PT140 · S1 · Q15 Greatly exceeding the recommended

Does this paragraph tell us whether less than 50% of people are aware of the recommended daily intake of vitamins A and D? No. We know that many people are unaware of what constitutes a standard serving. But we don't know what people's awareness level is of the recommended daily intake of these vitamins.

We don't have any information relating to what people believe about consuming more than the recommended daily intake. The passage isn't saying they consume two to three times the standard serving because they believe that this would be healthy. It's saying that they consume that much because they don't realize that a standard serving is actually only about 1/2 or 1/3 as much as they're estimating it is.

There's nothing in this paragraph that allows us to talk about more than 50% of people. We only hear that "many people" overestimate a standard serving. There also isn't any "should", although Most Supported questions will sometimes go from saying something is toxic / dangerous to saying, in a correct answer, that we should not do that. This answer is appealing on a common sense level, because we might think, "People eating vitamin-fortified foods are already screwing up by exceeding the recommended daily intake. They shouldn't make the situation even worse by taking vitamin supplements on top of that." But we don't know that most (more than 50%) of people who eat vitamin-fortified foods are already screwing up by eating more than the recommended daily intake. We only know that's true for many people (at least 10 ppl). Also, even for these many people, it's extreme to say they shouldn't take any vitamin supplements, since we're only worried about them piling on to their excess of vitamin A and D. We don't have any problem with them taking Vitamin C or E supplements, if those vitamins weren't in their vitamin-fortified food in the first place.

It might be natural to derive a big inference from this paragraph like, "Oh, no, people who are eating 2-3x as much cereal as they're supposed to are overeating vitamins to toxic levels" and then think, "Wow, someone should tell cereal manufacturers about this. They must be unaware." But that is way too much speculation on our part. These Inference questions are about finding the most derivable answer choice. The claim that could best be proven in court, based only on the evidence in the paragraph (+ our common sense). Manufacturers could be aware of this phenomenon; it doesn't offend common sense. After all, glue manufacturers can be aware that some people huff glue. They can put on their products warnings like, "Don't huff this", but they're still going to put out their product and let people take personal responsibility for any abuse or misuse of the product.