Which prompt engineering technique offers a limited number of examples or shots related to a specific task or topic to guide the language model's response generation?

• A. Few-shot
• B. Zero-shot
• C. Cognitive verifier pattern
• D. Trust and reliability

Answer: (A)

This item tests few-shot prompting, where you include a small set of demonstrations within the prompt to show the model the task and the expected format. That limited number of examples guides the model’s response by illustrating how to structure the answer and what kind of output is appropriate, enabling it to generalize to new inputs based on those cues. This differs from zero-shot, which provides no examples and relies on the model to infer the task from the instruction alone. The other options aren’t about using a concise set of task-specific demonstrations: a cognitive verifier pattern isn’t a standard method for guiding responses with examples, and trust and reliability refers to evaluation or safeguards rather than the prompting technique itself.