well unfortunately this will NOt do what you originally asked in the OP...
1. dog apple tim
2. cat banana joe
3. horse orange john
4. elephant grape will
5. mouse orange mike
6. lion pear brian
NONE of these rows would be removed... because the ENTIRE ROW has to be identical for the removal to take place. Thus a DUPLICATE RECORD, not just a DUPLICATE VALUE in a RECORD FIELD.
which is exactly what i said in my last post.
Yeah, the article is talking about actually removing duplicate records from a table. If you just want your query to leave out duplicate records, you use the word DISTINCT. But as SAO pointed out, that will have no effect on your table because the list you provided doesn't contain any duplicate records.
Putting aside any of the details about how to accomplish what you are asking, the real question is still WHY?
Like I said, if you don't care about horse, john, mouse, and mike, then why are you putting those fields in your query.
The only thing I can think of is that maybe what you really want is just a list of all the fruits, without duplicates. If this is the case, you can use DISTINCT, but you need to only include the column with the fruits in your query, and not the columns with the names and animals.
In other words, if you do a
SELECT DISTINCT [Fruit] FROM WhateverTable, then the two records with "Orange" do become duplicate records and DISTINCT will eliminate the duplicates.
But if you do a
SELECT DISTINCT * FROM WhateverTable, then the two records with "Orange" are NOT duplicates and won't be removed by DISTINCT.