Logical Reasoning

PT120 · S3 · Q21 Clearly, fitness consultants who smoke

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Clearly, fitness consultants who smoke cigarettes cannot help their clients become healthier.

Conclusion (clearly)

Fitness consultants who smoke can't help their clients become healthier.

Evidence

If they don't care about their health, they can't care about their clients' health. If they don't care about their client's health, they can't help their clients become healthier.

Evaluate

On Sufficient Assumption, it's very useful to ask ourselves whether there are any "New Ideas" in the Conclusion (something never mentioned in the Evidence).

"Can't help clients become healthier" is definitely in the evidence (it ends the paragraph).

But we aren't given any facts about "fitness consultants who smoke cigarettes". So "smoke cigarettes" is destined to be in the correct answer. We won't be able to prove the conclusion until we have info about people who smoke.

On Sufficient Assumption, it's also very useful (in most cases) to think of the conclusion as a logic path from the Naming part of the sentence to the Telling part.

Fitness can't consult --------------------------------> help who clients' smokes healthier

This allows us to visualize what parts of that logic path the Evidence has supplied, so we can go shopping in the answers for the missing part of the path. The evidence gave us a conditional chain (if A then B, and if B, then C).

don't don't can't care -----> care -----> help own clients' clients' health health healthier

So the missing part of the logic path is the first link, from the Naming part of the conclusion to the start of this conditional chain that takes us all the way to the Telling part.

Fitness don't consult ------> care who own smokes health

Goal

Naturally, if we're averse to all things conditional, then we just need to hear that switchover from sentence 1 to sentence 2. When sentence 2 starts off like,

We need to be like,

The author is assuming

smokes → don't care about own health

Sufficient Assumption loves to test the contrapositive of our prediction, which would be

do care about ⇢ don't smoke own health

21.

The conclusion follows logically if which one of the following is assumed?

  1. Anyone who does not care

    Trap

    Unrelated to Goal Not a New Idea Since this doesn't contain any information about "smoking cigarettes" it's functionally useless to us. Until we hear something about people who smoke, we have no chance of mathematically proving something about "people who smoke". Could we apply this answer choice's rule to fitness consultants who smoke? Are they people who "don't care for their own health"? We don't know. That's the whole problem. We don't know anything about fitness consultants who smoke because there was no evidence about them. This answer is announcing the inference that you get by combining the two conditional premises. We already "have" this idea, because if they tell us "if A then B, and if B then C", we already "know" that "if A then C". A Sufficient Assumption answer could never be correct if it just repeats something we already know.

    22% picked this

  2. Anyone who cares about the

    Unrelated to Goal

    Since this doesn't contain any information about "smoking cigarettes" it's functionally useless to us. Could we apply this answer choice's rule to fitness consultants who smoke? Are they people who "do care for their own health"? We don't know. That's the whole problem. We don't know anything about fitness consultants who smoke because there was no evidence about them.

    1% picked this

  3. Anyone who does not care

    Unrelated to Goal

    Since this doesn't contain any information about "smoking cigarettes" it's functionally useless to us. Could we apply this answer choice's rule to fitness consultants who smoke? Are they people who "do not care for their own health"? We don't know. That's the whole problem. We don't know anything about fitness consultants who smoke because there was no evidence about them.

    2% picked this

  4. Anyone who does not smoke

    Bad Trigger Match

    This is finally an answer about "smoking". It says don't smoke → care about others' health Could we apply this rule to fitness consultants who smoke? No, because it's a rule about people who don't smoke.

    3% picked this

  5. Correct

    Anyone who cares about his

    Why this is right

    This is the contrapositive we predicted. care about own health → doesn't smoke When we contrapose this answer it will look more like the gap we wanted: does smoke ⇢ doesn't care own health Can we apply this rule to fitness consultants who smoke cigarettes? Yes, finally! Since they smoke, this rule tells us that they don't care about their own health. The premises then say that since they don't care about their own health, they can't care for their clients' health, and thus they can't help their clients become healthier. We derived the conclusion! Fitness consultants who smoke can't help their clients become healthier.

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

    71% picked this

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