Terry,
Some factors to consider when choosing the metering mode to use:
What colour, or more specifically, tone, is the subject?
What tone are the surroundings?
What are the lighting conditions?
How light/dark are the ambient lighting conditions?
Are you using flash?
What balance between flash and ambient light do you want to achieve?
Do you understand how the meter on your camera is calibrated, and how the above factors will affect its suggested reading?
From the above, I hope you can see that there is no hard and fast answer to your question.
Above everything else, you must learn and understand how your camera's light meter is setup to treat every subject as though it is 18% grey. If the whole of the view through the viewfinder has this tone, then the meter will get its exposure right, regardless of the metering mode used. If the tone is darker than this, it will tend to over expose, if it is lighter than this it will tend to under expose.
The camera does not know if your subject is a very dark subject with a lot of light falling on it, or if it is a very pale subject with not a lot of light falling on it, it has to make an assumption about the tone of the subject (18% grey) and set the exposure accordingly.
Hope this helps.
Duncan
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