___ shows temperatures as gradients. Hotter temperatures are brighter and cooler temperatures are darker.

• A. A temperature gun
• B. Thermal imaging
• C. Infrared imaging
• D. A specific software program

Answer: (C)

Showing temperatures as a gradient with hotter areas brighter and cooler areas darker is how infrared imaging works. It detects infrared radiation emitted by objects and converts it into an image where brightness (or color) encodes temperature, making heat patterns easy to read at a glance. Hotter spots emit more infrared energy, so they appear brighter; cooler spots emit less, so they look darker. This contrasts with a single-spot tool that only gives one temperature reading, not a full heat map, and with a software program alone, which wouldn’t produce the image without the imaging hardware. Infrared imaging is the method that inherently visualizes temperature variations across a scene as a brightness gradient.