Q3 - Peter: Recent evidence suggests

[smiller]

Question Type:
Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
Premise:
Alcohol consumption has some benefits.

Conclusion:
Alcohol consumption is beneficial overall.

Answer Anticipation:
This is a somewhat common flaw in LSAT arguments: based on something having one benefit, or several, the argument concludes that it is beneficial overall, or even purely beneficial. The argument is failing to consider potential drawbacks.

Correct Answer:
(D)

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This is out of scope. The argument is not assuming anything about why people choose to consume alcohol. The premises state that specific benefits exist, but say nothing about what people who consume alcohol believe.

(B) This is unsupported. We don't know that anything in the argument is based on popular belief.

(C) This is out of scope. The argument is about whether alcohol is beneficial. That could be the case, or not, regardless of whether there are other ways to achieve the same benefit.

(D) Hmmm… this isn't what we anticipated above, but looking back at the stimulus, we see the premise is in fact about moderate alcohol consumption, while the conclusion makes a statement about alcohol consumption in general. This is the correct answer.

(E) This is not a flaw in the argument. If alcohol has an effect on some bacteria that cause illness then it could possibly be beneficial as a whole. This could still be true even if many harmful bacteria aren't effected, so what choice (E) describes isn't a flaw in the argument.

Takeaway/Pattern: Arguments can have multiple flaws. The correct answer to a Flaw question might be based on a less obvious flaw, not the one you might immediately notice.

#officialexplanation

[AndyS157]

I almost never get a question 3 wrong, but D did not seem right to me because the stimulus says "on balance" which I thought connected to moderate consumption. To me, it seemed that the conclusion matched the premise in that moderate = on balance.

Can anyone clear this up for me?

[ohthatpatrick]

If a Senator says, "The bill has some problems, but it's, on balance, a good bill", that means that the bill is a net gain.

If the author was talking specifically about moderate alcohol consumption, she would have to modify the subject noun of that conclusion sentence.

Anything between two commas can essentially be removed from a sentence without changing it's essential meaning.

Barack Obama, the 44th President, grew up in Chicago.

We can remove the descriptive modifier and still have the essential sentence:
"Obama grew up in Chicago".

Similarly, the independent clause of the conclusion is "alcohol consumption is beneficial".