very overweight people

[harika.apu]

what is the relation between consuming calories and burning calories.

if you eat more food than you burn, you get bigger; if you eat less food than you burn, you get smaller; etc.

i.e., the relationship(s) you've known since you were probably 6 or 7 years old.

Thank you

[michail.palagaschwili]

[quote="gmathanoifall2010"]Researchers have found that when very overweight people, who tend to have relatively low metabolic rates, lose weight primarily through dieting, their metabolisms generally remain unchanged. They will thus burn significantly fewer calories at the new weight than do people whose weight is normally at that level. Such newly thin persons will, therefore, ultimately regain weight until their body size again matches their metabolic rate.

The conclusion of the argument above depends on which of the following assumptions?

(A) Relatively few very overweight people who have dieted down to a new weight tend to continue to consume substantially fewer calories than do people whose normal weight is at that level.

A Fat guy can burn only 1250 callories a day, that's why his food intake (diet) is equivalent to 1000 callories a day.
Now, he's thinner, but the conclusion is that he'll have a Yo-Yo effect, [because he'll still burn only 1250 cal. but released from the diet he starts eating much more (2000) callories] --> it's an assumtion, who said that he won't stay on track (looking at his "Before" picture), and eat only 1000 callories a day, as he used to.

[RonPurewal]

sorry, i can't tell what you are trying to ask.

what is your question?

[SharayuR89]

[size=200]i[/size]

the negation of choice (a) would be "lots of these people will continue to eat super-low calories".
if that's true, then the author is going to be wrong, since those people won't regain weight.

Hi Ron,

With this explanation, I totally understand why option a is the correct answer. But I am having trouble formulating the negative of this option. I negated it in this way "Relatively few very overweight people who have dieted down to a new weight tend to continue to consume substantially more calories than do people whose normal weight is at that level." With the above mentioned negation, it becomes difficult to comprehend and so I missed this question.

Can you please help me with coming with correct negations?

Thanks in advance!

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

This problem is made tricky by the convoluted expressions in the answer choices. Take answer choice A:

Relatively few very overweight people who have dieted down to a new weight tend to continue to consume substantially fewer calories than do people whose normal weight is at that level.

You need to be able to cut through all the "noise" and ask: 'What's the opposite of relatively few people doing something?'. As Ron states, it's lots of people doing the same thing.

However, don't be a slave to a method: take time to understand the argument and use your own critical faculties to assess it. I'm sure you noticed that the conclusion is "Such newly thin persons will, therefore, ultimately regain weight until their body size again matches their metabolic rate." You need to read arguments critically, which is to say that you engage with them and comment on them as you read them. My reaction on reading this for the first time (just now), was to think: "Hang on, these newly thin people might still have slow metabolisms, but they'll only gain weight if they actually eat lots of food." That thought helped prepare me for the correct answer, regardless of the negation test.

[SharayuR89]

Sage Pearce-Higgins, thank you for your response!

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]