Consumer advocate: The introduction of a new drug into the marketplace should be contingent upon our having a good understanding of its social impact. However, the social impact of the newly marketed antihistamine is far from clear. It is obvious, then, that there should be a general reduction in the pace of bringing to the marketplace new drugs that are now being tested.Which one of the following, if true, most strengthens the argument?
Answer(s): A
The consumer advocate says that we need to understand a product's social impact before it's marketed, but the new antihistamine is being marketed now even though its impact isn't well understood. The consumer advocate thinks that it's therefore obvious that we need to slow down the process of bringing products to the marketplace. But hold on: Is the new antihistamine representative of products in general, or is it an exception? If it's an exception, then we can't learn much from considering it. However, if option [The social impact of the new antihistamine is...] is true, and the newest drugs under consideration are even worse understood, then we'd be able to conclude that most drugs under consideration aren't well understood. In that case, the danger of releasing drugs that aren't well understood seems greater, which strengthens the advocate's claim.
Tina: For centuries oceans and human eccentricity have been linked in the literary and artistic imagination. Such linkage is probably due to the European Renaissance practice of using ships as asylums for the socially undesirable.Sergio: No. Oceans have always been viewed as mysterious and unpredictable -- qualities that people have invariably associated with eccentricity.Tina's and Sergio's statements lend the most support to the claim that they disagree about which one of the following statements?
Answer(s): E
What's the point at issue between Tina and Sergio? Tina senses a literary and artistic link between oceans and eccentricity, and proposes that the Renaissance-era "Ship of Fools" practice is probably the cause. Nope, says Sergio: From time immemorial, the oceans have been perceived as mysterious and unpredictable, and that explains their association with eccentricity. So both accept the connection between oceans and eccentricity, but Tina sees the cause of the link in how a particular culture at a particular timeused the ocean, while to Sergio it's the nature of the ocean itself that's responsible. Note the extreme words that Sergio employs: "always" and "invariably." These words leave little doubt that his time frame for the phenomenon stretches far beyond Tina's explanation, and option [The linkage between oceans and...] captures the dispute perfectly: Tina believes the linkage dates from the European Renaissance (that's the point in time at which she places its cause), while Sergio believes it goes back much further than that.
In a recent study, a group of subjects had their normal daily caloric intake increased by 25 percent. This increase was entirely in the form of alcohol. Another group of similar subjects had alcohol replace nonalcoholic sources of 25 percent of their normal daily caloric intake. All subjects gained body fat over the course of the study, and the amount of body fat gained was the same for both groups.Which one of the following is most strongly supported by the information above?
Answer(s): D
This is an Inference question. Remember to stick close to the passage. In this passage the crucial thing to note is that one group increased its caloric intake by 25%, all of it alcohol. The other groupreplaced25% of its caloric intake with alcohol. And yet both groups gained equivalent amounts of body fat. Based on this information, you can infer that body fat gain is not dependent solely on the number of calories one consumes. If that were the only factor affecting body fat gain, then we would expect the two groups to have gained different amounts of body fat, since they had different caloric intakes. But they were equivalent, so we can infer that option [Body fat gain is not dependent solely...] on is correct.
When investigators discovered that the director of a local charity had repeatedly overstated the number of people his charity had helped, the director accepted responsibility for the deception. However, the investigators claimed that journalists were as much to blame as the director was for inflating the charity's reputation, since they had naively accepted what the director told them, and simply reported as fact the numbers he gave them.Which one of the following principles, if valid, most helps to justify the investigators' claim?
Answer(s): C
The director of the charity repeatedly lied about the number of people helped by the charity, but when confronted by the investigators, accepted responsibility for the deception. But the investigators oddly blame the journalists as much as the director for misrepresenting the charity's beneficence, because they unquestioningly printed the numbers they were told.The journalists didn't fabricate the story -- they merely printed the numbers they were given. It seems that the investigators believe that printing erroneous information without checking it is on a par with making up that info in the first place. The principle in option [Anyone who presents as factual a story that...] embodies that notion, and thus supports the investigators' claim. The description in the first part of the choice clearly applies to the journalists; the phrase "no less responsible" in the middle matches up perfectly with "as much to blame as..."; and "than anyone else" clearly includes the director. Option [Anyone who presents as factual a story that...] hits on all cylinders, while the other choices stray from or distort the scope of the situation.
Telephone companies are promoting "voice mail" as an alternative to the answering machine. By recording messages from callers when a subscriber does not have access to his or her telephone, voice mail provides a service similar to that of an answering machine. The companies promoting this service argue that it will soon make answering machines obsolete, since it is much more convenient, more flexible, and less expensive than an answering machine.Which one of the following, if true, most calls into question the argument made by the companies promoting voice mail?
Certainly the companies promoting voice mail have a vested interest in making it sound as good as possible.Their pitch includes greater convenience, more flexibility, and lower cost than the garden-variety answering machine. One need not jump through hoops to weaken an argument like this--pointing out a factor that the voice mail folks overlook (conveniently, no doubt) that favors the answering machine over voice mail would be enough. The factor in option [Answering machines enable the customer to...] serves perfectly well. A huge benefit of answering machines (as we suspect most of us have discovered by now) is the ability they afford us to "screen" our calls. They weren't invented for that purpose, but people certainly figured out pretty quickly how to use them that way. Option [Answering machines enable the customer to...] therefore cites a function of answering machines that voice mail can't match, and to the extent that that function is desirable (which isn't so hard to imagine), we'd be less likely to believe the prediction that voice mail will render the answering machine obsolete.
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