After monitoring blood levels of lycopene

Answer choices

1. A

   Correct79% picked this

   Most fruits and vegetables that are rich in lycopene also contain high levels of several other nutrients that are thought likely to

   Why this is right

   Here we get a 3rd Factor Alternate Explanation. The real causal factors are nutrients XYZ. They reduce the risk of stroke. They happen to be found in fruits and veggies that are rich in lycopene. So people who eat these fruits and veggies are getting their risk of stroke reduced by nutrients XYZ. And they're simultaneously ingesting a lot of lycopene. This explains why there ends up being a correlation between lycopene and fewer strokes, but lycopene isn't the causal factor reducing the risk of stroke; nutrients XYZ are.

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

   79%
2. B

   Strengthens2% picked this

   Countries in which people consume substantial quantities of lycopene-rich fruits and vegetables generally have lower rates of

   This provides more data points that fit the author's hypothesis (More Cause, More Effect). She thinks that consuming lycopene causes lower risk of stroke, and this is talking about countries that eat a lot of lycopene and have a lower risk of stroke.

   2%
3. C

   Unclear Impact5% picked this

   Middle-aged people typically have lower lycopene levels than

   Because the answer fails to tell us whether middle-aged people have more / fewer strokes than young adults, we can't really do anything with it. If we made a common sense guess that "the older you are, the higher your risk of stroke", then this would strengthen, because the older middle-aged people have lower lycopene and more strokes, just like the correlation in the argument. Just like (B), this would represent more data points that support the plausibility of the author's conclusion.

   5%
4. D

   No Impact8% picked this

   Study participants with high levels of lycopene consumed, on average, twice the quantity of fruits and vegetables as those

   This is just explaining how they got higher lycopene, and it's probably what we were already assuming. If I tell you that lycopene is found in fruits and veggies and that Group A has more lycopene in their system than Group B does, then you'll probably think, "I guess Group A ate more fruits and veggies." This answer doesn't have anything to do with assessing the connection between lycopene and stroke or with a potential alternate explanation for why lycopene and stroke risk would be correlated.

   8%
5. E

   No Impact5% picked this

   There was wide variation in lycopene levels among

   This is the classic wishy-washy wrong answer we see on Strengthen and Weaken: - things change - levels fluctuate - differences exist It tells us nothing we weren't already assuming. The results of the study are averaging together everyone's different lycopene levels and stroke risks and finding a strong correlation between the two. It doesn't matter that there was a wide variety of data points that went into that average.

   5%