CBSA OTEE flashcards
CBSA OTEE · Build recall with a focused review session.
32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Main idea
- The central claim of a passage that most supporting details explain or defend; it is broader than any single fact.
- Inference
- A conclusion drawn from evidence and reasoning rather than stated directly; it must be supported by the text, not personal opinion.
- Topic sentence
- The sentence that states a paragraph's controlling idea; it usually appears first but can appear at the end.
- Active voice
- A sentence structure in which the subject performs the action, as in 'The officer checked the form,' making responsibility clear.
- Pronoun antecedent
- The noun or noun phrase to which a pronoun refers; unclear or distant antecedents create ambiguous meaning for readers.
- Contrast transition
- A word such as however, although, or yet that signals the next idea reverses, limits, or contradicts the previous idea.
- Concise wording
- Writing that removes redundant pairs and replaces wordy verb-plus-noun phrases with one precise verb, without losing meaning.
- Conflict of interest
- A situation in which a personal interest could improperly influence an official decision, even if no actual bias has been shown.
- Escalation trigger
- A condition such as safety risk, legal violation, or exceeded authority that requires a decision to be referred to a higher level.
- Urgent-important matrix
- A prioritization tool that ranks tasks by urgency and importance; urgent and important tasks are handled first, unimportant ones are dropped.
- Decision assumption
- A belief accepted as true without confirmation; it should be stated explicitly when information is incomplete.
- Procedural fairness
- A decision process that gives notice, a chance to respond, an unbiased decision-maker, and a reasoned outcome.
- Risk rating
- A score calculated as likelihood multiplied by consequence; higher scores require stronger controls or escalation.
- Decision documentation
- A record of the date, facts considered, options rejected, and reason for the chosen action, supporting accountability and consistency.
- Valid syllogism
- An argument form in which, if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true; validity depends on structure, not factual truth.
- Contrapositive
- The logically equivalent form of 'If P then Q,' namely 'If not Q then not P'; both statements always share the same truth value.
- Sufficient condition
- A condition that guarantees an outcome; if P is sufficient for Q, then whenever P occurs, Q must occur.
- Necessary condition
- A condition that must hold for an outcome to occur, although it may not be enough by itself to produce that outcome.
- Correlation versus causation
- Correlation means two variables move together; causation requires temporal order, a mechanism, and control of confounding variables.
- Assumption negation test
- A reasoning check in which a candidate assumption is negated; if the argument then collapses, the assumption was necessary.
- Percent change formula
- Percent change equals new value minus old value, divided by old value, multiplied by one hundred; a negative result is a decrease.
- Weighted average
- A mean calculated by multiplying each value by its weight, summing those products, and dividing by the sum of the weights.
- Median
- The middle value in a data set after sorting; unlike the mean, it is not strongly affected by extreme outliers.
- Unit rate
- A rate expressed as quantity per one unit of time or another base unit, found by dividing quantity by the base.
- Unit conversion
- A method of changing units by multiplying by a conversion factor arranged so unwanted units cancel and the desired unit remains.
- Truncated axis
- A graph axis that does not start at zero; it can visually exaggerate small differences and must be read with caution.
- Transposition error
- A data-entry mistake in which characters are reversed in order, such as writing 34 as 43 or 'form' as 'from'.
- Look-alike words
- Words with similar spelling but different meanings, such as affect and effect, which must be checked against sentence context.
- Backward proofreading
- Reading a document from the last word to the first; it breaks normal flow and helps reveal spelling errors and omitted words.
- Field completeness check
- A review confirming every required field contains an entry; blanks are exceptions requiring correction, not acceptable defaults.
- Signature verification
- Checking that a signature or initial is present and matches the authorized person, confirming that a record has been approved.
- Cross-field consistency
- A check that names, dates, amounts, and reference numbers agree across all related fields and documents in a record.