included

All subclasses of ActiveRecord::Base have two named_scopes:

• all, which is similar to a find(:all) query, and
• scoped, which allows for the creation of anonymous scopes, on the fly: Shirt.scoped(:conditions => {:color => 'red'}).scoped(:include => :washing_instructions)

These anonymous scopes tend to be useful when procedurally generating complex queries, where passing intermediate values (scopes) around as first-class objects is convenient.