PrepTest 154, Section 4, Question 10
Columnist: The dangers of mountain climbing have been(47 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the columnist's(8 more words not shown)
- Awhether the number(13 more words not shown)
- Bwhether the number(13 more words not shown)
- Cwhether the number(15 more words not shown)
- Dhow many climbers(18 more words not shown)
- Ehow many climbing(13 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Fewer than 200 deaths out of how many climbers? That's the missing piece as soon as the columnist gives the Mount Everest figure. To see why it matters, use 200 deaths as a round-number illustration. Out of 500 climbers, that would be 40 percent. Out of two million climbers, it would be 0.01 percent. The same number of deaths can describe very different risks.
Then we get more than 7,000 traffic deaths in France in one year. That's a larger death count, but what if millions of people traveled on those roads while relatively few attempted Everest over the 80 years? The activity with more total deaths could still have a much lower chance of death for each participant.
What we’re looking for
The question asks what the columnist fails to consider. I want the sizes of the groups being compared: climbers on Everest and people traveling on French roads during the relevant periods. Without those numbers, the comparison doesn't establish that mountain climbing's dangers have been exaggerated. Counting deaths isn't enough to tell someone how risky an activity is.
Working the answers
- A
A particularly bad year for French traffic could be worth asking about. But learning how 2002 compares with other years still wouldn't tell us how many people traveled on the roads. The central problem remains: we're comparing totals without the information needed to compare the risk faced by participants.
- B
France might have more traffic deaths than another country simply because more people travel on its roads. Another comparison of death counts doesn't solve the missing-group-size problem. We need to know how the fatality totals relate to the number of people exposed to each danger.
- C
Better safety measures might reduce future climbing deaths. That doesn't tell us whether the historical numbers justify the columnist's present claim about exaggerated danger. The issue is what the comparison establishes, not what could be done to make climbing safer.
- DCorrect
These are the missing group sizes. With them, we could put the death counts in context and compare the proportion of people who died. Without them, the smaller Everest total could conceal a much greater risk to each climber. D identifies why the offered comparison doesn't support the columnist's judgment about danger.
- E
Other mountains are relevant to a broad discussion of mountain climbing, so this isn't a random topic. But another death count wouldn't repair the comparison we were given. Even for Everest, which the author calls one of the most dangerous mountains, the total is uninterpretable as a rate without the number of climbers. D addresses that direct defect in the evidence.
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