AkashM
I feel this is more like an assumption question than a strengthen one. Please correct me if I am wrong.
The prompt tells us increasing oxygen intake is crucial for Tennis players and goes on to conclude that all athletes should do yoga. There could be two assumptions that can fill in the gap,
1. Yoga increases breathing capacity.
2. All athletes need to increase their breathing capacity, assuming that yoga helps them doing that.
Option B matches with the first assumption mentioned above and hence, is the correct answer.
Posted from my mobile deviceGreat job
AkashM! You cracked the code on this one! Kudos to you!
We also understand that assumption and strengthen questions can look very similar. In most cases, you can use the same tactics to answer both assumption and strengthen questions successfully! Here's the easiest way we can explain the difference:
Strengthen questions ask you to provide a plausible link between the premise and the conclusion. What you're actually doing here is determining what evidence would most strengthen the argument as a whole or some part of it - which includes the premise, assumptions, and the conclusion. In this case, the evidence we're looking for is that yoga increases breathing capacity. That doesn't necessarily have to be true 100% of the time for 100% of people doing yoga - but if there is a link between the two, then that gives us the "glue" we need to connect the premise and conclusion together.
Assumptions questions ask you to also provide a link between the premise and the conclusion. However, the major difference is that whatever option you choose
MUST be true 100% of the time for the argument to work at all. You're not providing evidence to strengthen the argument - you're telling us what has to be true for the argument to even exist or be worth making. If we were asking for an assumption here, we'd need a statement to say that "100% of people who do yoga have improve their breathing capacity."
Often, study guides will tell you that "Assumption" is the broader category, with strengtheners and weakeners as sub-categories. We find that they are, in fact, different, which is why we treat them differently. We hope this helps, and feel free to tag us at
EMPOWERgmatVerbal if you have any other questions!