Hello I eliminated (A) for the following reason and would like to check if its the right reason.
Stimulus states "more cholesterol, higher risk of heart attack". Though this does not imply CAUSATION, we can infer that "lower cholesterol, lower risk of heart attack". With this in mind, I read (A) and found 2 potential errors.
- All we have is relative scale between cholesterol and risk, we don't know about absolute amount of risk based on absolute amount of cholesterol
- Even if we say we know the absolutes, we do not know about other factors that influence heart attack so cannot guarantee that low or high cholesterol entails low or high risk of heart attack.
This raised some general question regarding causation/correlation, and would love to check if the following hypothesis makes sense.
- Even if we are given a causation e.g., cholesterol causes heart attack, there can be situations where cholesterol is present but heart attack is not resulted, (due to the fact that all we know is just one factor that cause heart attack and do not know about other factors that can potentially influence heart attack whether in a good way or bad way??) Thus, cannot say there is a perfect correlation i.e., if cholesterol then heart attack.
Thx!
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- wj097
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Atticus Finch
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- tommywallach
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Atticus Finch
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Re: Q6 - These days, drug companies
Hey Wj,
Good points all over, so I think I'll use this opportunity to talk about the question more generally, then answer your specific points.
This is an inference question. We are told that there is a correlation between cholesterol and heart attack, and that heart disease kills more people than any other cause. We also know that smoking, drinking, and exercise affect cholesterol.
The correct answer needs to repeat one of these facts.
(A) As you said, there are numerous other factors that could affect heart disease, so simply having low blood cholesterol does not ensure a low risk of fatal heart disease. As to your second point, whether or not causation has been proven, that's true, but (A) does not imply any causation, it simply restates a correlation. (There are no "cause" words).
(B) We are not given any comparison between heavy versus light or moderate smokers.
(C) This is a spurious application of the transitive property. Just because cholesterol causes heart disease and heart disease is the biggest killer, that does not mean that high-cholesterol diets are the principal cause of death, or even that cholesterol is. Some other problem could be more relevant to how many heart attacks people have.
(D) We don't know this. There could be other ways.
(E) Lifestyle = smoking, drinking, and exercise. So the passage DOES say this.
As for your final question, I'm not sure I quite understand it. If the passage SAYS that something causes something, then of course there will be correlation. Correlation does not imply that EVERY single person who does thing X will get thing Y. A correlation simply implies a statistical probability that something X will also be Y. Causation creates correlation, but not vice-versa.
Hope that helps!
-t
Good points all over, so I think I'll use this opportunity to talk about the question more generally, then answer your specific points.
This is an inference question. We are told that there is a correlation between cholesterol and heart attack, and that heart disease kills more people than any other cause. We also know that smoking, drinking, and exercise affect cholesterol.
The correct answer needs to repeat one of these facts.
(A) As you said, there are numerous other factors that could affect heart disease, so simply having low blood cholesterol does not ensure a low risk of fatal heart disease. As to your second point, whether or not causation has been proven, that's true, but (A) does not imply any causation, it simply restates a correlation. (There are no "cause" words).
(B) We are not given any comparison between heavy versus light or moderate smokers.
(C) This is a spurious application of the transitive property. Just because cholesterol causes heart disease and heart disease is the biggest killer, that does not mean that high-cholesterol diets are the principal cause of death, or even that cholesterol is. Some other problem could be more relevant to how many heart attacks people have.
(D) We don't know this. There could be other ways.
(E) Lifestyle = smoking, drinking, and exercise. So the passage DOES say this.
As for your final question, I'm not sure I quite understand it. If the passage SAYS that something causes something, then of course there will be correlation. Correlation does not imply that EVERY single person who does thing X will get thing Y. A correlation simply implies a statistical probability that something X will also be Y. Causation creates correlation, but not vice-versa.
Hope that helps!
-t
2 posts Page 1 of 1