The use of automobile safety seats

Answer choices

1. A

   No Impact2% picked this

   Some of the automobile safety seats purchased for children under 4 continue to be used after the child

   We're trying to explain some phenomenon involving children under 4. If there are kids 5 and over using carseats, god bless them, but they have nothing to do with this conversation.

   2%
2. B

   Correct63% picked this

   The proportion of serious automobile accidents involving child passengers has remained constant over the

   Why this is right

   This is strengthening by ruling out an alternate explanation. It's possible that child fatalities haven't gone up as much as expected because kids just aren't riding in cars as much as they were 8 years ago. This answer rules out that alternate explanation, by saying, "Nope, kids are involved in the same slice of serious accidents now as they were 8 years ago." Sameness usually strengthens in causal arguments, because you're "controlling" for some other potentially causal variable.

   Skill tested: Strengthen · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

   63%
3. C

   No Impact21% picked this

   Children are taking more trips in cars today than they were 8 years ago, but the average total time they spend

   This has nothing to do with carseats, so it's not making it more plausible that carseats are saving children. And it doesn't deal with any alternate explanation for why there's a lower rate of child auto fatalities than we'd expect. Since total time spent in cars is the main factor relating to your risk of getting into an accident, and since that hasn't changed, this would strengthen the argument if anything. "It must be the carseats. After all, they're spending as much time in cars as they were 8 years ago, and yet they're not dying in accidents as much as the old rate."

   21%
4. D

   Weaker Impact5% picked this

   The sharpest increase in the use of automobile safety seats over the past 8 years has been for children

   We're trying to explain a statistic about children under 4 (3 or younger). This answer is about kids over 2 (3 and older). There is one overlapping age there, 3 years old, but it's not clear from this answer whether there's been an increase in the use of car seats for 3 year olds. If use of car seats among 3 years olds were the same that use of car seats among 3 The fact that there's been in change in children "over 2" doesn't mean it applies uniformly to each age over 2. I could say "The sharpest increase in the use of TikTok over the past 4 years has been in people under the age of 80", but that doesn't mean that 79 year olds have had a sharp increase in using TikTok. It just means there's been a bigger increase among 1-79 year olds than among 80-120 year olds.

   5%
5. E

   Opposite Impact9% picked this

   The number of fatalities among adults involved in automobile accidents rose by 10 percent over

   This suggests that there's some alternate explanation for the lower than expected fatality rates, because it also applies to adults, who obviously are not being saved by riding in car seats. This is basically a classic Effect w/o Cause plausibility weakener.

   9%