PrepTest 107, Section 1, Question 1
Politician: The funding for the new nationwide health-awareness(87 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(11 more words not shown)
- Awhether the politician's(10 more words not shown)
- Bwhether smokers are(18 more words not shown)
- Cwhether the effects(17 more words not shown)
- Dwhether it is(19 more words not shown)
- Ewhether the proposed(13 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Smoking causes serious health problems. Does that mean smokers should pay for this particular campaign?
I want the politician to explain that connection. What if the campaign concerns healthy eating or exercise? And why focus on smokers? People can also harm their health by eating poorly, getting little exercise, or not sleeping enough. Those possibilities make me question the proposed burden even while accepting that smoking is unhealthy.
The smoker makes a similar objection. Regularly eating high-fat, high-cholesterol foods also causes serious health problems. But, the smoker says, we wouldn't reasonably make the people buying those foods finance this campaign.
Think of someone buying a fast-food meal: if we reject the funding argument for that person, why accept the same reasoning for the smoker?
What we’re looking for
Now we're asked where the two speakers disagree. We don't need to decide which policy is actually fair. The politician supports making smokers fund the campaign through higher cigarette taxes; the smoker challenges that proposal as unreasonable. That's the disagreement we can establish. We don't know whether the politician would also support taxing unhealthy food.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
The politician explicitly calls the proposal reasonable, while the smoker uses the food comparison to challenge its reasonableness. Put the same question to both: is this proposed way of funding the campaign unreasonable? The politician says no; the smoker says yes.
- B
Neither speaker compares people's awareness of the risks. Smokers and people who eat these foods could both know exactly what the risks are and still disagree about who should finance the campaign. We cannot assign them opposing views on an awareness comparison they never make.
- C
The smoker says the foods cause as many serious health problems as smoking. But the politician never compares smoking with these foods. The politician's claim that smoking causes many problems doesn't establish that it causes more than the foods do. We need two conflicting positions, and we have only one speaker's comparison.
- D
The smoker does not say smokers receive no benefit from the campaign. The objection concerns whether an unhealthy habit justifies making its practitioners pay. Changing the topic to people who don't benefit from government programs gives us a different funding argument.
- E
They aren't arguing about whether the tax would efficiently raise the money. A tax might work perfectly as a source of funding and still strike the smoker as unfair. The disagreement is about whether imposing this burden is reasonable, not the efficiency of collecting it.
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