Q1 - Press release: A comprehensive review

[weiyichen1986]

Hi, i have been thinking about this one for a long time, i choose C....

the question asks for a flaw, so the premise is talking about coffee drinker will not harm heart, and concludes it is safe to drink coffee.

In other words, the argument is focusing on heart disease, and why B is correct about general health???? I think even E is closer than B honestly speaking..

thanks!!!

[noah]

This is a classic example of a conclusion going and getting inflated!

The conclusion is that it's safe to drink coffee. Why? Because drinking normal amounts doesn't harm your heart (and I'm paraphrasing a bit here, of course).

What's the gap? For one, what about the folks who drink more than normal amounts of coffee? Is it safe for them? Also, couldn't coffee hurt something other than the heart? What about liver damage?

The second issue is what (B) points out. The conclusion has gone too far! One technique to get deeper into this is to consider what could the argument conclude? It would be on safer ground if it said "it's safe for your heart to drink normal amounts of coffee."

(A) is doubting the premise - we accept the the review found no reason!

(C) is out of scope - we're only interested in whether coffee is safe, not whether coffee-drinkers will ever get issues with their heart for any reason.

(D) is out of scope. We're coffee-focused right now!

(E) is about another factor that could harm the heart: stress. Who cares? Is coffee bad? An answer with a similar issues as (E) is this: Drinking coffee might result in spilling the hot beverage while driving, having an accident, and ending up with a telephone poll through your heart.

[WaltGrace1983]

I think I (C) why (C) is tempting ( ). It made me do a double-take certainly. Yet there are two problems with this answer choice.

The word "might." The word "might" is so vague and even kind of useless that it is hard to have this be in the correct answer for a flaw. Coffee drinkers might do this....Coffee drinkers might do that. So? Coffee drinkers might do anything! Coffee drinkers might stab themselves in the eye with their coffee spoon. Can we claim that coffee is dangerous from this? No. The point of the argument is to weaken the claim by finding the flaw. This isn't a true weaken question but it definitely is not your typical flaw question either. I hope this makes sense. "Might" does not really do anything to weaken the claim. What if we had this argument...

Having oatmeal every morning will lower cholesterol
→
Thus, having oatmeal is healthy

Which one of the following points to a weakness in the reasoning in the press release's argument?
(A) Oatmeal might make you eat a lot more foods that are really high in cholesterol and it might make you eat 84 Big Macs in one sitting.

Does this point to a weakness in the claim? Absolutely not. Just because someone might do something doesn't mean it will happen. It may even mean that there is almost no chance of it happening! It would be much different if the answer choice said "Oatmeal will make you eat 84 Big Macs in one sitting." (Although this would never be a correct answer choice - we have to assume a bunch of stuff for this to work including that Big Macs are high enough in cholesterol, etc.)

However, let's say we don't have the word "might." Let's say the answer choice says, "Coffee drinkers will choose to eat, along with their coffee, foods containing substances that harm the heart."

Coffee drinker → foods containing substances that harm the heart → heart is harmed

Now of course we still have the big gap from harming/not harming the heart to safety. Let's ignore that for a second and get to another point in logic. This answer choice is still saying that, it is not the coffee that harms the heart, it is the food! Thus, I think it would be rationale to still have this answer choice be wrong because the coffee is not what is harms the heart, the coffee just induces an effect that in turn harms the heart.

[eshaf913]

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