PrepTest 153, Section 2, Question 19
Trainer: An athlete developed lower back pain after(60 more words not shown)
The trainer's argument is vulnerable(10 more words not shown)
- AIt fails to(37 more words not shown)
- BIt fails to(23 more words not shown)
- CIt fails to(27 more words not shown)
- DIt overlooks the(25 more words not shown)
- EIt overlooks the(25 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Did the heating pad help, or did the pain simply go away while she happened to be using it?
Several explanations fit the sequence. Maybe she was going to recover with time regardless of either treatment. Maybe the stretching helped but took a few days to have an effect. Or perhaps she also used some other form of pain relief during the heating-pad period. The fact that improvement came afterward does not isolate the heating pad as the cause.
The trainer nevertheless uses that sequence to declare heating pads generally more effective than stretching. I would challenge the claim that we even know which treatment made the difference here.
What we’re looking for
The question asks for the exception among possible criticisms. Four choices should identify a real problem with the reasoning. We want the one that raises a different issue without undermining the stated conclusion.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
The conclusion concerns relieving pain, not healing the injury that caused it. A method could reduce pain effectively while doing little to repair the underlying problem. If heating pads were better for pain relief but worse for healing, the trainer's comparison about pain relief could still be true.
That distinction may matter when choosing treatment, but it is not a criticism of the particular conclusion being argued for. This is the exception: it changes what we are measuring.
- B
This is our natural-recovery objection. If the pain would often disappear after several days anyway, its disappearance during heating-pad use does not show that the pad made it disappear. The timing fits a cause other than either treatment, which weakens the trainer's attempted comparison.
- C
This catches another problem beyond the cause-and-effect issue I initially focused on. Even if we granted that the heating pad relieved this athlete's pain, would one athlete establish what generally works better for people with lower back pain?
The trainer moves from this person's experience to a broad comparison of treatments. Her response might be unusual. We would need a reason to think it represents the wider population before drawing that general conclusion. “Generally” does not mean every single person, but it still goes well beyond this one case.
- D
Back pain from different underlying causes could respond differently to the same method. Even if heat relieved this athlete's sports-related pain, we have no comparative evidence about pain from an unrelated cause, such as a tumor. Why should success in the first situation establish which method works better in the second? The trainer needs support for that broader comparison.
D challenges the generalization about pain relief across different causes. Unlike A, it does not switch the goal from relieving pain to healing an injury.
- E
The athlete tried particular ways of stretching. Other ways might have relieved the pain more effectively. She could follow one routine carefully while another routine would work better. Testing the first would not tell us how effective the second could be. The trainer has not established that heating pads outperform stretching as a general category.
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