Q9 - All potatoes naturally contain

[jardinsouslapluie5]

I am lost in this question.
Please, help.

[ohthatpatrick]

All potatoes have at least some poison, which goes by the name of solanine.

Wild potatoes have much more poison than domesticated potatoes.

However, the author thinks you can make a wild potato equally safe to an unpeeled domesticated potato by peeling off the wild potato's skin.

After all, he tells us that most of the poison in potatoes is found in the skin.

The author's conclusion is that "peeled wild potatoes are at least as safe to eat as comparably sized unpeeled domesticated potatoes".

How could we potentially argue with this conclusion?

How could a peeled wild potato still be more dangerous than an unpeeled domesticated potato?

This gets into mathematical territory, so let's make up some numbers to help make it more concrete.

Let's say that wild potatoes have 100g of poison in them, while domestic potatoes only have 10g in them.

An unpeeled domestic potato has its full amount of poison, 10g.

A peeled wild potato has lost MOST of its poison, more than half of its poison.

So a peeled wild potato has lost more than 50g of poison. But, once it's peeled, a wild potato could still have between 0-49g of poison.

If the peeled wild potato still had 49g of poison, the conclusion would be wrong. The peeled wild potato would be MORE poisonous than the unpeeled domestic potato (49g > 10g).

So just because MOST of the wild potato's poison is gone, that doesn't mean it's now as safe as a domesticated potato.

Bill Gates could lose MOST of his money gambling, and still be a billionaire.

In order to prove the conclusion is true, we need to know the peeled wild potato's amount of poison is less than or equal to the unpeeled domesticated potato's amount of poison.

That's precisely what (C) tells us.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have lingering questions.

[ttunden]

i chose B but now i understand why it is wrong, even if it does contain most of the poison the wild patatoe could still have much more poison than a domesticated potatoe.

C would justify the conclusion by ensuring 100% that the wild peeled potatoe is at least as safe in poison level terms as the unpeeled domesticated potatoe

[patrice.antoine]

Is (D) wrong because it does not speak of unpeeled domesticated potatoes but just domesticated potatoes?