Nuts are high in calories

Answer choices

1. A

   No Distinction7% picked this

   The likelihood of becoming overweight depends not only on how many calories one consumes but also on how rapidly one burns

   This doesn't present any distinction between people who eat nuts and those who don't, so it's functionally useless to us. If they had told us that "people who eat nuts "burn calories faster than those who don't", then we've got ourselves an answer.

   7%
2. B

   No Impact12% picked this

   Due to the fact that nuts are rich in calories, consuming a sufficiently large quantity produces

   This answer just tells us that people who eat nuts love those nuts. It doesn't give us a way to explain why people who eat nuts are less likely to be overweight.

   12%
3. C

   No Impact2% picked this

   If people who avoid a certain kind of food are more likely to be overweight than people who consume that food regularly, then that

   I think this answer choice is lost. It seems to have wandered into a Paradox question, but it belongs on some other task, like Strengthen+Principle. We don't have an argument here. The idea of what foods should / shouldn't be avoided is totally meaningless to this conversation. We're just trying to find an answer that causally explains how people who eat nuts are less likely to be overweight.

   2%
4. D

   Weak Impact4% picked this

   On average, people who never eat nuts consume the same total calories per day as people

   This helps to explain why nut-eaters are not more likely to be overweight. Even though they eat this high-calorie food, they're total calories per day are the same as people who don't eat nuts. But that would make those two groups equally likely to be overweight. We need a way to go beyond that and explain why people who eat nuts are less likely to be overweight.

   4%
5. E

   Correct74% picked this

   Most people who regularly eat nuts eat correspondingly less of foods whose taste, unlike that of nuts,

   Why this is right

   This gives us a potential mechanism for explaining who nut-eaters are less likely to be overweight. Most of them (most = strong, which is what we want on Strengthen / Weaken / Paradox) eat less of foods that stimulate a hunger response. In other words, eating other foods stimulates a hunger response, which presumably leads to more eating, which leads to more calories. Eating nuts is unlike that. Person 1 eats nuts. Person 2 doesn't eat nuts; they eat food X instead. The taste of nuts doesn't stimulate a hunger response. The taste of X does, which means Person 2 gets hungry and decides to also eat more X or to eat food Y. Food Y might also stimulate a hunger response, and so you can create a positive feedback loop where the taste of the last food you ate stimulates hunger for more food. Thus, even if nuts are higher in calories than are foods X or Y, a person eating nuts stops with nuts. Meanwhile, non-nut people get caught in this feedback loop of eating lower-calorie foods that stimulate a response to eat even more foods. So this gives us a potential story for how people who eat nuts, which are high in calories, might still end up consuming fewer calories overall (since nuts don't stimulate a hunger response as other foods do), and thus could be less likely to be overweight than people who don't eat nuts.

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

   74%