PrepTest 159, Section 1, Question 4
A process of extracting caffeine from coffee without(31 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(13 more words not shown)
- AThe percentage of(21 more words not shown)
- BMany coffee drinkers(17 more words not shown)
- CThe taste of(16 more words not shown)
- DCoffee that is(10 more words not shown)
- EDuring the years(17 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Preserving the taste doesn't necessarily mean making the coffee taste good. What if the coffee already tasted bad?
There are other possibilities worth considering too. Perhaps people expected decaf to be unpleasant and judged it that way. Or perhaps the new product attracted people who hadn't liked coffee before. Their negative reaction wouldn't necessarily tell us that removing caffeine damaged the flavor.
What we’re looking for
The question asks us to explain how the two given facts could fit together: the process doesn't seriously compromise taste, yet many people dislike the resulting coffee. My first guess would be an expectation problem—people looking for something wrong with the decaf. But we should stay open to another explanation that preserves both facts. Saying the process actually ruined the taste would simply fight the first fact.
Working the answers
- A
More people drink only decaf now. That tells us about a change in popularity, not why people reported a bad taste when this product first appeared. It leaves the original puzzle intact.
- B
We're not trying to explain why someone refuses to try decaf. We're explaining the negative taste reports from people who did drink it. A person could avoid decaf because they wanted caffeine even while believing it tasted fine; that wouldn't account for the reports here.
- C
Food can affect the taste of coffee, but did these drinkers eat anything that made this coffee taste bad? C gives us a possible source of influence without telling us that the relevant influence occurred. We'd need a connection between the accompanying food and these particular bad-taste reports.
- D
A higher price might discourage a purchase. It doesn't, by itself, explain why people who drank the coffee thought it tasted bad. The puzzle concerns flavor, not whether the product was a good deal.
- ECorrect
Here's a different explanation from the expectation problem I anticipated: the processors started with low-quality beans. The caffeine-removal process could preserve the coffee's taste quite well and still leave us with unpleasant coffee. Preserving the flavor of a bad starting product doesn't improve that product. Now we can accept both that the process worked as described and that the customers disliked the result.
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