Let's say that you are doing a keyword search in OneSearch to find recent articles about marine pollution. Which ONE of the following groups of search words would bring you the largest number of results? Select the BEST answer.

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BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

Question restatement: You’re performing a keyword search in OneSearch to find recent articles about marine pollution, and you must pick the group of search words that would bring the largest number of results.

Option 1: 'oceans AND dumping' uses the AND connector between oceans and dumping. This restricts results to items that mention both terms together, which will likely be a smaller subset focused on dumping in oceans. Since only a specific combination is captured, many marine pollution articles that talk about pollution without mentioning dumping, or that mention dumping without the word oceans, will be excluded. This yields fewer results than a broader, more inclusive approach.

Option 2: 'marine AND pollution' requires both terms to appear. This again narrows the results to sources that explicitly mention both 'marine' (singular) and 'pollution,' which may exclude articles that use 'marine' in one place and 'pollution' in another, or that use synonyms like 'oceans' or 'sea.' The AND constraint is helpful for precision but reduces recall compared with broader OR-based groupings.

Option 3: 'marine OR oceans OR sea AND pollution' appears to combine synonyms with a pollution term. Because of operator precedence, AND is evaluated before OR in many search engines, so this is typically parsed as 'marine OR oceans OR (sea AND pollution).' This yields anything about marine in general, plus items that mention sea specifically in conjunction with pollution. This tends to produce a larger set than the prior two options, since it covers broader topics (marine topics broadly) and also captures pollution-relevant results when tied to sea.

Option 4: 'ocean AND pollution NOT air' uses NOT to exclude results containing 'air' and requires both 'ocean' and 'pollution.' The NOT clause reduces the result set by filtering out potentially relevant articles that mention air-related contexts (e.g., air pollution discussions, atmospheric studies). This would shrink the number of results relative to more inclusive queries that don’t exclude such content.

Option 5: 'I don’t know' is not a search strategy and does not correspond to a valid query pattern. Selecting this would fail to retrieve any results or would be treated as an invalid response by the search system, making it a poor choice for maximizing results.

Overall reasoning: To maximize the number of results, you want a query that captures a broad range of wording that could appear in relevant articles. Including multiple synonyms for the topic (marine, oceans, sea) with the key concept (pollution) is more inclusive than requiring all terms to appear or applying restrictive exclusions. Among the given options, the one that combines broad topic terms with the pollution concept in a way that allows many articles to match is the group that uses OR across the synonyms in combination with pollution being present under at least one branch. This approach is more likely to yield the largest set of results compared with the strictly AND-based or heavily restricted NOT-based options.

Library Skills Workshops (SP 2025) Database Seeker

Let's say that you are doing a keyword search in OneSearch to find recent articles about marine pollution. Which ONE of the following groups of search words would bring you the largest number of results? Select the BEST answer.

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使用图书馆数据库时，建议您学习这些有助于缩小信息范围的搜索词（AND、OR 和 NOT），图书管理员称之为：

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Library Skills Workshops (SP 2025) Database Seeker

Let's say that you are doing a keyword search in OneSearch to find recent articles about marine pollution. Which ONE of the following groups of search words would bring you the largest number of results? Select the BEST answer.

View Explanation

Log in for full answers

Similar Questions

4. To find articles about AI ethics in universities, which search statement is most effective?

2. Which Boolean operator is used to broaden a search by including either of two keywords?

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使用图书馆数据库时，建议您学习这些有助于缩小信息范围的搜索词（AND、OR 和 NOT），图书管理员称之为：

When using Library Databases, it is recommended you learn these search terms that help narrow information, (AND, OR, and NOT), which librarians call this:

To combine related key terms (e.g., free-text, controlled vocabulary), we use the Boolean operator _________ to __________ our search:

More Practical Tools for Students Powered by AI Study Helper

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