You ask a model to reason through a problem step by step. Which technique is this?
Why C is the answer
Chain of thought
Chain of thought asks the model to show its reasoning steps.
In detail
- Step-by-step reasoning is chain of thought.
- Reasoning steps can still contain mistakes.
Use case
An illustrative scenario, not a real incident.
A planner asks a model to work through a budget step by step, which makes its reasoning easy to check.
See it in different ways
flowchart LR A["Zero-shot: no examples"] --> B["Single-shot: one example"] B --> C["Few-shot: several examples"] C --> D["Chain of thought: reason step by step"]
mindmap
root((Prompting))
Zero-shot
Instruction only
Few-shot
Examples
Chain of thought
Step by step
Negative prompt
What to avoidflowchart LR S0["Problem"] --> S1["Step by step reasoning"] --> S2["Answer"]
Key point: Chain of thought asks for reasoning steps.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Negative prompting
- A negative prompt says what to avoid.
- B. Single-shot prompting
- Single-shot gives one example.
- D. Zero-shot prompting
- Zero-shot only means no examples.