Recent studies have demonstrated that smokers

Answer choices

1. A

   Correct55% picked this

   smokers who drink caffeinated beverages are less likely to develop heart disease than are smokers who do

   Why this is right

   This controls for smoking, and shows a negative correlation between drinking caff beverages and developing heart disease. This directly undermines the truth of the conclusion.

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

   55%
2. B

   Out Of Scope Comparison: "most important"7% picked this

   something else, such as dietary fat intake, may be a more important factor in the development of heart disease than are the

   The argument isn’t trying to assess which factor is most important in the development of heart disease. In fact, the author isn’t even concerned with causality, as her conclusion mentions. She’s only trying to establish a statistical truism: people who drink caffeinated beverages are more likely to develop heart disease.

   7%
3. C

   Opposite4% picked this

   drinking caffeinated beverages is more strongly correlated with the development of heart disease

   This strengthens the argument, by basically lending support to the truth of the conclusion that drinking caffeinated beverages is positively correlated with heart disease.

   4%
4. D

   Too Weak / Unclear Impact10% picked this

   it is only among people who have a hereditary predisposition to heart disease that caffeine consumption is positively correlated with

   If most of the population has no correlation between A and B, but specific subset of the population does have a positive correlation between A and B, then when you average the whole population, there will still be a positive correlation between A and B. So this strengthens the conclusion. People may feel like it’s an objection, because it’s saying, “The conclusion is true, but only because it’s true for a subsection of the population”. That still mildly strengthens the argument, even more so if that subset (people with a hereditary predisposition to heart disease) is a large segment of the population, which it probably is. It will be watered down by the segment of the population for whom there is no correlation, but there will still be some skewing of the data towards a correlation. Say you had four buckets of Skittles. The five flavors are evenly distributed, so about 20% of the Skittles in each bucket are red. In a fifth bucket, you have like 90% red Skittles, 10% an even mix of the rest. If you combine those five buckets into one huge pool, the % of Skittles that are red will be higher than the normal 20% rate. It won't be anywhere near 90%, but it will still be elevated. There will still be a correlation of red appearing in the population. Similarly, the people with hereditary disease are the bucket of red skittles. A ton of them have a correlation between caffeine and heart disease, and when you combine these hereditary disease people with the rest of the general population (who have no correlation between caffeine and heart disease), you still end up with some statistical lumpiness that makes caffeine drinkers more likely to have heart disease than non-caffeine drinkers.

   10%
5. E

   Famous Flaw: Correlation vs. Causality24% picked this

   there is a common cause of both the development of heart disease and behaviors such as drinking

   This argument isn’t causal, so it’s pretty out of scope what causes what. LSAT definitely primed us for this type of answer, but the author specifically says in her Conclusion that she is not assuming a causal connection between caffeine and heart disease. She’s only concluding a statistical correlation. If there’s a common cause underlying both drinking caff beverages and developing heart disease, then that strengthens the author’s conclusion that those two things will have a positive correlation.

   24%