. '” While Limbaugh initially apologized, he would later say on his show that he never made fun of Fox and that this controversy was created by the “drive-by” media. Limbaugh also renewed attacks on Fox and said that the actor was “allowing his illness to be exploited” and was “shilling for a Democratic politician.” The Washington Post reported: After his apology, Limbaugh shifted his ground and renewed his attack on Fox. “Now people are telling me they have seen Michael J. Fox in interviews and he does appear the same way in the interviews as he does in this commercial,” Limbaugh said, according to a transcript on his Web site. “All right then, I stand corrected. . . . So I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong, and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox, if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act.” Claim: "Radio host Rush Limbaugh once claimed that actor Michael J. Fox was ""exaggerating"" his Parkinson's disease symptoms in a political ad."

SOLUTION: Then Limbaugh pivoted to a different critique: “Michael J. Fox is allowing his illness to be exploited and in the process is shilling for a Democratic politician.”

PROBLEM: Paragraph: "The term ""Obamacare"" is used by critics to describe the health care overhaul that President Barack Obama signed into law last year. And some conservatives derisively use the phrase ""Romneycare"" to slight Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and the changes he approved to Massachusetts’ health care system when he was governor there. How about ""Perrycare""? That’s Georgia anti-illegal immigration activist D.A. King’s term for what he contends was an effort by Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry to impose a binational health care plan between his state and Mexico. King even has a website dedicated to highlight Perry’s stance on immigration issues. King is one of the most vocal voices in Georgia’s ongoing debate over illegal immigration. ""Granting instate tuition to illegals is only a small part of Perry’s problematic record,"" King, president of the Dustin Inman Society, which is opposed to open borders between the U.S. and Mexico, wrote in a recent op-ed to the Marietta Daily Journal. ""We noted that Perry had dismissed any consideration of a state immigration enforcement law such as Arizona, Georgia and other states struggled to put in place; had proposed a binational health insurance program with Mexico (Perrycare? ); has expressed his support for legalizing the fugitive illegals who have escaped capture at American borders (it’s not amnesty, it’s a guest worker plan! ); and refused to use the power of his office for any E-Verify legislation in Texas. So what if that state has one of the highest number of illegals in the country?"" King made a number of points, but we decided to look at the Perrycare charge because the presidential candidate’s immigration policy has come up in a number of other forums. Some Perry critics describe him as being soft on illegal immigration because of his position on allowing students who are illegal immigrants to pay instate tuition at colleges in Texas. The criticism has hurt Perry’s standing among some Republicans. So we wondered if King had found another case in which Perry could be criticized as soft on illegal immigrants. Our colleagues at PolitiFact Texas recently examined this issue when another GOP presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, said Perry supported binational health insurance. King dismissed the PolitiFact Texas ruling, forwarding us an e-mail with a widely circulated speech by Perry on the issue. The Texas governor urged lawmakers there to pass a telemedicine program that allows ""individuals living on the Mexican side of the border"" to get care from a specialist hundreds of miles away. Telemedicine is using forms of communication such as video conferences to provide health care, according to the American Telemedicine Association. Perry also mentioned a study to look at the feasibility of binational insurance. ""This study recognizes that the Mexican and U.S. sides of the border compose one region, and we must address health care problems throughout that region,"" Perry said. Those comments were made in August 2001, two weeks before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The study guidelines were outlined in House Bill 2498, passed by the Texas Legislature in 2001. It begins by stating the interest of the state to deliver affordable health care services to citizens ""on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border."" The 141-page report, released in 2003, found some legal problems with the idea and logistical challenges, such as there are no laws in Mexico preventing a doctor from performing the duties of a specialist. The report found other problems. Some Texas health care providers were concerned that medical care in Mexico did not meet their standards, the medical equipment in Mexico was not as advanced and some medicine approved in Mexico may not meet Food and Drug Administration guidelines. The report offered several options if Texas wanted to move forward with the idea. Perry and state lawmakers didn’t act. A spokeswoman for Perry noted to PolitiFact Texas that the Legislature took no further action on the topic. Still, some websites have bashed conservative media for not being more critical of Perry. ""However, in spite of the Legislature’s failure to act, Perry made clear his willingness to funnel Texas’s assets to Mexico,"" an item in the New American website said. It then had excerpts from Perry’s August 2001 speech. The website failed to note that the speech was made two years before the study. By signing the bill that allowed the study, and through his 2001 speech, we can see how some find seeds for Perry’s support of a binational health insurance program with Mexico. But the governor never acted on the study, and he hasn’t appeared to talk much about the subject since 2001. Still, Perry pushed for the study, which implies his interest in the idea." Claim: "D.A. King Says Rick Perry ""proposed a binational health insurance program with Mexico."

SOLUTION:
Did Rick Perry propose a bi-national health care plan with Mexico?