PrepTest 103, Section 2, Question 12
The higher the average fat intake among the(40 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(6 more words not shown)
- AThe differences in(15 more words not shown)
- BThe countries with(14 more words not shown)
- CCancer is a(12 more words not shown)
- DThe countries with(15 more words not shown)
- EAn individual resident(20 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Do people get more cancer because they eat more fat, or are these countries different in some other relevant way?
The passage gives us a pattern across countries. High average fat intake goes with higher cancer incidence, and low average fat intake goes with lower incidence. That tells us the two vary together. It does not tell us what produces the pattern.
Perhaps countries with higher fat intake also have more smoking or greater exposure to harmful substances. Or a difference associated with wealth might affect both diet and disease. Those are possibilities to investigate, not established explanations. We could even ask whether an illness changes what someone wants to eat, rather than assuming the diet caused the illness.
What we’re looking for
The advice to individuals treats reducing fat as a way to reduce cancer risk. For a weakener, I want another plausible explanation of the country-level pattern. If something else accounts for the cancer difference, changing fat intake would not necessarily remove the relevant risk.
Working the answers
- A
Traditional diets could explain why countries differ in fat intake. That does not tell us whether the fat causes the cancer difference. The question is not simply why people eat differently; it is whether changing that part of their diet would reduce the risk the author identifies.
- B
This resembles the possibility that first came to mind: perhaps something associated with wealth explains the pattern. But wealth by itself does not identify the relevant exposure or behavior. We still have to supply a further connection from being in a wealthy country to increased cancer risk. Keep B in consideration, but compare it with an answer that points to a more direct alternative.
- C
Cancer can be a prominent cause of death in low-fat-intake countries while being an even greater problem elsewhere. Imagine it accounts for twenty of every hundred deaths in one group and fifty in another. It could be prominent in both.
Those hypothetical death figures are not the incidence rates the passage gives us. They illustrate why “prominent cause of death” does not erase the reported comparison or establish what causes it. C does not supply a competing explanation of the fat-and-cancer pattern.
- DCorrect
Environmental pollution supplies a more direct competing explanation than wealth alone. The high-fat-intake countries also have the highest pollution levels, so exposure to that pollution could help explain their higher cancer incidence.
The contrast with B matters. For wealth to explain the pattern, we still need to say what about wealth creates the relevant risk. D identifies an environmental exposure to investigate rather than leaving that step unstated. It does not prove that pollution causes all the cancers or that fat has no effect. It gives us a reason to doubt that the dietary difference is what the comparison isolates.
- E
A country's average does not describe every resident. A person in a high-fat-intake country could eat little fat; we should not assign the national average to that individual.
But E tells us nothing about that person's cancer risk or what would happen if the person changed fat intake. It therefore does less than D to challenge the proposed causal explanation. Variation within a country, by itself, does not show whether fat contributes to cancer risk.
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