PrepTest 122, Section 1, Question 12
Poor nutrition is at the root of the(77 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(6 more words not shown)
- ASome of the(16 more words not shown)
- BDietary changes are(17 more words not shown)
- CMany young offenders(19 more words not shown)
- DA further study(19 more words not shown)
- EThe violent inmates(18 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Is poor nutrition making these young people violent, or does something else help explain both their food choices and their behavior?
Someone with poor impulse control might choose unhealthy food and act violently. In that case, the two behaviors would go together without the food causing the violence. So the initial observation doesn't settle the claim.
The experiment is more interesting. Researchers changed some violent inmates' diets, and their behavior improved over four months. That does give the nutrition explanation more support. Still, what else happened during those months? Perhaps therapy, education, or some other change helped their behavior. We need to know whether the diet accounts for the improvement rather than merely occurring alongside it.
What we’re looking for
We're asked to strengthen the argument. Repeating the result in another study could help. So could an explanation of how improved nutrition affects behavior. More generally, I want evidence that makes the diet itself a better explanation for the change. “Confirm” is a stronger claim than the experiment has earned so far, but we only need to add support.
Working the answers
- A
A long history of violent crimes tells us more about the inmates' past behavior. It doesn't tell us what caused their improvement during the experiment. We still need to distinguish the effect of the diet from other things that could have changed.
- B
Cheap and easy isn't the same as effective. A dietary program could be inexpensive to introduce and still have no effect on violence. The argument concerns whether nutrition changes behavior, not whether the program would be practical to adopt.
- C
Eating one low-nutrient food sometime before a crime is weak evidence about a person's overall nutrition. Plenty of people could eat such a food without becoming violent, and an otherwise nutritious diet could include it. C gives us a loose association without the comparison needed to isolate nutrition's effect.
- D
This association is relevant, but choosing the diet introduces another explanation. People trying to change their lives might both choose healthier food and avoid violence. Their decision to behave differently could explain the two choices. D doesn't show that the food produced a change in behavior, so it offers much less support than a comparison within the experiment.
- ECorrect
The violent inmates whose diets weren't changed didn't improve. Now we have a useful contrast: improvement among those placed on the high-nutrient diet, but no improvement among the other violent inmates at the same institution.
That makes a general change affecting the whole institution a less convincing explanation. If the passage of time or a shared institutional change were doing all the work, why didn't the other group improve too? E doesn't eliminate every possible difference between the groups, but it makes the dietary change a much stronger explanation than the additional loose associations in C and D.
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