Logical Reasoning

PT105 · S2 · Q9 Someone who gets sick from eating

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Someone who gets sick from eating a meal will often develop a strong distaste for the one food in the meal that had the most distinctive flavor, whether or not that food caused the sickness.

Curious Fact

Why are children especially to develop strong aversions to some foods?

Author's Explanation

Because if you get sick from a meal, you'll usually develop a strong distaste for the one food in the meal that had the most distinctive flavor.

Evaluate

This isn't really an argument, so we're not parsing the paragraph into Conclusion / Premise. We just need to justify why the first sentence would be especially likely to impact children.

Goal

Seems like we need to hear that children are more likely to get sick from eating a meal, or that children are more likely than adults to find that one food in the meal has the most distinctive flavor (or both).

Which one of the following, if true, provides the strongest support for the explanation?

Children are more likely than
Opposite
In order for this causal mechanism to happen, the child has to get sick from the food AND think that one of the foods had a really distinctive flavor (and thus develop a food aversion to that flavor). If children's meals are more devoid of distinctive flavors, that goes the opposite of what we want.
5% picked this
Children are less likely than
Weakens, if anything
In this causal story that's supposed to affect children more than adults, people develop an aversion to a flavor because they got sick from a meal, that meal had this flavor in it, and they see a connection between their sick health and the distinctive flavor of the food they ate. This answer is saying children are less likely to see a connection.
5% picked this
Correct
Children tend to have more
Why this is right
This accomplishes one of the two things we were looking for. The causal mechanism described is get sick from food + ? aversion to flavor X X most distinctive flavor If kids get sick from food more often than adults do, then this causal explanation will apply more frequently to kids, so we're helping to justify why children are especially likely to develop food aversions.
Skill tested: Strengthen · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
81% picked this
Children typically recover more slowly
Out of Scope: recover
This is only about whether or not they get sick and develop an eventual aversion, not how long it takes to recover from the sickness.
3% picked this
Children are more likely than
Out of Scope: refuse to eat
If a child refuses to eat a food, then there's no way for this causal sequence to even play out. Once a child (or adult) has a food aversion, they will probably refuse to eat that food, but that food is no longer unfamiliar. This answer is talking about whether they're willing to try a food they've never tried before, so it's really unrelated to the sequence of eating food, getting sick, and then avoiding the strongest flavor that was in that meal.
6% picked this

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