The ________________ statement causes a loop to terminate immediately.

Provide a step-by-step example. Answer: The purpose of the "break" statement is to immediately terminate a loop (such as for, while, or any other type of loop) before its natural termination. It helps in controlling the flow of the program by exiting the loop as soon as a specific condition is met. When the break statement is encountered inside the loop, the loop terminates immediately, and the program control resumes at the next statement following the loop. For example, consider a situation where we want to find the first even number in a list of integers, and stop the loop as soon as it is found. Here's how to use a for loop with a break statement: 1. Create a list of integers: `numbers = [1, 3, 5, 2, 4, 6]` 2. Initialize a variable to store the first even number: `first_even = None` 3. Use a for loop to iterate through the list: `for num in numbers:` 4. Inside the loop, check if the current number is even: `if num % 2 == 0:` 5. If it is even, store it in the `first_even` variable and exit the loop: ``` first_even = num break ``` 6. Print out the first even number found: `print("First even number:", first_even)` In this example, the loop would terminate at number 2 (the first even number found) and print "First even number: 2". Without the break statement, the loop would continue to iterate through the entire list unnecessarily.