LR Question 6 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: A recent taste test reveals that most…
QUESTION TYPE: Strengthen
CONCLUSION: The complexity of chocolate probably masks the low fat flavor.
REASONING: Studies compared regular and low fat versions of ice cream flavors. Compared to regular ice cream, people dislike low fat vanilla, but they don’t mind low fat chocolate. Chocolate has a very complex flavor.
ANALYSIS: This argument makes a classic LSAT error. The author makes a comparison between chocolate and vanilla, but they don’t give us any information about vanilla! A comparison must give information about both groups.
So, we don’t know anything about vanilla. Maybe it’s complex too! In that case, we’d need another explanation for low-fat chocolate’s appeal.
___________
- It doesn’t matter whether people prefer chocolate to vanilla. The argument’s comparison is between full fat and low fat versions of the same flavors.
- If you picked this, you probably assumed that an experiment shouldn’t be biased. But in this case, the bias would be equally present in both the chocolate and vanilla experiments. Yet the two experiments had different results. So knowledge of the fat content couldn’t have caused the difference between chocolate and vanilla.
- The argument didn’t say chocolate worked because people liked it. The argument proposed that the complexity of chocolate’s compounds masked the low fat flavor.
- CORRECT. The author made a comparison between chocolate and vanilla, but didn’t tell us anything about vanilla! This answer completes the comparison: chocolate is indeed more complex. Therefore complexity could have caused the difference.
- Awareness isn’t relevant. People perceive the complexity of chocolate when they eat it, whether or not they are aware chocolate is complex.
Also note that this answer doesn’t say the people in the studies were aware of complexity – it only says “most people” are aware of complexity.
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Hi,
I don’t understand why D wouldn’t weaken the conclusion. Wouldn’t people knowing that vanilla is a significantly less complex flavor than chocolate skew the results and give us another reason for the effect that we see?
There are two issues with this:
1. “Vanilla is known to be less complex” doesn’t mean *everybody* knows it. It could be “known” in the sense of being an obscure but provable scientific fact. In other words, it is expert knowledge but not common knowledge.
2. Even if it *is* common knowledge, that doens’t mean people know the implication of this knowledge. They might not know that complex flavors like chocolate mask the taste of low fat, so there’s no bias in the results.
In other words, you need to add two additional assumptions for your interpretation even to be plausible.