#22 - A long-term health study that followed a group of

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

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

Answer choice (A):

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C): This is the correct answer choice.

Answer choice (D):

Answer choice (E):

This explanation is still in progress. Please post any questions below!

[desmail]

Hi,

I am having a bit of trouble understanding why choice A is wrong and D is correct.

A is saying that muscle and bone makes up a smaller proportion of body weight, so if you gain weight wont it balance that and make someone healthier?

Answer choice D talking about the smokers seems very out of scope to me!

Thanks a lot,
Dana

[Steve Stein]

Hi Dana,

For the question you referenced, the correct answer choice is actually C. Take a look and let me know if that answer choice makes more sense.

Thanks!

[Sweetgpeach]

Logical Reasong Question Type Training (Prep Test 1-20) Question 37

....C vs. D....due to in stimulus it states "lower life expectancy"?


Thank you for sharing your time and knowledge.

Cheers,
Georgia

[Nikki Siclunov]

Hi Georgia,

The paradox is pretty simple: we associates weight gain with health problems, but one long-term study revealed that those who gained weight after the age of 35 lived longer than those who didn't. The question is why? Answer choice (C) presents the answer: if smokers tend to be leaner than non-smokers, but also have shorter life spans than nonsmokers, this would explain why the subjects in the study who didn't gain weight also didn't live as long as those who did. What if a lot of those who didn't gain weight were smokers? This correlation, if true, would provide a definitive cause as to why those who didn't gain weight had shorter life spans, on average, than those who did.

Answer choice (D) makes the paradox more confusing. If the deterioration of your immune system can be slowed down by a reduction in your caloric intake, you'd expect those who don't gain weight to have healthier immune systems than those who do. This is at odds with the results of the long-term health study, where the subjects who gained weight lived longer.

Hope this helps! Let me know.

[ksandberg]

Hello,

I selected answer choice A for this question, although I was between selecting A and C. I thought that if muscle and bone tissue makes up a smaller proportion of total body weight as one ages, then those who gained weight after age 35 could have gained muscle, which would make them healthier and likely to live longer. I think this is wrong because I am bringing outside knowledge or inferences into this question (that muscle = healthier = live longer). I am still confused as to how C can be correct though. I understand the logic behind the answer, that smoking = thin = life span decreased, so the non-smokers in the study who were not as thin lived longer. However, I don't understand why there would be a discrepancy between this study and other studies if proper protocol had been followed and random sampling had been done. Could it be that this study was done in a region of the world where more people smoked and that the other studies were not? Any insight is much appreciated.

[Adam Tyson]

You're right that your confusion is probably stemming from bringing in too much outside info, ksandberg. Who says that gaining muscle is healthy? I don't see that in the stimulus, so let's leave it out. I also don't see anything about where the study was done or whether it was conducted properly, so let's leave that out, too. We will only consider those factors if an answer brings them up.

I'm not a fan of correct answer C here, but it is the best of the bunch. If the paradox here is that some studies showed weight gain to be unhealthy and correlated to shorter life spans while another showed it to correlate to longer life spans, we need to find some reason for why those studies could both be accurate. Ideally, I want an answer that tells me about a crucial difference between the studies. For example, the one study could have been looking at people who were, at the time the study began, extremely underweight, while the other ones looked at people of average weight. I don't like answer C because it doesn't do that, and I don't want to have to assume that the first study looked at people who quit smoking. Still, answer C at least allows for the possibility that, in some cases, weight gain can be a sign of health and long life, even while in other cases it is not. It's not a great answer, but it is the best answer, and that, after all, is what the authors of the test have instructed us to select.

I'll point out that this test is from 1994, making it among the oldest ones in the modern era of the LSAT. In those first few years they were still working out some kinks, and we've seen some question stems and answer choices in those early years that were poorly written compared to more recent ones. I don't know that this answer, as written, would pass muster today. For that reason, while studying older tests is useful, you will want to focus on the more recent tests as you get closer to your test date. The test has gone through some evolution over time, and weeding out bad answers like this one is part of that evolution, as is a slowly changing pattern of how questions are asked and which types tend to dominate. We've seen some patterns, like "double trouble" (two stems after one stimulus) go away completely (although there's nothing to say they won't return!)

Keep pounding, you're getting there!

[ksandberg]

Thank you so much Adam. Your response was very helpful and informative.

[LSAT2018]

I felt that the correct answer was too specific in addressing the paradox. But it is right to take it that it is not only weight gain/loss that tends to increase/decrease life expectancy but some other factor that may also contribute?

You said that the question is from an old practice test, so may I ask how a more modern test would have phrased the answer?

[Francis O'Rourke]

Hi LSAT 2018,

It is absolutely necessary to assume that there is some factor other than weight change that causes life expectancy to increase or decrease!

Let's think about what would happen if there were no other factor involved in life expectancy. The stimulus gave us one study that found that gaining weight was correlated with increasing life expectancy. If there were no other possible factors to consider other than weight change, then the correlation presented here would be proof that gaining weight increases life expectancy.

This would present a true paradox then when we learn of other studies. We learn in the last sentence that other studies have associated weight gain with a decrease in life expectancy. If weight change were the only possible cause in life expectancy change, then these two studies would give us completely contradictory take-aways!

Of course, there is no reason to limit ourselves to only weight change when considering life expectancy change. The LSAT expects us all to know that there exist many diseases and conditions that can affect your health. In fact, the stimulus points towards this in the final sentence when the speaker refers to "a host of health problems that tend to lower life expectancy."

I don't want to speak for Adam on what he thought would be a more modern-LSAT version of this question. For me though, I really don't like how little answer choice (C) actually resolves the paradox. I might expect a better answer choice to tell us that smokers were participants in the long-term study. Perhaps when this question was created in the very early 1990's it was commonsense to expect smokers to be a part of any study, while today we are much more likely to think of smokers as exceptions.