PT3.S4.Q8 - On the basis of incontestable proof that car

Mario Robo

How come B is wrong?

Admin note: edited title

FixedDice

Note: Revised explanation.

1. "more likely" is too ambiguous. How "more likely" are we talking about? If children had, say, 10% chance of making automobile trips prior to the introduction of the car safety seats and 95% after, then that might contribute to explaining the apparent discrepancy. But if we are talking about a 10%-versus-10.0001% situation, then the difference becomes kind of negligible.
2. Even if the probability of a child being in an automobile trip did increase, does that mean that children actually became more involved in such trips? Just because A is more likely to occur than before, it doesn't mean that A actually occurs more frequently than before.
3. The fact that the probability of children being in automobile rides increased doesn't explain anything by itself. Stimulus claims that these children do use safety seats, which have been proven effective. Per stimulus the number of children injured should have decreased substantially, if not entirely eradicated.

sidytraore

First post on the community here but I hope that helps:

The paradox here is that the car seats, if used, are supposed to reduce car injuries, but a large number of children who use the car seats are still subject to those injuries (that the car seats are supposed to prevent).

If you look closer, B does not say that children are using those car seats while riding. Instead, B makes a general claim about children riding cars. The stimulus is about children who use the car seats while riding, not children who ride in cars in general.

Hope it helps.

FixedDice

You know what, @sidytraore 's explanation is far better (and simpler).

BlindReviewer

Just to chime in because I was also between B and E, I kind of took a step back and observed the problems with both choices. Both @FixedDice and @sidytraore point out a lot of issues with B (way more than I had noticed), but one issue with E for me was "many."

There's a lot that's vague about this stimulus. B was in the running for me because I interpreted "greatly reduce serious injuries" as something like 75% or maybe just 60%, as opposed to 90%. So I thought hm, well if more children are riding cars, then that would result in a "large number" of injuries even if most of them are reduced by the car seats.

@sidytraore points to a central assumption I was overlooking in that logic: B never says those children are riding car seats. Furthermore, @FixedDice mentions one thing that led me to E, which was that just because it's more likely that kids rode cars doesn't necessarily mean there was a significant boost in the number of kids riding cars. I was kind of morphing B to say what I wanted it to say, rather than taking it verbatim.

Meanwhile, what ultimately led me to E is that if you step back, B says nothing about the car safety seats. The two things we're reconciling is that 1) the seats are supposed to work (there's that entire premise about incontestable proof that they should work) and 2) they didn't work. Even if E says "many" which I thought could just mean one or two parents, it actually resolves the issue by conceding, hey the seats work, it's just people don't actually use them correctly.

So I think there's a bit of challenge here in identifying the emphasis. We can choose to fixate on the numbers (which I assume are deliberately vague like "large" and "greatly reduce") or we can fixate on the basic parts of the RRE question: seats, and why they don't work. B might explain the "large number" of children that have accidents if we're generous enough to grant two assumptions: 1) they use the seats and 2) there is a rise in number of children riding cars, but even then that doesn't resolve the emphasis in the stimulus which is, these seats were guaranteed to work, but they didn't.

Hope this helps in some way haha it definitely helped clear up my own logic!

Mario Robo

Thanks so much!