PrepTest 153, Section 3, Question 7
Advertisement: Honey Oat Puffs cereal is made with(42 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the advertisement's(12 more words not shown)
- Ainfers that a(16 more words not shown)
- Btreats a property(21 more words not shown)
- Cconfuses two distinct(5 more words not shown)
- Dconcludes that a(18 more words not shown)
- Econtains a premise(7 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
What else is in the bowl?
Whole-grain oats may be very good for us. But “Honey Oat Puffs” makes me wonder about the honey and sugar. Imagine taking those healthful oats and adding enough of other ingredients to offset their benefit. The oats wouldn't stop being healthful just because we mixed them with something else. The finished cereal, however, might be a poor choice for breakfast.
What we’re looking for
We don't know that this cereal actually has too much sugar. We don't need to prove that it does. The example shows why the experts' praise for oats doesn't settle the question about everything made with oats. The advertisement needs to tell us about the food people will actually eat, including the rest of its ingredients. That is the flaw I'd look for: the advertisement gives a property of one ingredient to the whole product without checking what else goes into the product.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
Oats are the ingredient; Honey Oat Puffs is the food containing it; being healthful is the property carried from one to the other. That move leaves out the other ingredients. Our hypothetical bowl could contain good oats and still fail to improve someone's diet, so the premise can be true without establishing the advertised benefit.
- B
This would involve treating a way to make food healthful as something every healthful food must have. For example, it would conclude that food without oats cannot be healthful. The advertisement never makes that claim. It argues that having a healthful ingredient makes this cereal healthful, not that lacking the ingredient makes all other foods unhealthy.
- C
'Healthful' means good for us in both the premise and the conclusion. What changes is the thing described: first the oats, then the cereal. Moving a property between those two things is the mistake; changing the meaning of the property is not.
- D
We aren't given observations of healthy people eating Honey Oat Puffs. The support comes from experts' assessment of oats. An argument saying 'healthy people eat this cereal, so the cereal must help make them healthy' would need evidence about those people's diets that this advertisement never offers.
- E
The premise doesn't already assume that eating Honey Oat Puffs improves people's diets. It makes the narrower claim that oats are healthful. The conclusion improperly extends that claim to a different object; it is not merely repeating its own assertion as support.
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