Poor nutrition is at the

Answer choices

1. A

   No Impact0% picked this

   Some of the violent inmates who took part in the experiment had committed a large

   This is incredibly weak, ("Some" = at least one), so it's unlikely to ever be a correct answer on Strengthen, Weaken, Paradox, or Sufficient Assumption. Being told that at least one of the inmates committed a bunch of violent crimes does nothing to help us assess the results of this experiment or figure out whether poor nutrition is a causal factor in violent crime. By contrast, an answer like "The violent inmates who committed the largest number of violent crimes were the ones with the poorest nutrition before they entered the experiment" would strengthen.

   0%
2. B

   No Impact0% picked this

   Dietary changes are easier and cheaper to implement than any other type of reform program in

   We don't care how cheap or easy a dietary change is. We're not evaluating whether or not to launch a "Better Nutrition for Prisoners" initiative. We're just analyzing whether there's any causal impact of changing prisoners' diet. Knowing that it's cheap / easy to do X doesn't tell us anything about what effect X does or doesn't have.

   0%
3. C

   Weak Impact14% picked this

   Many young offenders have reported that they had consumed a low-nutrient food sometime in the days before they

   On a formal level this adds some plausibility to the author's explanation, because it pairs up the supposed Cause (low-nutrient foods) with the supposed Effect (violent behavior). But it is a grain of sand's worth of strengthening power. To say "many young offenders had a low-nutrient food sometime in the days before they committed a violent crime" is akin to saying, "At least five of these young offenders ate a Kit-Kat within five days of committing a violent crime." Would you take from that statement that eating the Kit-Kat was a causal factor in the violent crime? Of course not.

   14%
4. D

   Weak Impact11% picked this

   A further study investigated young offenders who chose a high-nutrient diet on their own and found that many

   On a formal level this adds some plausibility to the author's explanation, because it pairs up No Cause (high nutrition diet) with No Effect (nonviolent behavior). But again, the strength of language is very lacking. In a study, we looked at young offenders who chose a high-nutrient diet and found that many of them were nonviolent. What percent of the group was nonviolent? That would be more informative. If there were 200 young offenders who eat high-nutrient diets and we found that 20 of them were nonviolent, that would allow us to say "Many of them are nonviolent!" But that's only 10% of the group. That would still mean 90% of the young offenders eating a high-nutrient diet were violent. That would badly hurt the argument. Since many is such a wishy-washy quantity with a very low minimum, this answer doesn't tell us whether most of the high-nutrition offenders are violent or nonviolent, so it really doesn't move the needle in either direction.

   11%
5. E

   Correct74% picked this

   The violent inmates in the institution who were not placed on a high-nutrient diet did not show

   Why this is right

   This is the classic "No Cause, No Effect" plausibility-strengthener. The author thinks that the higher nutrition diet in the experiment is what caused the improvement in behavior. This answer pairs up "people not on the diet" with "not improved behavior". In the scientific method, this is known as The Control Group. If you want to check whether the high-nutrition diet is really a causal difference-maker, then you have some of the violent inmates go on the diet and other violent inmates stay on their normal low-nutrition diets. If the behavior of the high-nutrition prisoners gets better (which we were told in the argument) and the behavior of the low-nutrition prisoners stays the same (which we are being told in this answer), then it looks like that new high-nutrition diet really was a causal difference-maker.

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

   74%