PrepTest 114, Section 1, Question 23
Activist: Food producers irradiate food in order to(72 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the activist's(6 more words not shown)
- Atreats a failure(13 more words not shown)
- Btreats methodological flaws(16 more words not shown)
- Cfails to consider(21 more words not shown)
- Dfails to consider(16 more words not shown)
- Efails to establish(18 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
A bad safety study doesn't establish that the food is dangerous.
When we're told food is irradiated to extend its shelf life, I'd want to know whether the process has unwanted effects. The five studies conclude that it is safe. Before treating that as settled, I could ask how well animal results apply to people, or whether a study ran long enough to notice delayed effects. Those are questions to investigate, not defects we've already proved exist.
Then we do get a fact about the evidence: independent scientists found serious problems with the studies' methods. That gives us a reason not to rely on their reassuring conclusion. But where is the evidence for the opposite conclusion?
What we’re looking for
The food could still be safe despite having been studied badly. Or it could be unsafe. Discrediting these studies doesn't decide between those possibilities. For the flaw question, I'd look for that leap from failing to establish safety to claiming to establish danger.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
The claim is that irradiated food is safe. The failure to prove that claim comes from the serious flaws in the studies offered to support it. The denial of the claim is that the food is not safe.
Put those pieces together in ordinary language: “These studies don't show that it's safe, so it must be unsafe.” The second part doesn't follow. The activist needs evidence of danger, not just a reason to distrust evidence of safety.
- B
The activist doesn't conclude that a sound study is impossible. A better study could still be designed, for all this argument says. The conclusion concerns whether the food is safe, not whether researchers are currently capable of investigating it properly.
- C
We aren't dealing with a study whose methods have no serious flaws; the passage explicitly says these studies do. More importantly, even if a well-designed study could give only weak support, that wouldn't explain the leap the activist makes. Weak or unreliable support for safety still isn't proof of danger.
- D
This resembles one of our initial questions about the studies. Animal safety might not establish human safety. But the activist's conclusion is that the food is unsafe for humans, not that it is safe because animals tolerated it. D could challenge the researchers' reassurance; it doesn't identify the activist's mistake in declaring the opposite.
- E
We can accept the finding that the studies' methods were seriously flawed without ranking the two groups' overall knowledge of irradiation. Even if the independent scientists knew much more, their criticism of the methods wouldn't itself prove the food dangerous. E doesn't address the unsupported step from bad evidence to the opposite conclusion.
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