Logical Reasoning

PT154 · S1 · Q24 Nuts are high in calories

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Nuts are high in calories.

Given that ...

Nuts are high in calories, and that the more calories you consume, the more likely you become overweight.

How is it that ...

People who regularly eat nuts are less likely to be overweight than people who never eat nuts.

Evaluate / Goal

Since these nut-eaters have a high calorie habit, which skews towards being overweight, we need to know something else about nut-eaters that skews towards not being overweight (maybe they exercise more / maybe they have higher metabolisms / maybe they eat less of other high-calorie foods like desserts).

Look for a difference between nut-eaters and nut-avoiders that relates to weight gain / weight loss / burning calories.

24.

Which one of the following, if true, would most help to resolve the apparent discrepancy described above?

  1. The likelihood of becoming overweight

    No Distinction

    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% picked this

  2. Due to the fact that

    No Impact

    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.

    11% picked this

  3. If people who avoid a

    No Impact

    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.

    1% picked this

  4. On average, people who never

    Weak Impact

    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.

    3% picked this

  5. Correct

    Most people who regularly eat

    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.

    78% picked this

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