Logical Reasoning

PT146 · S2 · Q15 Nutritionist: Most fad diets

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Nutritionist: Most fad diets prescribe a single narrow range of nutrients for everyone.

Statements

Most fad diets - narrow range of nutrients. but People: vary widely in terms of what nutrients they need.

(Reconcile what's before/after the pivot ... Infer: most fad diets work work better for some people than for others, since the narrow range of nutrients they prescribe would better match some people's dietary needs than someone else's dietary needs)

Everyone needs fruits and veggies, which help ward off health problems.

(infer: maybe it would be good for most fad diets to include fruits and veggies in their range of nutrients suggested, since that's a type of nutrient that doesn't vary widely from person to person. Everyone benefits from those.)

Goal

Find a safely worded answer, possibly reinforcing the idea that most fad diets are going to work better for some than others, or reinforcing the idea that if you're gonna prescribe a narrow range of nutrients, fruits and veggies would be a good way to go, since everybody needs those.

15.

Which one of the following is most strongly supported by the nutritionist's statements?

  1. Most fad diets require that

    Unsupported: which nutrients are prescribed

    While we have reason to think it would make good sense for most fad diets to require fruits and veggies, we have no evidence that this is what they currently are recommending.

    4% picked this

  2. Fruits and vegetables are the

    Too Strong

    Too Strong: the only Only One Mentioned ≠ Only One Just because "fruits and veggies" are the only type of food mentioned that protects against a wide range of health problems doesn't mean we're allowed to infer that "fruits and veggies" are the only type of food.

    8% picked this

  3. Any two people have different

    Too Strong: all people are unique

    This is enticing people into a mis-read of "dietary needs vary widely from person to person", which does not mean that every person has a unique set of dietary needs, it just means that there's a high variance within the test. If I proctored a practice LSAT for 100 students and said "the scores varied widely from person to person", that wouldn't mean that "any two people had different LSAT scores".

    17% picked this

  4. Correct

    Most fad diets fail to

    Why this is right

    This is derivable from the first two claims. It's a "Reconcile the Pivot" sort of inference, synthesizing the ideas of Most fad diets = narrow range of nutrients People = vary widely in nutrients needed If we said "most fad LSAT programs cater to a very narrow part of the test" and "people vary widely in terms of what part of the test they need help with most", then we could infer that "most fad LSAT programs fail to satisfy the needs some LSAT students". Remember, "some" just means "at least one", so contradicting this claim would mean we think it's possible that "most fad diets successfully satisfy the needs of 100% of people".

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

    68% picked this

  5. There are very few if

    Too Strong: very few, if any

    This is making a strong, out of scope statement. It's saying there are very few nutrients that would be contained in every non-fruit / non-veggie food. I think they're trying to entice people into thinking, "if dietary needs vary widely from person to person, then there must not be many common denominator ingredients." We just don't know. If we supposed there were 100 nutrients out there, and all non-fruit, non-veggie foods have nutrients 1 thru 20, that would invalidate this answer but it would still allow the paragraph to be true. Foods could vary a lot in terms of which of the remaining 80 nutrients they have or don't have, and people could vary a lot in terms of which of those remaining 80 nutrients they need or don't need. In other words, it's possible for there to be many common denominator nutrients, while there is still a lot variety to other nutrients, and perhaps people are relatively similar when it comes to these common denominator nutrients but are more widely divergent when it comes to these more intermittent nutrients.

    3% picked this

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