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.
--------
Question: 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. 
Question: Which path will be marched over less frequently?

Answer: path B.


Question: Background Paragraph: So much rain falling so fast causes some of the damage from a hurricane. But a lot of the damage is caused by storm surge. Storm surge is very high water located in the low pressure eye of the hurricane. The very low pressure of the eye allows the water level to rise above normal sea level. Storm surge can cause flooding when it reaches land ( Figure below ). High winds do a great deal of damage in hurricanes. High winds can also create very big waves. If the large waves are atop a storm surge, the high water can flood the shore. If the storm happens to occur at high tide, the water will rise even higher. 
Story: Two cities were located 50 miles away from each other. They received a hurricane warning. Twin city got hit by the Hurricane, while Big city missed most of the effects. 
Question: Which city experienced smaller waves?

Answer: Big.


Question: Background Paragraph: The Gaia hypothesis states that the biosphere is its own living organism. The hypothesis suggests that the Earth is self-regulating and tends to achieve a stable state, known as homeostasis . For example the composition of our atmosphere stays fairly consistent, providing the ideal conditions for life. When carbon dioxide levels increase in the atmosphere, plants grow more quickly. As their growth continues, they remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In this way, the amount of carbon dioxide stays fairly constant without human intervention. 
Story: Two boys read about the Earth, Evolutionism and the Gaia hypothesis. Brad liked Evolutionism more, while Stan preferred the Gaia theory, and agreed with it. 
Question: Which boy agreed that the Earth tends to achieve homeostasis?

Answer:
Stan.