Q23 - A gram of the artificial sweetener aspartame is

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Match the Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Ppl who regularly drink soda w/ aspartame will develop a preference for super sweet stuff.
Evidence: A gram of aspartame is much sweeter than a gram of sugar. Sugar sweetened sodas are already sweet.
Subsidiary Conclusion: Aspartame sweetened sodas must be super sweet.

Answer Anticipation:
There are a couple flaws in this argument. Just because, per unit, aspartame is sweeter than sugar, that doesn't mean that a soda w/ aspartame is sweeter than a soda w/ sugar. After all, who said they have the same number of grams of aspartame vs. sugar?

The second flaw is assuming that "if you regularly drink something with quality X, then you'll develop a preference for quality X". That doesn't have to be true. Perhaps you already had a preference for quality X, which is what led you to drink something with quality X in the first place. Or perhaps you regularly drink something even though you don't particularly prefer all of its qualities. (I might have to regularly drink prune juice for the sake of digestion, but that doesn't mean I'll develop a preference for prune flavoring).

Structurally, we need something like
One unit of A is more X than one unit of B.
Thus something containing A is more X than something containing B.
Thus, having something containing A will make you a bigger fan of X over time.

Correct Answer:
C

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This has a topic/language trap baked in, since it's using foods / preference. It also only has one premise, so it's hard to see how that would match. The flaw here is just that the argument went from "sometimes this happens" to a conclusion of "this will eventually happen"

(B) The flaw here is assuming that the number of books people read is at least as great as the number of shows they watch. Per unit, (one book or one show), one book takes more time. Most people own more books than televisions, but that doesn't mean they read more books than watch tv shows. This is close, but there should be something better.

(C) This does a good job of replicating the first flaw. Per unit, a nickel has more cents than a penny. But that doesn't mean that something containing nickels has more cents in it than something containing pennies. After all, who said the number of nickels and pennies is the same in their respective containers? It doesn't end up replicating the second flaw, but it DOES "exhibit flawed reasoning similar to the flawed reasoning in the argument above".

(D) There's only one premise, so again it seems unlikely to be able to replicate the original flaw. And a premise about one person liking something more than another doesn’t get us matched up in any way with the concept of "per unit, A has more X than B does". This argument just commits a flaw of assuming that "Because A has a greater preference for X, A must have had more exposure to X." That's almost the 2nd flaw, but the 2nd flaw was the idea that "Because A has more exposure to X, A will develop a greater preference for X."

(E) What's up with these one-premise imitators? The flaw here is assuming that someone would take their own personal experience to be representative of the majority's experience

Takeaway/Pattern: This correct answer ended up being a bit weird because it was more about the flaw in going from the premises to the subsidiary conclusion. However, counting up premises (as we usually do on Matching questions) was an easy way to discount A, D, and E.

B's flaw felt somewhat similar, but it's first premise is a worse match than C's corresponding premise. And with B, our objection is "what if people do TV more often than they do books?". With C, our objection is "what if there are way more pennies in Joe's bank than there are nickels in Maria's bank". That's closer to our objection to the original argument: "what if there are way more grams of sugar in a sugar-sweetened soda than there are grams of aspartame in an aspartame-sweetened soda?"

#officialexplanation

[WenjiC19]

In (B), there are two comparisons in its premises, however, in the original flawed pattern, there is only one, that's why B is a wrong answer.