#5 - Journalist: A recent study showed that people who drink

[ashpine17]

I guess I assumed that exercise was good for preventing arthritis. Is that an incorrect presumption to have going into this answer choice?

[Robert Carroll]

ashpine,

The only kind of assumptions permitted on the test are common sense ones. I don't see how it's commonsensical to think that exercise prevents, causes, exacerbates, or does anything at all to arthritis. So that seems to be the problem you had with answer choice (A).

Robert Carroll

[ashpine17]

I feel that anticipating the correct answer for this question is nearly impossible...and when I encountered A I thought the exercise was potentially an alternative explanation as to why there is this discrepancy in development of arthritis between the two groups, aka exercise cause arthritis. Why is that not the case?

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi ash,

We can have a simple answer here. Answer choice (A) has an inconclusive impact on the argument. We have no idea how exercise would impact arthritis rates. Maybe it makes the rates higher. Maybe it makes them lower. Maybe they are the same as non-exercisers. We just don't know from the stimulus. Since we don't know how it impacts the connective tissue disease, we can't learn anything about the validity of the conclusion based on the answer to a question that has an indeterminate impact.

[lsat4ever]

I eliminated AC C because of "and the other stimulants." Can anyone explain why having this would not affect the correctness of AC C? I think mentioning "and the other stimulant" just adds additional confounding variables to the argument.

Thanks!

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi lsat4ever,

Evaluate questions can have broader answer choices. Remember that these are a combination of 2nd family and 3rd family questions, so we are using the information in the answer choice to either help or hurt the stimulus. Here, as long as answer choice (C) included caffeine, it would help us evaluate the stimulus. If we answer "yes" to answer choice (C), we weaken the causal relationship in the stimulus by suggesting that it's not decaf that's causing damage, but caffeine that's protecting against damage. If we answer "no" to answer choice (C) we strengthen the stimulus by eliminating a potential alternate cause. The "or other stimulants" language here doesn't impact the fact if the fact is true of caffeine it hurts the argument and if it's false it helps the argument.

Hope that helps!