PrepTest 123, Section 2, Question 21
Driver: My friends say I will one day(48 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the driver's(12 more words not shown)
- Ainfers a cause(4 more words not shown)
- Brelies on a(5 more words not shown)
- Cmisinterprets evidence that(11 more words not shown)
- Dmistakes a condition(13 more words not shown)
- Erelies on a(6 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Will changing the car change how you drive it?
The friends are worried because this person drives recklessly. The driver's response is to find vehicles with lower accident rates and propose buying one. But perhaps those lower rates have more to do with who drives the vehicles than with the vehicles themselves.
Imagine cautious drivers tend to choose minivans and people who want to drive fast tend to choose sports cars. Then minivans could have lower accident rates even if switching vehicles did nothing to make an individual driver more careful. Our driver could trade cars and keep taking exactly the same risks.
What we’re looking for
That doesn't prove the car makes no difference. It shows why the reported pattern isn't enough to establish that buying a minivan will lower this driver's risk. For the flaw question, I'd look for that jump from “these vehicles have fewer accidents” to “the vehicle is what makes the difference.” The driver hasn't separated the effect of the car from the effect of the person behind the wheel.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
The correlation is the lower accident rate associated with minivans and larger sedans. The cause the driver assumes is the vehicle itself: change to a minivan and the risk will fall. But driver behavior could account for the association. If the same person keeps driving recklessly, the lower rate among other minivan drivers doesn't establish a lower risk for this person.
- B
We don't know that the research used a narrow sample. It might cover a huge number of drivers. Even excellent data showing a difference in accident rates would leave the question of what causes that difference. To choose B, we'd need some reason to think the sample itself was inadequate.
- C
The driver concludes that the risk would be lower, not that an accident would become impossible. The friends' prediction of an eventual accident isn't the conclusion we're evaluating. C doesn't describe the driver's move from accident rates to the proposed benefit of switching cars.
- D
The driver doesn't take something that is enough to produce a result and conclude that the result cannot happen without it. For example, we aren't told that a minivan can provide safety and then told that only minivans can be safe. The actual mistake is treating the association between vehicle type and accident rate as evidence of the vehicle's causal effect.
- E
We aren't told the research comes from an uninformed source. The accident-rate findings could be accurate and well researched. The driver's interpretation would still be questionable because the findings don't isolate the car's effect from differences among its drivers. Don't replace the demonstrated problem with an unsupported suspicion about the source.
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