why is my default ionic app not getting default styling?

I am learning Ionic, and I am creating a test project and playing around. I have noticed a few things being different from the examples they show in their docs. For example:

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This is a small screenshot of how some elements are displayed. For example the Card component has a very strange shadow. Whereas in the ionic docs, the example shows a much softer shadow:
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why is it that i am not getting the same styling?