GetThisDone wrote:
A certain pharmaceutical firm claims that its dietary supplement, Dietol, is highly effective in helping obese people lose weight and improve physical endurance. The company supports this claim by providing the results of a recent experiment that involved over 800 subjects suffering from obesity. During the 9-week experiment, each of the subjects was required to take a regular dose of Dietol every day immediately after their daily 2-hour workouts supervised by a professional fitness instructor. As a result of the experiment, the subjects lost an average of 12 pounds of weight per person, and over 95% of all participants demonstrated higher physical endurance.
The answer to which of the following questions would be most helpful in evaluating the conclusion of the pharmaceutical company?
A. What was the daily dose of Dietol that the subjects were required to take?
B. What was the maximum weight lost by any participant during the 9-week program?
C. What would be the average weight loss and the improvement in endurance in a group of subjects with similar characteristics involved in the same physical fitness program but not taking Dietol?
D. What was the average age among the subjects participating in the experiment?
E. Did the majority of subjects experience a significant improvement in physical strength?
Main CR Qs link -
https://gmatclub.com/forum/cr-qs-600-700 ... 31508.htmlOFFICIAL EXPLANATION
The pharmaceutical company claims that Dietol is highly effective in helping people lose weight and increase their physical endurance. However, since the regular intake of Dietol was accompanied by daily workouts under professional supervision, it is unclear whether the results of the experiment should be credited to the effects of Dietol or the rigorous fitness program in which the subjects participated. Thus, in order to evaluate the conclusion about the effectiveness of Dietol, it would be useful to separate these two effects and to see what result, if any, is attributable to Dietol alone.
(A) While the answer to this question could be helpful in estimating the required doses of Dietol, the actual amount of the supplement taken by participants provides little information about its effectiveness.
(B) Knowing the maximum weight loss is unlikely to be helpful in evaluating the effectiveness of the supplement, as the maximum weight loss among the 800 participants is unlikely to be representative of the typical result and provides little information about the effectiveness of Dietol.
(C) CORRECT. This answer choice underscores the importance of separating the effects of the physical program from those resulting from Dietol in evaluating the overall result of the experiment. For example, if a group of subjects with similar characteristics would be able to achieve comparable results just by repeating the fitness program over the 9-week experiment, this outcome would cast serious doubts on the claim of the pharmaceutical company about the effectiveness of Dietol.
(D) Since the company does not make a claim about Dietol’s effectiveness for a specific age group, the information about the average age is beyond the scope of this argument.
(E) Note that the pharmaceutical company claims that Dietol will help obese people lose weight and improve endurance. No claim is made about the supplement’s effect on physical strength. Therefore, information about the improvement in physical strength is unrelated to the conclusion.
_________________