PT63.S3.Q18 - the probability of avoiding heart disease

_kizilbash

Can someone explain to me how A is right. I understood the argument to be a generalization because it goes from talking about lowering dairy food intake to avoid heart diseases to talking about having good health in general
I understand why A is right, but is my way of thinking about the stimulas wrong?

http://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-63-section-3-question-18/

LSATcantwin

I don't think the way you saw it was wrong, my mind saw it a little more mathematically.

His conclusion says;

• Thus the probability of maintaining good health is Increased by avoiding dairy products.

So you can avoid heart disease, but what if your vitamins go down because of it? If you add +1 to good health for cutting it out, but then -1 from it because of loss of vitamins, your general health doesn't move at all lol.

That's just how I got to the AC.

JustDoIt

Hey! I wrote up an explanation for this a while ago. One of the harder questions I've encountered. Please excuse the formatting and post here if you have any more questions!

• The probability of avoiding heart disease is increased if one avoids fat in one’s diet.
o /F -> (not implies arrow) CHD down
• Furthermore, one is less likely to eat fat if one avoids eating dairy foods
• /D -> CEF down
• Thus, the probability of meaning good health is increased by avoiding dairy foods
o Okay I see two flaws here
 The first is that avoiding heart disease is being equated with maintaining good health
• I am pretty sure that there are other ways of maintaining good health that doesn’t involve avoiding heart disease, and just because you are doing things that are avoiding heart disease doesn’t necessarily mean that you are maintaining good health
o Actually I think this is the main flaw. If you assume the other flaw that I was thinking, (that the likelihood infers that there is a causal chain), then you are essentially assuming the first flaw
A. This is interesting. I didn’t anticipate this but I also think this is kind of problematic. What if, because you are avoiding dairy foods, your bones get no calcium and you, therefore, cripple and get hurt a lot? This is really good actually
a. We were actually really close. Even if we assume that it is true that avoiding dairy foods will help with reducing heart disease, it is not enough to show that avoiding dairy foods will help you maintain good health generally. This is way too broad
b. JY: Even though avoiding dairy may help in eliminating heart disease, avoiding dairy may also have negative consequences
i. This is what they are saying and it matches the issue here, just in a really abstract way
B. Maybe but the argument is not assuming that avoiding dairy foods is the only way of maintaining good health
C. The argument just doesn’t presume this
D. Its evidence is relevant though…
E. This would be good if the conclusion was a conditional

Sami

So your way of thinking about the stimulus is correct. Heart disease is a subset of what we take into account when we calculate health and this conclusion jumps from a subset to superset. Adding more to this, its also wrong because we do not know the complete picture of cause and effect. We only know that avoiding dairy helps lower heart disease but, like you said, we do not know about it increasing health in general. What if avoiding dairy in addition to lowering heart disease increased thyroid problems in adults? Then can we say -avoiding dairy increases health in general? The problem is we only know part of the picture about dairy and its effect on health but not the overall picture.

This question is difficult not only because the answer choices are extremely abstract and use referential phrasing but the answer choice may be coming from a different angle than expected. For example, if you had thought the flaw is we cannot jump from heart disease-health in general the answer choice is not written that way and is slightly coming from another angle.

In my opinion, this question teaches us two things:

1) To not pre-phrase answer after reading the stimulus.
This is not to say that do not think about what's wrong with the stimulus but do not think that the LSAT writers are always going to be kind enough to give us the answer in the way we see it. This is one of the tools the writers have in their arsenal to up the difficulty level of questions - they write answer choices in a way that's a bit far from the ideal way we are used to seeing a flaw written out.
So the strategy of not pre-phrasing is really helpful here. You want to read each answer choice on its own merit and ask yourself, does it describe the flaw in the stimulus?

2) To force yourself to answer what the referential phrasing stands for.
Inserting referential phrasing in answer choices is another way the LSAT writers hope that they can confuse the test takers about what they mean.So every time you encounter referential phrasing in stimulus or answer choice you want to be able to read it with the correct noun. If I was to do that, answer choice A would read as:

A) The argument ignores the possibility that, even though consuming dairy may lead to increased risk of heart disease, avoiding dairy may also have other negative consequences. (In other words avoiding dairy may have other negative consequences that needs to be factored in and in the end overall health may not be increased).

This is the exact flaw in the stimulus, because avoiding dairy lowers risk of heart disease does not mean your overall health is increased.

Let me know if this was helpful. : )

_kizilbash

thank you @Sami @JustDoIt @LSATcantwin. What I got from your comments are that I need to be more flexible in my way of thinking instead of assuming the LSAT will hand me the answer I'm looking for.
I understand the stimulas now. My way of thinking is only a partial explanation. Thanks a lot for you input!