Q3 - Psychiatrist: Breaking any habit

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Strengthen

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: People who quit their cigarette addiction are more likely motivated by social pressure than health concerns.
Evidence: People who break an addictive habit are more likely motivated by immediate concerns than long-term ones.

Answer Anticipation:
Pretty easy to pre-phrase here, given the parallel nature of the evidence and the conclusion. Apparently, the author is thinking that social pressure is more an immediate concern and health concerns are more long-term concerns. In fact, the author already tells us, within the conclusion, that social pressure is an immediate concern. So we're really just missing that health concerns are a long-term concern

Correct Answer:
B

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This goes more in a Weaken direction. Since we're talking about an addictive cigarette habit, it would potentially pose a great health risk, which sounds more like the opposite of the conclusion.

(B) Yes! This is close to our prephrase. It's not immediate, thus it's longer-term.

(C) This makes it sound like CONTINUING to smoke (exacerbating health concerns) would relieve social pressure. That doesn't match the author's conversation. She is saying it's more likely that social pressure would make you quit than that health concerns would.

(D) This answer does nothing to address the conclusion's distinction between social pressure and health concerns.

(E) No effect. We're trying to support the idea that "social pressure > health concern", and this is just saying "they're both relevant!"

Takeaway/Pattern: The symbol repetition of "____ is more likely to be X than Y" in both the Evidence and the Conclusion makes it easy to see which ideas are being equated in the author's mind. When you are reading a Strengthen question's stimulus and 'hear' a bridge idea, it's very likely that the correct answer will simply provide some support for / confirmation of that bridge idea.

#officialexplanation

[sstainb]

Breaking a habit is difficult. And people breaking a habit are more likely to be motivated by immediate concerns then long-term concerns. People breaking a habit of smoking more likely motivated by social pressure (the immediate concern) then health (the long-term concern), since _____.

(A) seems irrelevant
(B) just states that health isn't an immediate concern
(C) seems vague
(D) also irrelevant
(E) could be true but "everyone" seems suspicious

I couldn't pick between B and E.

I can't understand why B would be correct when it only seems to reemphasize a point already stated. Though actually, I made the assumption that health was a long-term concern didn't I?! And so being a long-term concern health must not also be an immediate concern??

Ok, maybe I just talked myself through it now after the fact, but could I get a little more sound clarification??

[jolieyang]

The stimulus wants us to find an answer that strengthens the argument that people who break a habit are more likely to be motivated by immediate concerns than long-term. The argument then states that social pressure is an immediate concern and that health concern is not. Therefore, you need to find an answer that supports this view.

E) is wrong because it states that social pressure AND health concern are both equally important as motivators when the stimulus clearly says that social pressure is more of an immediate concern

B) is correct because it bolsters the psychiatrist's argument that health concern is indeed a long-term concern, not an immediate one. B rules out the possibility that health concerns are the motivating factor for people because most people who quit smoking are not facing an immediate problem ie lung cancer

Hope that helps!

[lhermary]

Can someone go into more detail as to why B is a better answer than E?

[fmuirhea]

Usually with these fill-in-the-blank questions, you're looking to provide the conclusion, but here you're asked to supply a premise. You can see this both from the question stem ("conclusion...is most strongly supported") and from the fact that the word "since" immediately precedes the blank - "since" is one of the common premise indicators.

So, let's flesh out the argument as it is so far:

P: those who break a habit more likely to be motivated by immediate concerns rather than long-term concerns
P: social pressure against smoking is an immediate concern
P: ?
C: those who succeed in quitting smoking are more likely to be motivated by social pressure than by health concerns

sstainb, as you mentioned, it's easy to trick yourself into thinking that the missing piece - health concerns are long-term concerns - was actually stated in the argument, but if you look back, it wasn't! It's heavily implied, and in fact is the blank you're looking to explicitly fill, which (B) does nicely.

(E) claims that there can only be two motivating factors in quitting smoking - social pressure or health concerns. It doesn't have to be true that there are only two options, because we're only comparing between social pressure and health concerns. Maybe money is the biggest motivating factor, but we can still generate the conclusion because it already specifically limits the scope to a comparison between social pressures and health concerns.

More to the point, (E) does not confirm the idea that health concerns are long-term, which is the big hole in the argument. It leaves open the possibility that health concerns are immediate, in which case we wouldn't know which of the two is more likely to motivate people to quit smoking.