#9 - Nutritionist: Vitamins synthesized by chemists are

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Assumption. The correct answer choice is (E)

The nutritionist explains that vitamins synthesized by chemists are identical to naturally occurring vitamins. The nutritionist concludes that it is a waste of money to pay for vitamins pills made of high-quality or natural ingredients.

The nutritionist assumes that the vitamin element is the only relevant factor in the pills, and you are asked to identify that assumption.

Answer choice (A): The nutritionist does not argue against supplements; the nutritionist argues against choosing expensive instead of inexpensive supplements.

Answer choice (B): The nutritionist does not need to assume that pills with natural ingredients always cost more. The nutritionist merely argues that you should not pay more for natural ingredients. Technically, even if every single natural ingredient product were the cheapest available, the nutritionist could still be correct that you should not be willing to pay more for natural ingredients, so this choice addresses an irrelevant consideration and is incorrect.

Answer choice (C): The nutritionist argues that natural and synthetic vitamins are identical, so the nutritionist does not have to assume that all pills contain some synthetic vitamins. This choice ignores the considerations already in the stimulus.

Answer choice (D): The nutritionist does not need to assume that some producers are guilty of false advertising. It is possible that some pills, as advertised, are made of higher-quality or natural ingredients, but that the quality of those ingredients does not affect the overall quality of the pill. In that case, the readers of pill bottles would be guilty of faulty reasoning; the producers would not be guilty of false advertising.

(You can argue about at what point advertising that experts should anticipate would, though true, mislead someone with an "unengaged" mind becomes false advertising, but since that involves a number of presumptions, that is really not a viable, logical means of justifying this choice.)

Answer choice (E): This is the correct answer choice. The nutritionist has to assume that the non-vitamin ingredients in a pill do not affect how much money the pill is worth. If the factor of non-vitamin ingredients can affect worth, the nutritionist might be wrong.

[lanereuden]

As to C, if they are identical, then what is the point in distinguishing between synthesized and natural? In a sense, it isn't C naturally true according to the other...all brands have synthesized and similarly, all brands have natural? I mean, acc to author, they are one in the same?

[Adam Tyson]

I'm not sure I am following your reasoning there, lanereuden. The author is saying that the synthetic vitamins are the same as vitamins that occur in food. In other words, "natural" vitamins have no special advantage over those that are synthetic. While the pills are made differently, they are chemically, physically, and effectively identical. That does not require the assumption that all brands of vitamin pills contain synthetic vitamins, as it could be true that some pills contain only vitamins that were derived naturally from foods.

Try the negation technique on that answer. What if some vitamin pills have only natural vitamins in them, with no synthetic vitamins? What does that do to the claim that nobody should pay extra for those pills? Nothing! The author would say "so what if some are completely natural? They are still identical to the synthetic ones, so there's no point to paying more for them." The argument still stands, so this is not a required assumption of the argument.

If I misunderstood what you were asking, please follow up!

[MeliXi]

I was going back & forth between C & E, but I see why E is the correct answer.
However, what tripped me up about choice C was my understanding of the stimulus that vitamin pills are vitamins synthesized by chemists. The author distinguishes between vitamins that occur naturally in food & vitamins that are synthesized by chemists; as vitamin pills obviously aren't vitamins that occur naturally in food, they must be synthesized.
Therefore, I concluded that it must be assumed that all vitamin pills contain some synthesized vitamins.

[Adam Tyson]

I see what you did there, MeliXi! But the argument clearly describes "brands of vitamin pills that are advertised as made of higher-quality ingredients or more natural ingredients," so they are definitely talking about pills being made with natural ingredients. It's not the pills that occur naturally, but the ingredients that are either synthetic or natural. So we can make a Vitamin C pill with vitamins that came out of a test tube in a lab, or we can make them out of oranges and lemons, for example. Either way we are making the pills, and the only issue is what sort of ingredients are going into that process.