"Surprising" Phenomenon
Why are researchers warning that widespread use of the antidote could be dangerous, even though it has no serious side effects and is currently effective at limiting chicken pox?
Objective
The correct answer should tell us some negative effect of widespread use of the antidote. If we don’t have any negative effect from widespread use of the antidote, it will be difficult to explain why researchers are calling its widespread use dangerous.
A
The drug is extremely expensive and would be difficult to make widely available.
The fact that the drug will be difficult to apply widely doesn’t tell me why its widespread use would be dangerous.
B
The drug has to be administered several times a day, so patient compliance is likely to be low.
Unlikelihood of patient compliance doesn’t tell us why widespread use would be dangerous. Maybe patients wouldn’t get the full benefit; that doesn’t make the antidote dangerous if widely used.
C
The drug does not prevent the spread of chicken pox from one person to another, even when the drug eventually cures the disease in the first person.
But if the drug cures the disease in an individual person, why would widespread use be dangerous? We could just cure the disease in many individual people with widespread use.
D
When misused by taking larger-than-prescribed doses, the drug can be fatal.
Risk of overdose is present even when use isn’t widespread. There’s no reason widespread use would increase any particular individual’s chance of an overdose.
E
Use of the drug contributes to the development of deadlier forms of chicken pox that are resistant to the drug.
As the drug is used by and more people, the risk of more resistant, deadlier forms of chicken pox becomes greater. This helps connect how widely the antidote is used with danger, unlike (D).
Summarize Argument
The researchers implicitly conclude that drinking just two cups of coffee per day gives them less risk of heart disease than drinking five or more cups per day. Why? Because their research found that people who drink five or more cups daily have an elevated risk of heart disease.
Notable Assumptions
The researchers assume that people who drink two cups of coffee per day have less risk of heart disease than those who drink five or more per day. They also assume there’s no factor besides age and smoking habits that is associated with coffee intake and would explain the health effect.
A
The study found that for people who drank three or more cups of coffee daily, the additional risk of heart disease increased with each extra daily cup.
This is irrelevant because it does not apply to people drinking two or fewer cups per day. It’s possible that people who drink two cups daily have an even higher risk of heart disease than people who drink five cups.
B
Per capita coffee consumption has been declining over the past 20 years because of the increasing popularity of soft drinks and also because of health worries.
The proportion of people in the world drinking coffee is not relevant to the researchers’ decision. Lots of coffee can have negative health effects even if it’s less popular than it used to be.
C
The study did not collect information that would show whether variations in level of coffee consumption are directly related to variations in level of stress, a major causal factor in heart disease.
This introduces an alternative explanation for the study’s results that challenges the researchers’ conclusion. If people who are stressed tend to consume lots of coffee, then simply reducing coffee intake may not reduce the risk of heart disease.
D
Subsequent studies have consistently shown that heavy smokers consume coffee at about 3 times the rate of nonsmokers.
The study controlled for smoking, so a relationship between smoking habits and coffee consumption should not have influenced the results.
E
Subsequent studies have shown that heavy coffee consumption tends to cause an elevated blood-cholesterol level, an immediate indicator of increased risk of heart disease.
This explains why drinking more coffee increases the risk of heart disease, without challenging the researchers’ conclusion. It does not imply that variations in blood-cholesterol levels confounded the study’s results.