#13 - Heart attacks are most likely to occur on Mondays

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Resolve the Paradox. The correct answer choice is (A)

The stimulus contains a fact set. Heart attacks are most likely to occur on Mondays, a coincidence
that is usually explained by the fact that people feel more stress on the first day of the workweek.
Surprisingly, even unemployed retired people continue experiencing the same elevated risk of having
a heart attack on Mondays. The correct answer choice must explain why this is so.

Note that the stimulus does not contain a true paradox, just an odd situation that is presented without
explanation. The correct answer must explain how the situation came into being while allowing
both sides of the situation to be factually correct. It would be a mistake, for instance, to question the
commonly accepted explanation that people feel more stress on Mondays than on other days. As
in all Resolve questions, since you are not seeking to disprove one side of the situation, look for an
answer choice that contains a possible cause of the situation.

Answer choice (A): This is the correct answer choice. If retired people continue to associate
Mondays with work, and therefore begin large projects on Mondays, they would continue
experiencing an increased likelihood of having a heart attack on that day.

Answer choice (B): At first glance, this may seem like an attractive answer. After all, if many retired
people take up part-time jobs after they retire, it is logical to presume that Mondays will continue to
be particularly stressful. However, your job is to explain why unemployed retirees are more likely to
have heart attacks on Mondays, not why employed retirees are. Since retirees who are employed parttime
are not unemployed, this answer choice cannot resolve the paradox described in the stimulus.

Answer choice (C): If people seldom change their dietary habits after retirement, this might explain
why their risk of having heart attacks does not change when they retire. However, this would not
explain why retirees continue experiencing the same elevated risk on a specific day of the workweek.

Answer choice (D): The fact that stress is the major factor influencing the risk of heart attack only
explains why heart attacks are most likely to occur on Mondays. This is a classic incorrect answer
to a Resolve question, explaining only one side of the situation. It is still unclear, however, why
unemployed retirees continue experiencing an elevated risk of having heart attacks on the first day of
the workweek, given that they are no longer working and therefore not experiencing a high level of
stress on that day.

Answer choice (E): The relative risk of having a heart attack between unemployed retirees and
people who have jobs is entirely irrelevant and does not explain the paradox described in the
stimulus.

[PresidentLSAT]

Ppl feel stress on Mondays is a fact, but it seems like a bit of a leap to assume large projects contribute to stress for retirees and even working ppl. What if ppl feel stressed on Mondays because it starts a streak of back-to-back consecutive work days? What if it has to do with commuting stress which, in this case, won't apply to retirees? 'A' requires the assumption that large projects are in fact stressful. Anything I'm missing here?

[Jeff Wren]

Hi PresidentLSAT,

This question is what we classify as a Resolve the Paradox question. For these questions, you are given a paradox, or at least a pair of odd facts, in the stimulus. Your job is to find an answer choice that allows both facts to be true and to explain how they could both exist at the same time.

In this stimulus, the first fact that we are given is that heart attacks are most likely to occur on Mondays and that the accepted explanation for this is that Monday is the first day of the workweek and people (who work) feel more stress on Mondays. For the purposes of this question type, we are not disputing this statement. Sure, in the real world there may be other causes of work stress, such as a long commute in heavy traffic, although this wouldn't explain why there would be more stress on Mondays (unless the traffic was much worse on Mondays, which would be odd.)

The second fact that we are given is that unemployed retired people are also more likely to have heart attacks on Mondays. This is puzzling because if the reason that workers have more heart attacks on Mondays is the stress of the workweek, this shouldn't apply to unemployed retired people who no longer have that stress.

It's this second fact that we really need to explain because it's the one that doesn't seem to make any sense. What we need in our answer is an explanation for why these unemployed retired people are having more heart attacks on Mondays. A good prephrase might be "There is something else stressful on Mondays for these unemployed retired people."

Answer A, if true (notice that the question tells you to accept each answer as true), provides a possible explanation for why these unemployed retired people may also be feeling more stress, and therefore having more heart attacks, on Mondays. While it is true that Answer A assumes that large projects can be stressful (at least for some people), that is not an unreasonable assumption depending on the large project.

The key thing to solving this question is that we need a source of stress (or other cause of heart attacks) that would apply to these unemployed retired people and be specific to Mondays. Only answer A provides both of these.