Safety consultant: Judged by the number

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Stimulus

Safety consultant: Judged by the number of injuries per licensed vehicle, minivans are the safest vehicles on the road. However, in carefully designed crash tests, minivans show no greater ability to protect their occupants than other vehicles of similar size do. Thus, the reason minivans have such a good safety record is vehicles, but rather that they are driven primarily by low-risk drivers.

What this question is testing

Strengthen

Your task

Find the choice that makes the argument's conclusion more likely to be true.

Common trap

Answers that are consistent with the argument but add no real support, or that strengthen a claim the argument doesn't make.

Winning move

Locate the gap between evidence and conclusion, then pick the choice that closes it.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question

21.

Which one of the following, if true, most strengthens the safety

Answer choices

Opposite8% picked this
When choosing what kind of vehicle to drive, low-risk drivers often select a kind that they know to perform
The author thinks that minivans do not perform particularly well in crash tests, but are driven by low-risk drivers. This answer makes it sound like low-risk drivers wouldn't be likely to choose to drive a minivan.
8%
Opposite15% picked this
Judged by the number of accidents per licensed vehicle, minivans are no safer than most other
This undermines the plausibility of the author's hypothesis. Since he is selling the idea that primarily low-risk drivers drive minivans, he would expect that minivans get into fewer accidents than average.
15%
Weak Impact12% picked this
Minivans tend to carry more passengers at any given time than do
This does rule out the alternate explanation that minivans have fewer injuries per vehicle because they have fewer passengers than most vehicles. But since that's a pretty unlikely alternate explanation, ruling it out doesn't have as much impact as (E) does.
12%
No Impact / Opposite4% picked this
In general, the larger a vehicle is, the greater its ability to
In crash tests, we're only comparing minivans to similar sized vehicles. And even the drift of this answer is in the wrong direction, because it sounds like a minivan is inherently safer, if you start saying "the bigger it is, the better it protects".
4%
Correct62% picked this
Minivans generally have worse braking and emergency handling capabilities than other vehicles
Why this is right
This rules out the possibility that minivans have fewer injuries because they avoid accidents due to better safety features (not due to better drivers). It also directly boosts the plausibility of the conclusion, in terms of the idea that minivans are not inherently safer than other vehicles.
Skill tested: Strengthen · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
62%

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