while hiking, you stumble upon an outcrop of rock. being a good geologist, you pull your trusty field notebook from your vest and get to work making a field sketch (pictured above). using the principles of relative dating, you know that the diorite was the first rock formed, then the conglomerate and finally the shale were deposited on top. while looking closely at the outcrop you find some nice fossils! you find a piece of bone in the conglomerate, and several clams in the shale. these rocks suggest that conditions changed from [ select ] , such as you might expect during sea level rise. your working hypothesis is that this outcrop was formed on the edge of an ancient mountain range. rivers drained from the mountains to a nearby sea, depositing a coarse conglomerate on the older diorite. as sea levels rise, the rivers become submerged, and shales and marine organisms are deposited on top. to test your hypothesis, you will need to know when these rocks are from. so, you take some samples back to the lab to measure ages with radioactive isotopes. before you get to work, you need to ask yourself a few questions: what relative dating principle can be used to determine the age of deposition of the conglomerate from the absolute age given by the fossil bone? [ select ] how should you interpret the date given by the diorite? [ select ] after toiling in the lab to crush the rocks, dissolve them in beakers, and finally put them through a mass spectrometer, you measure the parent-daughter isotope ratios of each of your samples. you write the resulting ages on your field sketch. now that have both stratigraphy and absolute dates, you are finally able to apply your geological knowledge and scientific reasoning to test your hypothesis. using these tools, answer the following questions: at what age was the shale deposited? [ select ] how much time is missing between the formation of the diorite and the deposition of the conglomerate? [ select ] what can you infer from the the age of the conglomerate rock sample [ select ] the shale rock sample is dated to be much younger than the diorite, which indicates that [ select ] . do the absolute dates confirm or contradict your hypothesis?