#21 - Maté is a beverage found in much of South America.

[Administrator]

Question #21: Strengthen. The correct answer choice is (E).

The author concludes that Paraguay is likely the place where maté originated, and this is based on two premises:

• More varieties of the beverage can be found in Paraguay than anywhere else.
• The beverage is used more widely in Paraguay than anywhere else.

As it stands now, the argument is rather weak: the premises only establish where maté is most widely used, not where it originated or how long it’s been used there. Scandinavian countries drink more coffee per capita than anywhere else in the world, but coffee drinking is a relatively recent phenomenon there. Coffee is widely believed to have originated in Yemen, not in Sweden.

The question asks for the answer choice that would most strengthen this argument, so the correct answer choice will likely provide new information supporting the notion that one or both of the attributes referenced above (more varieties, wider use) actually help point to the location where the beverage originated.

Answer choice (A) is attractive, but incorrect. It suggests that if a beverage has not been in use for a long time at a certain location (i.e. if it did not originate there), we would not expect to find a great variety of types of that beverage there. Sure—if we knew that there is a great variety of maté beverages in Paraguay, this would strengthen the notion that maté has been used in Paraguay for a very long time. This, in turn, would make it more likely that maté originated there. Unfortunately, we don’t know if there are a “great variety of types” of maté in Paraguay: all we know is that there are more varieties of it found in Paraguay than anywhere else. It’s entirely possible that there are only two varieties of maté in Paraguay, while all other countries have one.

If you found this answer choice attractive, you conflated a comparative claim with an absolute one.

Answer choice (B) is incorrect, for several reasons: First, what Paraguayans believe is irrelevant. Facts count; opinions don’t. Secondly, even if this belief were correct, it would imply that maté could have been imported from other areas of South America, which weakens the conclusion of the argument.

Answer choice (C) can be discounted for the same reason as answer choice (B): opinions are not facts.

Answer choice (D) is attractive, but incorrect. If maté is not frequently consumed outside of South America, this limits the probable range where it originated. However, it does not establish that it originated in Paraguay—it would have been any other country in South America.

Answer choice (E) is the correct answer choice, indicating that the length of a beverage’s history correlates positively with the extent of its usage. If this is the case, then the fact that maté is used more widely in Paraguay than anywhere else in the world would lend support to the notion that the beverage has been in Paraguay longer than anywhere else, which would mean back to the beverage's very beginnings.

[15veries]

I think I become too sensitive to different words...always doubt whether different two words mean the same thing.
Here, at first I did not think longer=originated.
But it is common sense that using something longer means the thing was originated there, right?
I was trying not to assume anything, but in this case I guess it's counterproductive to do so.

[Clay Cooper]

Hi 15veries,

Thanks for your post.

I think you are looking in the wrong place here for the mistake that you made. Longer does not directly equal originated; but because we are looking for the country in which the drink has been made longest, knowing that it is more widespread here in Paraguay than anywhere else does strengthen the idea that it might have originated here - without proving it.

It is entirely possible that the drinking of mate in Paraguay is atypical with respect to the length of time it has existed there, in which case our conclusion might well be off-base. This would greatly weaken our conclusion without conflicting with any of our evidence.

I hope that helps! Keep working hard.

[Oakenshield]

E) says "The longer..., the more..." Can these swap positions?

If the stimulus tells us "Maté has a longer history than anywhere else. Therefore, maté is used more widely there than anywhere else", E) will be a great choice.
However, there are many factors making maté be widely used. Maybe it's not because of its long history.
If so, how can I strengthen the conclusion?

[Jonathan Evans]

Oakenshield,

With respect to your first question: yes, you could conceivably swap the two phrases without changing the meaning of the answer choice.

I am not completely clear what you are asking in your second paragraph. If I am to surmise that you are offering an alternate answer choice to respond to the question or as a prephrase, I would caution you that you're inviting the possibility of making errors and unnecessarily complicating the issue.

With Strengthen and Weaken tasks, you have probably noted that it is difficult sometimes to anticipate the precise manner in which the credited response will strengthen or weaken the conclusion. It's hard to get a definite prediction for the correct answer because on strengthen and weaken questions, there are often multiple kinds of information that could help address different flaws in the argument. Further, often there are multiple possible ways to address any given flaw.

The fact that the stimuli for strengthen and weaken questions often contain relatively weak arguments is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, your task is limited simply to making the argument better or worse without having to deal with extraordinary precision with conditional concepts (as in Justify the Reasoning and Assumption questions). Also, the weaknesses of these arguments can also make the flaws rather obvious, allowing you to anticipate many possible answers.

