arvindg wrote:
I chose C because (I thought) it brings out a key difference between the asbestos and the RSI scenarios. If the companies (employers) had given adequate rest time, then their employees would not have developed RSI. This places the blame on the employers instead of the computer equipment manufacturers (who are being sued).
I get the line of thinking that results in the answer A, but it would be useful to know how/why to rule out an answer such as C.
C might be a valid reason not to find the computer manufacturers liable, but it's irrelevant regarding the consolidation of the cases, which is the issue at hand.
In fact, if C were more strongly worded (more on that below), it might actually strengthen the argument to consolidate, since the same issue would arise in every case. Basically, the judge could preside over every case against the computer manufacturers together and throw them out
en masse for the same reason, saving taxpayers the cost of hundreds of different trials.
Further, C does not bring out a key difference between the two types of cases - it provides no information at all about the cause of injury in the asbestos cases. Since C only provides info about one of the two, it's impossible to classify it as a "key difference" indicator.
Another reason to eliminate C is its weak language. For weakening questions, the general rules is that we want a powerful reason to doubt the conclusion. Qualified language, such as "one of the most common", generally indicates wrong answers on strengthen and weaken questions.
For example, what exactly does "one of the most common causes" mean? It could mean that it's true 80% of the time. However, it could also mean that there are 100 different causes and, at a 5% occurrence rate, this explanation is among the most common 2 or 3 of those 100. Since we can't quantify C without outside information, it can't be the right answer.
As a small aside, assumption and inference questions have the exact opposite trap; for those question types, we typically avoid extreme wording in the answers.