How does a consumer know which offset to start from?

A consumer's starting offset is determined by: 1) Committed offset: if the consumer group has a committed offset for that partition, it continues from there. 2) auto.offset.reset: if no committed offset exists (new group or expired), this setting determines the start position — earliest (offset 0) or latest (current end). 3) Seek: the consumer can programmatically call consumer.seek(partition, offset) to start from any specific offset, overriding both committed offsets and auto.offset.reset.

Expected key concepts: committed offset, auto.offset.reset, earliest, latest, seek, new group, expired, consumer.seek, specific offset