Inductive & deductive reasoning

think about this real-world problem to estimate the population of a town in upcoming years one of the town workers collected populations from past years and made this table so they have year starting with 1950 going up by increments of 10 years and then you figure out the population of the town in each of those years the town wants to estimate the population for 2015 2018 and 2020 to do this you will be will you be using inductive reasoning or deductive reasoning now before answering that let's just think about what inductive reasoning is and what deductive reasoning it is inductive reasoning is looking for a pattern or looking for a trend so it's looking for a trend or pattern and then generalizing and then generalizing you could imagine it's kind of extrapolating the information you have generalizing generalizing deductive reasoning is taking some set of data or some set of facts and using that to come up with other or deducing some other facts that you know are true when you generalize you don't know necessarily whether the trend is good will continue but you assume it will you don't know 100% it'll be true with deductive reasoning you know it'll be true you're starting with facts you're starting with facts and then you're deducing other facts from those facts other facts that you know are true now when the town is estimating and that's a kind of a clue that they're not going to know the exact population for 2015 2018 and 2020 but when they estimate the population for these years these years are in the future they don't know what the Year what what the population will be in those years the best they can do is see the trend of growth here maybe see how much what percentage is growing every 10 years or what the absolute number of growth is every 10 years and maybe they can continue that trend out to 2015 2018 and 2020 so they'll be looking for a trend in growth over this 60-year period and then they'll generalize it out to these years so this will be inductive reasoning this will be inductive reasoning