PrepTest 132, Section 2, Question 5
Area resident: Childhood lead poisoning has declined steadily(54 more words not shown)
The area resident's argument is(4 more words not shown)
- Arelies on statistical(7 more words not shown)
- Brelies on an(11 more words not shown)
- Cfails to consider(13 more words not shown)
- Dtakes for granted(9 more words not shown)
- Etakes for granted(15 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
What if the lead comes from somewhere besides the walls?
Removing lead paint sounds helpful. Banning it doesn't make old paint disappear, and the passage explicitly says the paint still in these homes poses a significant health hazard. Let's accept that problem. The jump is from removing one hazard to eradicating childhood lead poisoning altogether.
Imagine every affected wall is fixed, but a child puts a toy train containing lead in their mouth. Fixing the walls wouldn't remove the lead from the toy. That's a possible counterexample, not a claim about any particular toy. It shows why we need to ask about other sources of exposure.
What we’re looking for
The earlier decline doesn't settle that question either. Lead poisoning fell after gasoline and paint restrictions, but we haven't been told that those were the only sources. The flaw answer should capture what the resident has left out: another source could keep poisoning children even after the proposed cleanup.
Working the answers
- A
We have no reason to reject the statistic about homes containing lead paint. It could be perfectly accurate and the conclusion could still fail because children encounter lead elsewhere. The problem is what the resident concludes from the evidence, not a demonstrated defect in the evidence itself.
- B
This would mean assuming the very thing the argument is supposed to establish. For example: the cleanup will end poisoning because poisoning will end after the cleanup. The resident instead offers facts about a decline and remaining hazards. Those facts don't establish the conclusion, but they aren't merely a repetition of it.
- CCorrect
Other significant sources of lead could remain. The toy example shows the problem: removing paint from homes doesn't remove every possible route by which lead reaches children. C identifies a possibility the resident overlooked; it doesn't need to prove that another source actually exists.
- D
Even if removing the paint cost a billion dollars per home, we could still ask whether doing it would eliminate poisoning. The conclusion is about what would happen if we removed the paint. It isn't a claim that the cleanup would be affordable. Cost doesn't identify the mistake in that prediction.
- E
Children don't have to live in every affected home. They might visit a grandparent's house, for example. Removing hazardous paint could protect children without every home having a child resident. More fundamentally, who lives in those homes doesn't settle whether other sources of lead would remain afterward.
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