Which of the following activities is best suited to develop inductive reasoning?

Inductive reasoning is the process of forming a general rule, principle, or law by observing and analysing multiple specific instances — the generalisation is built up FROM the data, not assumed beforehand. It is the reverse of deductive reasoning, in which an already-known general rule is applied to reach a specific conclusion, and it is different from simply recalling or confirming a rule that has already been stated.

In this item, asking students to measure the angle of reflection for many different values of the angle of incidence in a plane mirror gives them a set of concrete, specific observations. By comparing these measured angle-pairs across several trials, the students notice the recurring pattern themselves and arrive at the general law of reflection — this is exactly how inductive reasoning develops: specific data first, general principle second.

The other activities do not follow this specific-to-general path:

• Stating the laws of reflection only requires recalling an already-known rule; no observation or generalisation is involved, so it exercises memory, not induction.

• Verifying the laws of reflection experimentally starts from a rule that is already stated and merely checks whether it holds — this is confirmatory/deductive testing of a known hypothesis, not the derivation of a new generalisation from data.

• Solving numerical problems based on the law of reflection applies an already-known law to compute specific values — this moves from the general rule to a specific case, which is deduction, the reverse direction of induction.

Hence, measuring the angle of reflection across varied cases of the angle of incidence is the activity that best develops inductive reasoning.