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 need to come up with a question about the story that requires an understanding of the relationship described in the background paragraph. The generated question should not be answerable without both the background and story. Write a question about the story that requires a relationship in the background paragraph to answer. Check whether your question requires both the background paragraph and the story to answer. If your question can be answered by only one of these, try to rewrite your question so that it requires both. Note that "flipping" a word in the question can give rise to a new question where the answer will be different from the original question. Often, "flipping" a word gives rise to flipping the direction of the relationship, for example, from "increase" to "decrease."

Background Paragraph: Ecology is the study of ecosystems. An ecosystem consists of all the living and nonliving components of the habitat. Whereas nutrients and certain elements are recycled through ecosystems, energy moves in just one direction. Many interactions among species within an ecosystem are centered around the flow of energy. The formation of ecosystems, from new land to current habitats, is usually based on the pioneer species, and these species are able to live in an area due to the nonliving factors, such as the climate, the soil and the amount of rainfall, of that area. The populations within an ecosystem also determine the stability of the system. Recent tremendous increases in the human population have raised many important ecological issues. 
Story: Two friends were into natural sciences. Tom was more into Geology, while Rick studied Ecology.
Which student read less about living components of the habitat?

Background Paragraph: In the natural world, ants of some species (initially) wander randomly, and upon finding food return to their colony while laying down pheromone trails. If other ants find such a path, they are likely not to keep travelling at random, but instead to follow the trail, returning and reinforcing it if they eventually find food (see Ant communication).

Over time, however, the pheromone trail starts to evaporate, thus reducing its attractive strength. The more time it takes for an ant to travel down the path and back again, the more time the pheromones have to evaporate. A short path, by comparison, gets marched over more frequently, and thus the pheromone density becomes higher on shorter paths than longer ones. Pheromone evaporation also has the advantage of avoiding the convergence to a locally optimal solution. If there were no evaporation at all, the paths chosen by the first ants would tend to be excessively attractive to the following ones. In that case, the exploration of the solution space would be constrained. The influence of pheromone evaporation in real ant systems is unclear, but it is very important in artificial systems.[8]. 
Story: Ricky, an entomologist, is observing an ant colony in his back yard. After some observation, he discovers that all the ants travel down one of two distinct paths in order to find food to bring back to the colony. After taking some measurements, Ricky sees that path A is approximately 100 meters in length, and path B is approximately 150 meters in length. Ricky is now trying to make some scientific conclusions based on these observations.
If we wanted path B to be marched over less frequently, would path B need to be shorter or longer?

Background Paragraph: The number of viruses in the oceans decreases further offshore and deeper into the water, where there are fewer host organisms.In January 2018, scientists reported that 800 million viruses, mainly of marine origin, are deposited daily from the Earth's atmosphere onto every square meter of the planet's surface, as the result of a global atmospheric stream of viruses, circulating above the weather system, but below the altitude of usual airline travel, distributing viruses around the planet.Like any organism, marine mammals are susceptible to viral infections. In 1988 and 2002, thousands of harbour seals were killed in Europe by phocine distemper virus. Many other viruses, including caliciviruses, herpesviruses, adenoviruses and parvoviruses, circulate in marine mammal populations. 
Story: John is a marine biologist. He was collecting samples from six locations in the ocean, location A, location B, location C, location D, location E, and location F. Location A was near the shore, but location B was farther offshore. Location C was in shallow water, but location D was deeper into the ocean. Location E was a habitat with very few organisms, but location F was a habitat full of organisms.

Which location would see less viruses, location A or location B?