QUESTION TEXT: Astronauts who experience weightlessness frequently…
QUESTION TYPE: Strengthen
CONCLUSION: Motion sickness is caused when the brain gets conflicting information about whether the body is moving.
REASONING: The astronauts can see they are moving, but their inner ears tell them they are still.
ANALYSIS: We can strengthen the argument by showing a situation where people get sick when their eyes and inner ear disagree. Or we could show a situation where people don’t get sick when their eyes and inner ears do agree.
The right answer does both.
___________
- CORRECT. If you’re on a rough boat, you feel movement. If you don’t have a window, you can’t see it. This difference makes you sick, and supports the hypothesis.
When you have a window, you see movement too. So you’re body feels and sees the same thing. Since this doesn’t make you sick, it supports the hypothesis.
- This doesn’t help. We need to know if the airline passengers can feel they are moving, and whether they can see out the window.
- “Some” is a very vague word. This could mean that two out of one billion passengers get motion sickness in this situation. That’s not meaningful.
- This weakens the argument. It doesn’t seem to matter whether you can see out the window and see your motion.
- The argument never said that every astronaut will get motion sickness. But this slightly weakens the argument, by showing that the cause doesn’t produce the effect 100% of the time.
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