PT49.S2.Q15 - The greater the number of people who regularly use a product

cqas190517

The greater the number of people who regularly use a product, the greater the number whose health is potentially at risk due to that product. More people regularly use household maintenance products such as cleaning agents and lawn chemicals than regularly use prescription medicines. Therefore, it is even more important for such household products to be carefully tested to ensure their safety than it is for prescription medicines to be so tested.
Which one of the following principles, if valid, most helps to justify drawing the conclusion in the argument above?

I put A but the credited answer is C. Can anyone tell me why, please? Thanks!

Admin note: added link
https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-49-section-2-question-15/

Sami

@cqas190517 said:
The greater the number of people who regularly use a product, the greater the number whose health is potentially at risk due to that product. More people regularly use household maintenance products such as cleaning agents and lawn chemicals than regularly use prescription medicines. Therefore, it is even more important for such household products to be carefully tested to ensure their safety than it is for prescription medicines to be so tested.
Which one of the following principles, if valid, most helps to justify drawing the conclusion in the argument above?

I put A but the credited answer is C. Can anyone tell me why, please? Thanks!

Admin note: added link
https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-49-section-2-question-15/

Answer choice "A" is saying that if we wanted to figure out if an object is important to be tested, we should look at the number of people using that product. So according to this answer choice, we can only arrive at two conclusions:
1. It's important to be tested.
2. It is not important to be tested.
But according to the conclusion in the stimulus we need a principle that will help us conclude which one of the two products is more important to test. "A" will only help us figure out if its important test a product. For this reason, "A" would not help us justify our conclusion in the stimulus. It will only help us conclude if it's important to test for household products and medicines. But not, which one is more important to test.

Answer choice "C" is saying if more people use the product, the more important it is to test it. According to the stimulus we know that more people use the household products than medicines. So using that information and applying to the principle stated in answer choice "C", we can conclude that it is more important to test the household products than medicines, which is exactly what our conclusion says in the stimulus.

Answer choice "A" is tricky. I can totally see why you would consider it a contender the first time you read it. A good question to ask here would be how did you eliminate answer choice "C" and go for answer choice "A"? Assuming you didn't eliminate answer choice "C" right away, It's completely okay to have contenders and as you read more answer choices to find challengers to that contender. LSAT writers love to do this. They love giving us answer choices that would answer part of the problem or come close. It's natural to miss the details in such an answer choice the first time you read it, especially when the are written in a convoluted manner. That's where reassessment of answer choices comes in after you have identified contenders and challengers. It's important to have good form here.

I hope this helped.