nahid78 wrote:
Sheila: Health experts generally agree that smoking a tobacco product for many years is very likely to be harmful to the smoker’s health.
Tim: On the contrary, smoking has no effect on health at all: although my grandfather smoked three cigars a day from the age of fourteen, he died at age ninety-six.
A major weakness of Tim’s counterargument is that his counterargument
(A) attempts to refute a probabilistic conclusion by claiming the existence of a single counterexample
(B) challenges expert opinion on the basis of specific information unavailable to experts in the field
(C) describes an individual case that is explicitly discounted as an exception to the experts’ conclusion
(D) presupposes that longevity and health status are unrelated to each other in the general population
(E) tacitly assumes that those health experts who are in agreement on this issue arrived at that agreement independently of one another
OFFICIAL EXPLANATION
(A) Yes. Sheila does not claim that smoking is
necessarily harmful to one’s health, just that smoking is
very likely to be harmful to one’s health. Hence, one counterexample is poor evidence against Sheila’s claim.
(B) No. We cannot determine whether the experts had information about the cause of death of Tim’s grandfather.
(C) No. There is no information in the passage to indicate that the case of Tim’s grandfather has been discounted.
(D) No. Tim assumes the opposite. Sheila argues that smoking is unhealthy, and Tim disagrees based on his grandfather’s longevity. He assumes that a long life indicates good health.
(E) No. Tim’s counterexample is intended to challenge the claim of the experts; it is not concerned with how the experts arrived at their conclusion.