confound

The various studies are mainly observational and could be skewed by confounding factors—people who are healthy for other reasons could use stairs more, for example.

“There’s no sugarcoating this,” Freeman echoed a few weeks later, when another confounding sweep to the Pittsburgh Pirates in early September was followed by another walk-off loss to the Orioles in team’s series-opener in Baltimore.

Set in Maycomb, it sees two siblings, clearly Lee and her older sister Alice, confounded by her sister's black gardener Arthur, who's from the North but has apparently decided to work in the segregationist South.

Winning a championship trophy is, and the sometimes confounding but always contending Dodgers are four victories away.

The waters of the north Pacific have had their warmest summer on record, according to BBC analysis of a mysterious marine heatwave that has confounded climate scientists.