Hi gullyboy09,Your instinct about the word
"consistently" is sharp, so let's use it rather than fight it.
Start with what the regulation actually did: it
offered a greater variety of foods,
including lower-calorie options. That's it. The whole plan to cut obesity rested on one hidden step - that students would
actually pick the lower-calorie foods. Availability alone changes nothing; consumption is what moves weight.
That's the gap
(E) fills. It says the expanded variety makes it hard for students to
consistently choose the healthier options - which means they keep gravitating to the higher-calorie picks on the bigger menu. If that's true, their overall calorie intake stays roughly where it was before, so obesity doesn't fall. Paradox resolved.
Now to your two objections:
-
"Harder isn't impossible - they might still choose healthy." In a resolve-the-paradox question, we
accept the choice as true and ask only, "does this explain the result?"
(E) tells us healthy eating is
not happening reliably. We don't get to soften it into "but maybe they manage anyway."
-
"Even inconsistent healthy choices should give some noticeable drop." Look at the bar the stimulus sets:
"no noticeable decrease." A few healthy picks scattered inside a diet still dominated by higher-calorie choices won't move the needle enough to be
noticeable.
(E) explains exactly why the effect stays below that threshold - the intended mechanism (choosing low-calorie food) never really kicks in.
A simpler parallel to lock it in:A gym adds dozens of new machines,
including treadmills, to help members lose weight - but members lose none. Why?
With so many options, members rarely stick with the treadmills. The treadmills were there; people just didn't use them consistently.
Same move: providing the healthy option does not equal people using it. That's the one link
(E) breaks, and it's why it best explains the discrepancy.
Answer: Egullyboy09
Hi
MartyMurray, I got this question in my GMATClub test, and option B was not present, and answer given is option E. But I am still not able to get how come E could be answer.
My reasoning is that even if
it makes harder but we really don't know if they are able to choose it or not. They might be facing challenges but eventually able to select it. Secondly, even if they are not able to choose "consistently", still one would expect to see the changes in obesity as doing something not consistently might not get us to 100% but noticeable changes are reasonably possible. So it really doesn't help IMO.