Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.

Input: Consider Input: The college says the chairs were removed for treatment to kill the insects after they were found Thursday on the chairs in the Mott Memorial Building’s student lounge. MLive.com reports that the bedbug find on the Flint campus follows the discovery of bedbugs earlier this month in a high school classroom in the Carman-Ainsworth Community Schools, which is also in Genesee County. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Agriculture all consider bedbugs a public health pest. But unlike most public health pests, bedbugs are not known to transmit or spread disease. ___ Information from: The Grand Rapids Press:MLive.com, http://www.mlive.com

Output: Chairs removed from Mott’s Flint campus after bedbugs found.


Input: Consider Input: None of the stories we reviewed gave readers sufficient information on the cost of the research scans used in the study. This story includes a comment from a researcher saying that increased use of this type of brain scan would bring the “high cost” down, but it doesn’t provide an estimate of the current cost or any comparison to alternative methods of assessing reading ability or other features of dyslexia. We will give this story a satisfactory rating because it portrays this research as providing information for researchers seeking to understand dyslexia, rather than offering important direct benefits to individuals. However, most of the story is about what it is like to live with dyslexia. These anecdotes have little or nothing to do with the research. The list of celebrities who may have or had dyslexia also seems irrelevant and distracting. Then the story tosses in discussion of a study that looked at correlations between dyslexia and spatial skills; again, unrelated to the topic of the primary study reported here. The jumble of extraneous personal tales and other research muddles the point of the story. MRI brain scans are generally considered to present little physical risk, so the issue here is really the potential negative effects of the information the test produces. At least the story raises that issue by including comments from parents who worry that this sort of scanning could further stigmatize children who have trouble reading or writing. This story fails to point out that the “children” studied were not beginning readers, but teenagers who were already identified as having dyslexia and may have been involved in special reading programs for many years. It also fails to mention several of the caveats and limitations that the researchers noted in their journal article, including the possibility that misclassification of the participants based on their initial testing could affect the results. In other words, rather than actually improving during the study, it is possible some of the teens were actually better readers from the beginning, but just scored low on the baseline tests. Nevertheless, the story appropriately describes this study as helping researchers to understand the disease, rather than evaluating the clinical usefulness of brain scans. Also, one paragraph deep in the story highlights the preliminary nature of the research; specifically that the study included only 25 participants with dyslexia, “which is too small a sample size to prove anything.” It also notes that the study did not look at whether different varieties or reading instruction or other interventions might have had some effect and it includes a comment from an independent expert about the lack of data on instruction or other factors that could influence reading ability. The story would have been better if the alert to the preliminary nature of the study had been near the top, rather than buried near the end. The story refers to estimates that between 5 percent and 20 percent of the population has dyslexia. Unlike the Reuters story we also reviewed, this story provides a useful definition of dyslexia as “a condition that, broadly speaking, hinders a person’s ability to interpret language.”  The story does include independent experts. Although it does not discuss conflicts of interest, the authors of the main study declared no conflicts and reported that their study was supported by a number of grants from public agencies and foundations, though the baseline assessment of the participants was supported by a company that markets treatment interventions for people with dyslexia. One troubling point: the story describes one person who claims to have been helped by “training at a learning development center.” If this individual was associated with the company that helped sponsor this research, the story should have disclosed that connection. The study authors wrote that although standardized tests did not accurately predict changes in reading ability during the study period, “it is possible that there are behavioral measures not included here that may predict outcome.” Indeed, their journal article specifically referred to other research into clinical testing that did appear to predict how children with poor reading skills responded to teaching. The story fails to make clear that the study reported here did not attempt to make a comprehensive comparison of the predictive power of scans and other methods of assessing children with reading problems. The story notes that the type of scan used in this study is not widely available. The story implies that this study is the first to suggest young people with dyslexia use a certain area of the right hemisphere of their brains more than average readers. Actually, the study authors pointed out that their research provides some additional data to support the findings of many other studies of differences between the brains of people with dyslexia and those who read normally. The story does not appear to rely on a news release.

Output: Dyslexia: Scanning the brain for clues


Input: Consider Input: That’s one reason behind the release Wednesday of their ”State of the World’s Fungi ” report, touted as the first ever global look at the way fungi help provide food, medicine, plant nutrition, lifesaving drugs — and can also spread death and destruction at an alarming pace. The focus on fungi is designed to call attention to potentially vital new uses now being studied — including possible deployment of a fungus that “eats” plastic and degrades it quickly, and one that may clean up radioactive waste — and to warn that climate change is threatening fungi habitat in various parts of the Earth. Director of Science Katherine Willis says researchers know relatively little about fungi — many of them hidden beneath the ground, or invisible to the naked eye, or living in a plant’s cells — even though fungus has been used to ferment food and drink for more than 9,000 years. “We have only just started to scratch the surface of knowledge of this incredible and diverse group of organisms,” she said. “When looking for nature-based solutions to some of our most critical global challenges, fungi could provide many of the answers. We ignore it at our peril.” She argues that fungi have a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde profile: Helping 90 percent of the world’s plants get nutrients, while at the same time doing irreversible damage to some ecosystems. Ash dieback fungus, for example, has spread from Poland throughout much of Europe and now threatens not just the ash tree but 955 other species. The report says climate change is already having an impact on fungi reproduction, distribution and activity, but Willis cautioned that much more research is needed to say with confidence how the world’s fungi will be affected as the planet warms. The focus on fungus is new, but Kew’s astonishing collection of fungi samples goes back to the days of evolution theorist Charles Darwin and children’s author Beatrix Potter. She, too, was a devoted fungus fan who clashed with Kew’s top mycologist — as fungus specialists are known. In a sharp break with British decorum of the era, she even suggested he had become a fungus himself. Kew is known for taking a comprehensive approach to field research, but that is impossible in this case. There are up to 3.8 million species of fungi, but only about 144,000 have been identified. New discoveries are made all the time, but no one expects every species to be catalogued anytime soon. Nonetheless, the Kew fungarium, hidden outside of public view, houses roughly 1.25 million specimens, making it the largest fungus collection in the world, said chief mycologist Ester Gaya. Some date back to the 18th Century. It also houses — under lock and key — a rare collection of fungi known colloquially as “magic mushrooms” for their psychedelic properties. Scientists at Kew say more and more different types of psychotropic fungi are being discovered in many parts of the world. Fungi are hailed for their medical uses, having proved vital for antibiotics and for cholesterol-lowering statins, but even fungus fans admit there is a macabre element to some aspects of fungi life. There is the fungus, for example, that invades cicada nymphs and takes up residence inside the cicada’s body, slowly killing them. Then there are the fungi that live inside ants, controlling their movements before killing them. The fungi can infect an entire colony of ants with their spores, said Gaya. “They turn them into zombie ants,” she said But it’s not all bad. She points out that the compounds fungi use to successfully live inside some animals are valuable immunosuppressants that have been used to develop cyclosporine drugs that have proved invaluable in preventing organ rejection after transplants in humans. “It’s really disgusting,” said science director Willis of the way fungi invade ants. But she concedes the associated medical discoveries have helped humanity. “They’re really horrible and really good.”


Output: Royal Botanic Garden seeks respect for world’s fungus.