On the other hand, given that there are multiple ways to address the flaws in these arguments, you will often not be able to anticipate exactly what to look for in the credited response. So how do you overcome this obstacle?

Instead of predicting what the correct answer will SAY, work on predicting what the correct answer will DO.

In a Strengthen question such as this, focus first on the claim that's made. Then catalog the kind of evidence you have so far for the conclusion. Try to describe the weaknesses in the argument in order to anticipate ways you might address these flaws.

In this problem, the author claims that:

• C: Maté likely originated in Paraguay

Based on the evidence that:

• P1: There are more varieties of Maté in Paraguay than anywhere else.
  P2: Maté is more widely used in Paraguay than anywhere else.

It is evident that you must make a connection that shows that either P1 or P2 or the combination of P1 & P2 make the conclusion more likely to be valid.

What would this kind of connection look like? As Nikki noted above, you need to show that widespread use or the number of varieties of something correlates directly with how long something has been somewhere.

Answer Choice (E) is the only one that makes this connection explicitly without requiring additional assumptions.

[Oakenshield]

Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for your explanation.
I thought "the XXXer, the XXXer" indicated a conditional logic:
The longer a beverage has been in use → the more widely that beverage is used there.
You told me the two phrases can swap without changing the meaning.
Do you mean "the longer a beverage has been in use the more widely that beverage is used there"?

[Jonathan Evans]

Hi, Oakenshield,

It's actually not a conditional here. Gramatically it describes a directly proportional relationship:

Length of time a beverage in use = x

How widespread use is = y

Constant of proportionality = K

x = Ky

Thus, the more x increases, the more y increases and vice versa. This is not a relationship you would need to symbolize logically on this test. You just need to recognize the meaning of this relationship through the grammatical construction: "the more x, the more y."

[mN2mmvf]

Why should we think that, even if mate has been in Paraguay longer than anywhere else, that it originated there? Maybe it originated somewhere, was there for 5 years, then was exclusively consumed somewhere else for the next 100? I thought the answer was (D), which doesn't strengthen the conclusion a lot, but it seems to a little, by eliminating all non-South American countries as alternative originators.

[Alexandra Ruby]

Hi mN2mmvf,

This question is a classic example of why it is important to identify the conclusion and understand how the premises interrelate with the conclusion. As explained in the thread above, the conclusion is that Paraguay is likely the place where mate originated. One of the premises in support of this conclusion is that mate is used more widely in Paragauy than anywhere else. There is something missing here because we do not know that beng more widely used in a particular place makes it likely that it originated in that place. Answer choice E provides that link.

As for answer choice D, it does not support the conclusion that Paraguay is the place where mate originated nor does it provide any assertion that such a fact would indicate a beverage originated in a particular county. And, answer choice D says there are in fact a few places outside South America where mate is regularly consumed making that answer choice even weaker.

Hope this helps!

[alexmcc]

Hi, Oakenshield,

It's actually not a conditional here. Gramatically it describes a directly proportional relationship:

Length of time a beverage in use = x

How widespread use is = y

Constant of proportionality = K

x = Ky

Thus, the more x increases, the more y increases and vice versa. This is not a relationship you would need to symbolize logically on this test. You just need to recognize the meaning of this relationship through the grammatical construction: "the more x, the more y."

But there still ARE times when there is some amount logic needed for these types of "the more x , the more y " or the "the more x, the less y" proportional relationships.. say PT 61 S2 Q24, the proportional relationship between knowing more about history ---> less inclined to see it as a working out of moral themes. That's a relationship which cannot be reversed and is necessary for bridging a gap in that justify question.

.. Or a made-up example that "typically, the more Joe has been running in the morning, the more spent he is at the end of the day" cannot be reversed to be "typically, the more spent Joe has been at the end of the day, the more Joe has ran in the morning."

or better yet, "the longer Joe is at jury duty in the morning, the angrier he is at the end of the day" vs. "the angrier Joe is at the end of the day, the longer he is at jury duty in the morning".

I am wondering how you know when you can reverse such proportional statements. Is it because there's a cause and effect relationship in these examples and not in the answer choice?




Edit: "the more x, the more y" is called a comparative correlative.

From a research paper about comparative correlatives: "Note that ... the two clauses can be syntactically reversible but not semantically as the semantics of the reversed order produces a different meaning (see also den Dikken (2005: 512, fn. 17) for the relevant discussion and cited literature there). This is also consistent with our argument that the English CCs have a copula structure, since the copula’s subject and complement are reversible syntactically but entailing semantic alternation."

Source:
Economic Journal of Takasaki City University of Economics vol.54 No.1 2011 pp.39-55
Title: Comparative Correlative Constructions Revisited
Author: Iwasaki, Eiichi