Q7 - Advertisement: Honey Oat Puffs cereal is made

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: If most people ate Honey Oat Puffs (HOP) for breakfast, they'd have a healthier diet.
Evidence: HOP is made with whole-grain oats, which are such a healthy food that they're healthier than most of the foods in a typical diet.

Answer Anticipation:
How can we possibly argue that Honey Puffs aren't going to make our diet healthier? Mom, would you like to take this one? The cereal has whole-grain oats, which are totes healthful!

Patrick's Mom: That's great, dear, but they also have 20g of sugar in every serving. The upside of oats is outweighed by the downside of sugar / sodium / what have you.

Correct Answer:
A

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) YES. This argument does conclude that a food will have a certain property (HOP will make most people's diets healthier) based on a premise that an ingredient in HOP (the whole-grain oats) has the property of being "healthier than most foods in a typical diet".

(B) There is no conditional logic in this argument, so we needn't entertain this Conditional Logic (Nec vs. Suff) flaw answer.

(C) This was not an Equivocation. "healthful" is being used consistently.

(D) This was not a Correlation / Causation flaw. The argument does conclude that HOP contributes to health, but not based on a premise that said "HOP tends to be part of the diets of healthy people". The author states that whole-grain oats are healthy, based on the opinion of health experts.

(E) This was not a Circular argument. The conclusion is about cereal, while the evidence is about oats. The conclusion is not restating a premise. And none of the premises presuppose the truth of the conclusion.

Takeaway/Pattern: Here we go ... It's a Famous Flaw jamboree! All five answers were from the 10 Famous Flaws: Part vs. Whole, Nec vs. Suff (Conditional Logic flaw), Equivocation, Correlation / Causality, Circular. By learning our 10 famous flaws, both what they are and how they sound in answer choices, we should have been able to write off most of these wrong answers quickly. Part vs. Whole arguments usually use the same adjective/trait in both the premise and the conclusion. So this argument was saying "O is one of the ingredients of HOP. O has property 'healthier than most'. So HOP has property 'healthier than most'."

#officialexplanation