#4 - A survey was recently conducted among ferry passengers

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Weaken. The correct answer choice is (D)

The author of this stimulus draws a very questionable conclusion which may at first seem reasonable:

Premise: More of those who got sick took anti-seasickness medication.

Conclusion: People would be better off not taking anti-seasickness medication.

The problem, we may notice, is that this is not a random sample of the population. Is there some other possible explanation for those who got sick to more likely have taken the medication? Since those who are more likely to get sick are the ones most likely to take medication, the survey results may not reflect what the author suggests. The correct answer choice to this weaken question will be the one which suggests that the anti-seasickness medication may not be detrimental as the author suggests.

Answer choice (A): This answer choice doesn't even mention the medication, so it cannot weaken the argument from the stimulus.

Answer choice (B): This answer choice does not weaken the author's argument, nor does it give reason to doubt the survey results. If the results were tainted by the drug company, they probably would not have been skewed to show the drug ineffective anyway.

Answer choice (C): This answer choice may seem at first glance to lend some credibility to the survey, but the central question here is whether the high proportion of medicators, among those who got sick, proves that people would be better off without the medication.

Answer choice (D): This is the correct answer choice, and is aligned with the prephrase from the discussion above—not only is the medication shown to be non-detrimental, it may even be beneficial! If the medication reduced the symptoms, this clearly weakens the argument that people would be better off without it.

Answer choice (E): This answer choice does not weaken the author's argument, and may strengthen it: if there are even more who got sick than reported by the survey, this would suggest even more strongly that the people who took the medication would have been better off without it.

[Vexans]

Hello, I am curious for some more explanation on how you came to answer D.

I chose answer A over D for a couple reasons.

1) "most ferry passengers" seemed to me to imply that even those taking medication suffer from seasickness when the weather is rough enough. Also, people taking medication may inherently be more likely to suffer from seasickness as they most likely have in the past.

2) Answer choice D introduces a degree of severity, while the argument discussed presence/absence of symptoms. The conclusion uses the wording "would be better off", however I do not think this is enough to suggest that magnitude of symptoms is being discussed. "despite claims...show the contrary" seems very clearly to me to refer to the study that reported only presence or absence of seasickness rather than a magnitude of symptoms, which does a lot to suggest that severity of symptoms is out of the scope of the question and is irrelevant.

Answer "A" seems to suggest that their may be a confounding variable skewing the results of a study and therefore undermining the conclusion, while "D" refers to information which is not necessarily relevant to the argument.

[Francis O'Rourke]

Hi Vexans,


We cannot infer that "most" would include anyone in the group that took the anti-seasickness medications, since we do not know how many people took the medication. Perhaps only 20% of the passengers in the original survey took the medication.

You are right that those who take the medication may be more prone to seasickness in general, but I am not sure how you see this information relating to answer choice (A).

The speaker's conclusion was that the drug companies were mistaken in their claims. However we do not know what the claims were. It is possible that the anti-seasickness medication was intended merely to dampen symptoms.