Which type of reasoning uses general premises to reach a logically certain conclusion?

• A. Inductive Reasoning
• B. Deductive Reasoning
• C. Correlative Conjunction
• D. Simple Sentence

Answer: (B)

Deductive reasoning moves from general premises to a specific conclusion, and when the premises are true and the reasoning is valid, the conclusion must be true. For example, if the general rule is that all mammals have hearts, and a whale is a mammal, then the conclusion that a whale has a heart follows necessarily. This kind of certainty distinguishes deduction from other patterns of thinking. Inductive reasoning, by contrast, starts with particular observations and builds up to a general claim, which is plausible but not guaranteed. The other options aren’t about reasoning patterns at all—one is a grammatical term for connecting words, and the other describes a type of sentence structure.