Q18 - Health officials now recommend

[willaminic]

Hi,

I choose A over E, i am wondering A is incorrect because of the price is off the topic?

But according to E, even if people have reduced their intake in their at-home diet, then they still go to restaurants, which means they are still ignoring the recommendation..am i missing something here?

Thanks !

[noah]

Looks like you see why A is wrong. Let me go ahead and explain the whole thing:

The conclusion of this argument is that there's lots of people ignoring the recommendation to reduce how much red meat they eat (note that I'm glossing over the high in cholesterol stuff, which is the sort of detail that might be important in another question, but is irrelevant here).

What's the support for that conclusion?

Steak restaurants are flourishing! And, to make their success more dramatic, the general restaurant industry is declining.

So, what's the gap? Well, how could it be that there are lots of folks going to steak restaurants but they're still heeding the recommendation to lower their intake of red meat? As (E) notes, people could be eating less red meat overall, but when they do eat red meat, they increasingly tend to head to a restaurant. In case that's unclear, imagine Joe used to eat 50 lbs. of meat per week (wow) and of those he at 2 in a restaurant. Now he eats 20 lbs. of meat per week but eats 10 of those in a restaurant.

As for the wrong answers:

(A) is out of scope - we're not interested in how restaurants try to attract folks. The references to "prices" should have raised a red flag.

(B) is questioning the recommendation and how or whether it applies to certain folks. That's out of scope. We're interested in whether we can conlcude that a lot of folks are ignoring the recommendation based on restaurant data.

(C) is out of scope - price of beef?

(D) is tempting since it's fancy! However, nobody is discussing whether the decline of beef consumption and the restaturant industry are connected. This argument isn't about causation - it's is about what certain numbers indicate.

[christinenyoung]

This question really gives me some troubles.

Answer B I defend like this:
You can be eating steak and still *reduce* your intake of other high cholesterol foods. So if the people ignoring the advice are the people patronizing the restaurant, they could still be reducing their intake.

So why is B still wrong?

[noah]

This question really gives me some troubles.

Answer B I defend like this:
You can be eating steak and still *reduce* your intake of other high cholesterol foods. So if the people ignoring the advice are the people patronizing the restaurant, they could still be reducing their intake.

So why is B still wrong?

I think you might have extended (B) a bit. It says that the argument assumes that the steak restaurant patrons don't really need to reduce their cholesterol intake. I don't see the argument as assuming that. If anything, it's assuming that those people are part of the group that needs to heed this advice, since the conclusion is about folks ignoring the advice.

And, as I mentioned above, (B) is about whether and/or who the recommendation applies to. We're interested in whether we can conlcude that a lot of folks are ignoring the recommendation based on restaurant data.

That clear it up?

[sweetygurl]

I think answer choice B is wrong because it is quite the contrary -- the author actually assumes that people who patronizes the steak restaurants "DO need to reduce their intake of foods that are high in cholesterol" (instead of "do not need.."), which is WHY the author concludes that a lot of people are still ignoring the recommendation when ALL of the people DO need to heed the advice.

Does this clear things up a bit?

-K

[dandrew]

After narrowing down the choices to B and E, I chose E because it fit with my assumption that people could be eating less meat overall but more of their meat at steakhouses. Still, I'd like to know more about why B is wrong and am assuming that it partly is because it reverses the logic of of the passage. The first sentence states, "...people should reduce their intake of foods that are high in cholesterol". I think answer B illegally reverses the logic of this statement by saying that people who eat at steakhouses don't have high cholesterol and as such don't need to reduce their red meat consumption. Yet the recommendation of the health officials was not made to those with high cholesterol but to all people.

Is my logic the right approach to crossing out B? Thank you.

[helenaygu]

Can someone elaborate on why D is incorrect?

[Dtodaizzle]

D is out of scope. Whether or not there is a casual relation is irrelevant to the conclusion. Even if there were a causal relation, how would it affect the number of people ignoring the health recommendation?