Although high cholesterol levels have been associated with the develop

EXPLANATION FROM Fox LSAT

Whoaaaaaaa, what?! The conclusion here is, “There is no reason for anyone to make dietary changes for the sake of preventing heart disease.” That is some crazy nonsense right there. Look how big and bold and absolute it is! There’s no way this can possibly be justified by the premises. Let’s see if we can figure out what happened here.

The first sentence is just silly. It’s like saying, “Many people survive gunshot wounds, and many people without gunshot wounds die.” If you go on to conclude, from that evidence, that gunshot wounds don’t cause death, you are an idiot. This flaw appears time and time again on the LSAT. Remember: correlations can still be causal even when the correlation is not a perfect one-to-one relationship.

Is that what the argument did? Well, maybe. The argument does eventually conclude with “don’t change your diet to prevent heart disease.” Part (but not all) of the support for this argument is the fact that high cholesterol and heart disease do not have a perfect one-to-one correlation. So let’s keep an eye on that.

The next sentence brings up a previously unmentioned factor, the “blood particle lipoprotein (a).” The argument says lipoprotein (a) is correlated with heart disease. Okay, fine. The next sentence says dietary changes that affect cholesterol do not affect lipoprotein (a). So what?

The logic now looks parallel to something like this: “Gunshot wounds are correlated with death, but it’s not a perfect one-to-one correlation. Cancer is also correlated with death. Taking steps to avoid gunshot wounds does nothing to reduce your risk of cancer. Therefore there’s no point in taking steps to avoid gunshot wounds.” This, my friends, is stupid.

There was a lot going on here, so I’m not sure we can articulate the flaw exactly before looking at the answer choices. Still, we can try. It might be something like, “The argument assumes that if there are multiple health risks, there is no benefit to avoiding one particular health risk.” The answer could either be that, or something close to it. Let’s see.

A) Hmm. This isn’t what we were looking for, so we have to move on. This just seems like grabbing a couple terms from the argument and crossing them up into something that might sound attractive but doesn’t actually make sense.

B) Again, this isn’t what we were looking for. Furthermore, the argument does cite a correlation between lipoprotein (a) and heart disease, which sure seems like “evidence for a link.” If the argument doesn’t even do this, then this cannot be the flaw the argument makes.

C) This sounds pretty good. The argument does, in the first sentence, say that “high cholesterol levels have been associated with the development of heart disease.” And then the argument ends up concluding that dietary changes to reduce cholesterol to prevent heart disease are useless. I’m worried about the word “ignored” in Answer C, because that’s a pretty specific accusation. Still, C is the best answer so far. At this point I’m comfortable enough with C that I’m hoping D and E are both terrible.

D) This one is clearly a trap, because “other health problems” are not what the argument was talking about. The conclusion was specifically about heart disease, so this can’t be our answer.

E) This is just a red herring. Arguments do not have to always fully explain every single one of their premises. (If they did, then every argument would end up being encyclopedic in length and scope.)

It looks like C comes closest to describing a flaw that is actually in the argument. We could be comfortable making C’s accusation against the speaker: “Hey dumbass, you just said that high cholesterol causes heart disease, and now you’re telling me that eating less lard will not reduce my risk of heart disease? You have presented, but ignored, evidence that high cholesterol contributes to heart disease.”

It’s not exactly what we predicted, but C is our answer.