Intelligence has been defined in many different ways including as one's capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, planning, creativity and problem solving. It can be more generally described as the ability to perceive information, and retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context. This definition is one that I found on Wikipedia, and in a sense, I am stealing it. However, ideas are owned by nobody and are constantly recycled and stolen by everybody, yet taking another’s words that explains those same ideas is condemned. In order to “steal” properly, the idea must be revitalized with the intelligence of the individual.

This is my paragraph that gives background information before the thesis. My goal with this paragraph is to demonstrate the importance of the individual's role in using information before talking about intelligence. Based on the comments that I got, while the idea for this paragraph was okay, the implementation was awkward, so I threw out most of the old paragraph and rewrote it so the point gets across clearer.