TASK DEFINITION: You are given a background paragraph that describes one or more causal or qualitative relationships such as a relationship in economics or a scientific law and a story that makes use of the concepts or the relationship described in the provided paragraph. You are also given a question about the story that requires an understanding of the relationship described in the background paragraph and the story. You need to come up with an answer to the given question; the answer will be a span from either the question or the story. In order to correctly answer the given question, you need to understand the relationship mentioned in the background paragraph and should be able to use it to understand that in the story. Your answer can not consist of any word that is not mentioned in any of these: the background paragraph, the story, or the question. You can directly copy and paste a span from the story or the question while answering the given question.
PROBLEM: Background Paragraph: Pollutants also affect the atmosphere through their contribution to global warming. Global warming is an increase in the Earth’s temperature. It is thought to be caused mostly by the increase of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Greenhouse gases can be released by factories that burn fossil fuels. Over the past 20 years, burning fossil fuels has produced about three-quarters of the carbon dioxide from human activity. The rest of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is there because of deforestation, or cutting down trees ( Figure below ). Trees absorb carbon dioxide during cellular respiration, so when trees are cut down, they cannot remove carbon dioxide from the air. 
Story: Long island was full of people and they used all their natural resources and burned fossil fuels while Snail island protected the environment and had fewer people living there. 
Question: Which island produced more pollutants?

SOLUTION: Long.

PROBLEM: Background Paragraph: The earliest members of the human species evolved around 200,000 years ago in Africa. Early humans lived in small populations of nomadic hunters and gatherers. Human beings remained in Africa until about 40,000 years ago. After that, they spread throughout Europe, Asia, and Australia. By 10,000 years ago, the first human beings colonized the Americas. During this long period of time, the total number of human beings increased very slowly. Birth rates were fairly high but so were death rates, producing low rates of population growth. 
Story: Archaeologists studied data about human settlements. One was 100,000 years old called village R, and the other one was about 9,000 years old called village N. The older settlement was located in Africa, the other one wasn't. 
Question: Which village had fewer people that were hunters?

SOLUTION: village N.

PROBLEM: Background Paragraph: For example, a radioactive isotope of iodine (I-131) is used in both the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid cancer. The thyroid will normally absorb some iodine to produce iodine-containing thyroid hormones. An overactive thyroid gland will absorb a larger amount of the radioactive material. If this is the case, more and more radioactive iodine can be administered, where it will cluster in the diseased portion of the thyroid tissue and kill some of the nearby cells. Cancer treatments often cause patients to feel very sick, because while the radiation treatment kills the unwanted cancer cells, it causes damage to some healthy cells in the process. 
Story: John is a doctor in a local hospital. Today, he is seeing two patients, patient A and patient B. Patient A has thyroid cancer, but patient B does not have thyroid cancer. John is trying to see the difference between these two patients' reports. 
Question: Which patient might not risk damaging healthy cells, patient A or patient B?

SOLUTION:
patient B.