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: Groundwater salinization compromises buffering properties. Vegetation clearance, along with irrigation, causes serious issues. Irrigation increases the water table and mobilizes salts, and vegetation clearance allows it to come in contact with water habitats and vegetation. This stresses species not adapted to high salinity. High levels of salinity reduces water uptake in plants, by causing stomatal closure, reducing photosynthesis. Forests undergo decline in areas of high salinity and shallow groundwater depths because these conditions make them more susceptible to droughts. Forests undergo decline in areas of high salinity and shallow groundwater depths making them more susceptible to droughts. 
Story: In the sixteenth century the State of Michigan had forests all over. But that has long been gone. 
Especially, in the state's northeast part the vegetation has been cleared in the twentieth century. 
Wooded areas were replaced by farm lands. All these farmlands were under heavy Irrigation. At one time, in the sixteenth century, plant species like elm and oak used to be plentiful. We still had some elms and oaks in the twentieth century, but they were not great many in number.
In which century plant species in northeast Michigan  were in less stress, sixteenth century or twentieth century?

Background Paragraph: There are many examples in the chemical world of changes in entropy. Phase transitions are one obvious example. When a substance makes a transition from the liquid state to the gaseous state, the particles have many more possible arrangements, because they are no longer confined to a specified volume in which they are close to each other; gas particles can move freely throughout their container. Vaporization represents an increase in entropy. In the opposite direction, a liquid loses entropy when it freezes to a solid. Because solids have very ordered structures, there are fewer possible arrangements of particles that would result in the properties associated with a solid. 
Story: George is going camping and forgot to bring water with him. He decides to collect water from a nearby stream and boil it to make it safe for drinking.
Given George removes the water from the fire to let it cool down so he can drink it, will the entropy increase or decrease?

Background Paragraph: Storing large volumes of data – When storing XML to either file or database, the volume of data a system produces can often exceed reasonable limits, with a number of detriments: the access times go up as more data is read, CPU load goes up as XML data takes more power to process, and storage costs go up. By storing XML data in Fast Infoset format, data volume may be reduced by as much as 80 percent. 
Story: Dan had a busy day storing XML. At 2 PM, he stored 10000 Gigabytes to the database. At 3 PM, he stored 20000 Gigabytes to the database. At 4 PM, he stored 30000 Gigabytes to the database. At 5 PM, he got dinner. At 6 PM, he stored 40000 Gigabytes to the database. At 7 PM, he stored 50000 Gigabytes to the database. At 8 PM, he went to sleep to finish storing XML in the morning.

What time did CPU load go up: 2 PM or 5 PM?