#9 - Someone who gets sick from eating a meal will often

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Strengthen. The correct answer choice is (C)

In this stimulus the author presents only one premise and then draws a causal conclusion. People develop distaste for foods that make them sick is the only premise. This explains why children don't like some foods. There is a completely new element in the conclusion: children. This element needs to be connected to the premise in order to strengthen the causal argument. There is also an element in the premise, sickness, that is not present in the conclusion. We need to connect these two lonely elements of the argument. If this were a weaken question, we would attack this gap in the reasoning.

Answer Choice (A): This answer choice is incorrect because if actually weakens the argument. If children are more likely to get food without distinctive flavor, they are less likely to develop aversions.

Answer Choice (B): This answer choice is incorrect because it is entirely unrelated to the stimulus. If anything, this answer offers another reason for children to develop aversions: they don't see the health benefits of some foods so they go by taste alone.

Answer Choice (C): This is the correct answer choice. It fills in the gap that the stimulus is missing. Children tend to have more acute taste and become sick, which connects the element in the premise, sickness, with the new element in the conclusion, children. If children are more likely to become sick, they are more likely to develop distaste, based on the premise.

Answer Choice (D): This answer choice is incorrect because it is dealing with recovering from sickness, which has nothing to do with actually getting sick or developing a distaste for food.

Answer Choice (E): This answer choice is incorrect because it focuses on children refusing to eat unfamiliar foods. If a child has never tasted a food, he or she cannot develop a distaste for that food, so this answer choice is unrelated to our argument about sickness and distaste for certain foods in children after they have eaten them.

[silent7706]

Hi,

I chose (B) because I thought if children are less likely to see the connection between health and food, they are more likely to believe that the distinctive food that they had was the cause of the sickness even if it wasn't. While, if adults are more likely to see connection between health and food, they are less likely to believe that the most distinctive food is the culprit.

Can someone please explain what's the flaw in my reasoning?

Thanks in advance.

[James Finch]

Hi Silent,

One of the premises in the stimulus is that all humans associate the ingredient with the strongest flavor in a dish that makes them sick with that illness, regardless of whether that ingredient was the cause of the illness. So all humans, both adults and children, react in a way that may or may not necessarily correspond to the danger any particular food could cause them. We then need to fill the logical gap of why children would be especially prone to a negative impression of certain foods.

There are basically three possibilities that we can prephrase: children have either a better sense of taste, are more likely to get sick from food, or both. (C) is correct because it says that children have both, making them more likely to notice the most distinctive ingredient and more likely to get sick, so more likely to develop aversions to foods. (B) on the hand would weaken the stimulus, by making it less likely that they would attribute an illness to a particular ingredient in a food, thus making the conclusion less likely to be true.

Hope this clears things up!

[minjivkang]

I would think that if kids were acute in taste, why would they hate food even when it is not the cause of their sickness? I don't want to get into the specifics but that was my reasoning and it would help a lot if you can explain a bit more!

[Jeff Wren]

Hi minjivkang,

While it is probably true in the real world that kids who have acute tastes may dislike foods for many reasons that have nothing to do with getting sick (some kids can just be very picky eaters for any number of reasons), that is not the situation that we are presented with in the stimulus and the specific argument that we are strengthening.

Here, the argument tells us that someone who gets sick from a meal often develops a strong distaste for the one food in the meal that had the most distinctive flavor. The argument then concludes that "this phenomenon" that was just described explains why children are "especially likely" to develop strong aversions to some foods.

To strengthen this argument, we need to explain why children would be "especially likely" to be affected by this phenomenon. Answer C states that children tend to have more acute tastes and get sick more often than adults.

The reason that having more acute tastes helps explain why children would be "especially likely" to be affected is that they would be able to distinguish the most distinctive flavor more easily. This combined with getting sick more often, would together help explain why children would be especially likely to develop food aversions.

On the other hand, if children didn't have an acute/well developed sense of taste, they would be less likely to identify the most distinctive flavor and wouldn't develop the food aversion based on this phenomenon.

For example, a child eats a meal and recognizes garlic as the most distinctive flavor due to his acute taste. The child gets sick and then hates garlic.