PrepTest 112, Section 4, Question 22
In a recent study, a group of subjects(62 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(8 more words not shown)
- AAlcohol is metabolized(11 more words not shown)
- BIn the general(11 more words not shown)
- CAn increased amount(10 more words not shown)
- DBody fat gain(11 more words not shown)
- EThe proportion of(20 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Adding calories isn't the same as replacing calories. Let's put numbers on it so we can see what happened.
Use 100 as a simple baseline for each group's usual daily intake. This is just a scale for the comparison. The first group keeps its original 100 and adds 25 from alcohol, for a total of 125.
The second group replaces 25 of its original intake with alcohol: 75 from other sources plus 25 from alcohol, still totaling 100.
I'd expect the group consuming more calories to gain more fat. But both groups gain the same amount. That makes me wonder what else is happening. Perhaps the first group is exercising more. That's a possible explanation, not something the study tells us.
What we’re looking for
The question asks what is most strongly supported, so we shouldn't pick an imagined explanation as though it were a reported finding. The result points toward the broader idea that calorie intake alone doesn't tell the whole story about fat gain. We have different intake levels and the same fat gain; we don't yet know why.
Working the answers
- A
The study doesn't compare how quickly alcohol and other foods or drinks are metabolized. It reports changes in intake and body fat. We can't turn that result into a claim about the speed of a process the study doesn't measure.
- B
This makes a much bigger claim than the study supports. Even if alcohol contributes to fat gain in these subjects, that doesn't establish it as the primary cause of fat gain across the general population. We'd need information about other people and other causes to make that comparison.
- C
Be careful: gaining body fat and gaining total body weight aren't identical claims. C says someone can gain fat without gaining weight. That could happen if some other component of body weight decreased, but the passage doesn't tell us that happened. We aren't given the subjects' changes in total weight, so we can't draw C from these findings.
- DCorrect
This captures the limited conclusion the comparison supports: the number of calories consumed isn't the only thing that matters for fat gain. The group with increased intake didn't gain more fat than the similar group whose total intake stayed the same.
D doesn't choose a specific explanation. It doesn't say exercise caused the result or that calories don't matter. It says we need more than calorie intake alone to account for the pattern reported here.
- E
Go back to the numbers. Both groups receive 25 units from alcohol, but those units make up different shares of their totals: 25 out of 125 is 20 percent, while 25 out of 100 is 25 percent. Despite those different proportions, the fat gain is the same.
That doesn't show that alcohol's proportion of the diet matters more than the total calories from alcohol. The study gives us neither a different outcome tied to the different proportions nor a basis for ranking the importance of those two measures. E claims a comparison we haven't established.
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