#4 - Nutritionists have recommended that people eat more

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Weaken-#%. The correct answer choice is (E)

This stimulus consists entirely of information, but you can draw a conclusion. Since nutritionists recommend that people eat more fiber, and the fiber-supplement pill advertisements focus on the pill's fiber content, you can conclude that the advertisement is meant to convince people that the pill is a good way to get fiber.

The question stem asks you to make the advertisement misleading. Essentially, you must weaken the idea that the advertisement is legitimate. You should focus on the "44 percent." Even though a significant portion of the pill is made of fiber, the pill itself could be very small. If the pill is too small, it might not be a very good way to get fiber. That is a "% vs. #" concept, because you are required to realize that if the pill is too small-- a numbers concept--, the percentage of fiber it contains might mean nothing.

Also, some people will incorrectly interpret the advertisement to mean that the pill provides 44% of daily fiber requirements. Since the advertisement could have made the issue a bit clearer, it is quite possible that the advertisement was intended to trick people who are not good at reading sentences for their actual mathematical meanings.

Answer choice (A): The issue is whether this supplement is good, not whether others are better.

Answer choice (B): We are not interested in the nutritionists' reasoning behind why fiber is beneficial; we are concerned with whether this pill provides significant fiber.

Answer choice (C): It is unreasonable to believe that fiber could be addictive in the same manner that painkillers or sleeping pills are, so this choice is without relevance. Furthermore, the issue is whether people will get enough fiber, not whether they will get too much.

Answer choice (D): The recommended dosage proves nothing immediately about whether the pills contribute a significant supplement, so this choice is irrelevant, and incorrect. If the recommended dosage was unreasonably high, we might be getting closer to suggesting that it would be overly inconvenient or expensive to use the pills. 3 pills is well within normalcy.

Answer choice (E): This is the correct answer choice. These numbers mean that the pills contain 1.1% to 1.67% of the recommended daily intake of fiber. That makes it highly likely that the pills are not an effective supplement, because quite a number of pills would be required per day if a person's diet leaves out even 10% or 15% of required fiber. If a person wanted to get all his fiber from these pills, he'd have to consume 60 to 90 pills. Ouch!

Furthermore, this answer choice shows that the 44% can be misleading. May people, when they see "44 percent fiber," will assume that the label means "44 percent of daily fiber requirement," even though that is clearly not the meaning. However, answer choice (E) rules that possibility out, because each pill contributes less than 2% of necessary fiber. Since we know that a great many people might misinterpret the statistic, this new information demonstrates that the advertisement might have been constructed to take advantage of those people.

[yrivers]

Could you please expand on why choice D is incorrect? Immediately reading that, I would think that approximately 3 of these pills are required. Is it incorrect because there's no additional information to decide what 44% actually means? Bit confused.

[Adam Tyson]

Compare the numbers in D to the numbers in E, and you'll see that E presents a much bigger problem - 3 pills in D vs 60-90 pills in E. Also, in D we are only looking at what the pill maker recommends, but in E we are looking at what nutritionists recommend, which is more relevant to the question of whether the ad is misleading.

In fact, if the pill gave you 44% of the daily recommended dose (one possible misinterpretation of the label that the pill makers might have been going for), then taking three pills would be one way to get your daily dose. That would be a good thing if the numbers were right. Again, though, look at 3 pills vs 90 pills and E is much, much more troubling.

Since we are tasked with picking the best answer of the five presented, and since E is better (more problematic, in this case) than D, we go with E.

Remember, it's not about picking the right answer - it's about picking the BEST answer!

[yrivers]

I understand now, thank you so much!

[jwooon]

Hi,

I also was debating between (D) and (E). When I read the question, I initially thought that the 44% could mean 2 things:
1. One pill is 44% of recommended intake of fibre
2. One pill consists of 44% fibre and 56% something else

For (D), I thought if (1) was true, then they have gone over the daily recommended fibre intake, which I thought was very bad and if it was (2) we don't know if it is bad or not.

For (E), I thought if (1) was true, then maybe it was to account for fibre already in the person's diet. What if a person consumes just below the recommended daily dose. Therefore, these fibre pills are recommended by nutritionists to account for them? If (2) was true, then it would just mean that 1/3g = 44% of pill, which was irrelevant in my view.

I think I keep misinterpreting or overanalyzing the question because initially I had chosen (E), but the more I thought about it, the more I could pick apart the AC. Where am I going wrong in this question? What can I do in the future to prevent making these mistakes?

[Adam Tyson]

Your uncertainty about what exactly the claim means is the source of the problem in this advertisement, jwooon. If the pill provides 44% of the recommended daily intake, then the label isn't misleading. Taking a little more than the recommended amount is almost certainly far less of a problem than not taking enough, and even if taking more is a problem, that's not a problem with the advertising claim being misleading. That would be a problem with the recommendation on the label, a different issue.

But if the ad means that 44% of the pill is fiber and 56% other stuff, and if it's nowhere near 44% of the recommended intake, than the advertising claim would be very misleading, because people might interpret it the other way. Answer E indicates that that's exactly what's happening. If the pill has only a third of a gram, you'd have to take 60-90 pills every day! What consumer would expect that to be the case? Once they learned that, they would feel completely misled.

I do think you overthought this a bit. For one thing, there's no reason to believe that taking slightly more than the recommended daily amount is very bad. It might not even be a little bit bad. After all, the recommendation is to consume more fiber, right? And there's no reason to bring in assumptions about whether the recommendations take into account other sources of fiber in one's diet.

Think of it this way: would you feel misled by that ad if the label said to take 3 per day? Or, would you feel misled if you had to take 90 pills every day to get the recommended daily amount? I think you'd feel a lot more displeased with the situation in answer E than the one in answer D.

[jwooon]

Ah, I see. I've been struggling with these "misleading advertisement" questions in the earlier PTs. Thank you for your explanation!