Editorial: Teenagers tend to wake up

Answer choices

1. A

   No Impact10% picked this

   Teenagers start releasing melatonin later at night and stop releasing it later in the morning

   This argument is only about teens, their melatonin, their sleepiness, their accidents. Learning anything about young children’s melatonin level is irrelevant to us.

   10%
2. B

   No Impact17% picked this

   Sleepy teenagers are tardy for school more frequently than teenagers who are well rested when

   If the conclusion were purely a recommendation that “we should push back start time”, then this could pile on an additional reason why it might be worth doing (fewer tardy students). But the conclusion is only about whether accidents involving teens would rise or fall, and this answer has nothing to do with that.

   17%
3. C

   No Impact4% picked this

   Teenagers who work at jobs during the day spend more time driving than do teenagers who attend high

   This plan is changing the start time for high school, so it affects teens who attend high school during the day. Teens that don’t go to high school during the day won’t be directly affected by this plan, so making any sort of comparison to them is just as irrelevant as it was to bring up young children in (A).

   4%
4. D

   Weakens, if anything12% picked this

   Many of the car accidents involving teenage drivers in Granville occurred in the evening rather

   Really, this answer is a non-issue. No one is assuming that all accidents involving teens occur in the morning, so learning that “many” occur in the evening really changes nothing that our common sense hadn’t already assumed. But to the extent that this plan is meant to reduce accidents by focusing on morning driving, the more we think that teen accidents occur in the evening, the more we’re weakening the potential of this Plan to impact the root of the problem.

   12%
5. E

   Correct58% picked this

   Car accidents involving teenage drivers rose in the region surrounding Granville during the time they

   Why this is right

   It’s important to remember how bad the other four answers are, because this doesn’t have to do much to still be the answer that strengthens most. This increases the plausibility that the reduction of accidents in Granville was due to something local to Granville. If accidents are going up in surrounding regions, it implicitly rules out the possibility of broader alternative explanations like a pandemic / a weather catastrophe that led to less driving. If this answer is telling us that the thing that caused the decline in Granville was local to Granville, does that prove that it was the changed high school start time? Of course not, but it does add some plausibility to that while diminishing the plausibility of some more regional alternative explanations.

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

   58%