PT114.S1.Q24 > Question

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SECTION 4 · lr

The author hypothesizes that children’s taste preferences change depending on the food they’re exposed to. To support his hypothesis, he points to the fact that one-year-olds normally prefer sweet food to salty, but after about a year of feeding them salty food, they prefer the salty food.

The author compares the preferences of the same children at two different times: when they’re one year old, and again when they’re around two. His explanation for why those preferences change is that they’ve been exposed to salty food over time. To reach his hypothesis, he must assume that there’s not some alternative explanation for why children’s preferences change during that time.

This rules out an alternative explanation for the phenomenon described in the premises. If two-year-olds just naturally preferred salty food to sweet, then there would be no reason to conclude that the change in preferences was the result of exposing the children to salty food. They would have come around to salty food regardless!

Whether their preferences usually happen to change says nothing about whether they can be changed through exposure. Even if (B) weren’t true, the conclusion would be unaffected. It’s possible that preferences don’t usually change, but they can be changed through exposure.

This says two-year-olds don’t naturally prefer some other foods to salty food—in other words, salty food is the natural favorite of two-year-olds. Making this assumption would destroy the argument, because it gives an alternative explanation for why children’s preferences change.

The author doesn’t assume anything about the salty food itself, other than that it’s salty. Regardless of how “pleasant” the salty food tastes, the fact remains that the children start to prefer it to sweet food, and the author’s conclusion is a possible explanation for why.

Infant development, and what’s better for that development, is irrelevant. The argument is purely about taste preferences, and how those preference change.

PrepTest 114 - Section 1 - Question 24

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