#23 - A gram of the artificial sweetener aspartame is much

[cornflakes]

I was between C and D - on my PT I went with D and on my BR I wont with C - the reason why D is wrong is because it holistically does not drive at the "single unit more severe, therefore aggregate total must be more severe type of idea that the stimulus gets at.

Using Stephanie's greater preference for hot weather relative to Katherine as the premise for her hometown having more days of hot summer weather than Katherine's is definitely a flawed argument (there is no link between preference and reality stated, Stephanie could like hot summer weather more than Katherine because she gets less days of it and therefore cherishes it more, probably the more plausible reality if you had to speculate, but I digress). The issue is that the preference and number of days aren't logically linked in the same way that the nickels and pennies are. It uses summer weather as a vessel to attempt to get there, but it fails to accurately describe the "one is more severe, so all are more severe" flaw commits.

Theoretically, what answer D needs is the first sentence to say something like "The hottest day in Stephanie's hometown on record is hotter than that of Katherine's hometown." - therefore, there must be more days of hot weather there than in Katherine's town. This would get directly at the idea the stimulus discusses:

Aspartame (Stephanie's town) is sweeter per gram (has a hotter day on record) than Sugar (Katherine's town), therefore drinks with Aspartame (total days of hot weather in Stephanie's town) must be even sweeter (more than) than those with sugar (total days of hot weather in Katherine's town)

It's not perfect, but this I feel is more what they were looking for here.

[Adam Tyson]

Agreed! That reworking of the hot days argument is not perfect and would still lose out to answer C because of the numeric idea built into the flaw (a single unit is more, so the collection of units must be more, which fails to consider the relative number of units), which is different from "the extreme is higher so the average must be higher" (which fails to take into account that averages are not determined by the extremes), but it's far closer to being a good answer than D is.

Good work!

[jrenee]

Hello,

I was stuck between (C) and (B) and ended up selecting (B) because I thought the comparison of time paralleled the comparison of sweetness in the stimulus. I also was drawn to the seemingly parallel conclusion. Can you help me better understand why (B) is incorrect?

[Adam Tyson]

I had a few problems with B, jrenee. The first one that occurred to me was that the answer switched from the number of televisions owned to the time to watch an episode of a television show, while the stimulus had no parallel shift in focus. The second was that the conclusion didn't single out people who watch television or people who read books, but instead focused more generally on "most people", while the stimulus was about people who drink things sweetened with aspartame, singling out a particular group.

There may be other problems with answer B, but those were enough for me to reject that answer.