Bunuel wrote:
People were asked in a survey how old they felt. They replied, almost unanimously despite a great diversity of ages, with a number that was 75 percent of their real age. There is, however, a problem in understanding this sort of response. For example, suppose it meant that a 48-year-old man was claiming to feel as he felt at 36. But at age 36 he would have said he felt like a man of 27, and at 27 he would have said he felt just over 20, and so on into childhood. And surely, that 48-year-old man did not mean to suggest that he felt like a child!
Which one of the following techniques of reasoning is employed in the argument?
Prethinking:
- People usually think of them as 75% of their actual age
- It is problematic to understand these responses because a 48 years old thinks of himself as 36, but if he is 36 then he thinks he is 28 and so on.
Clearly there is a flaw in this argument since If I am 48 and I feel like 36, in reality I am still 48. And I am not going to think that since I feel like 36, I should again think of my self as 75% of age 36.
So basically we have to find an option that explains this reasoning of the argument.
Bunuel wrote:
(A) projecting from responses collected at one time from many individuals of widely different ages to hypothetical earlier responses of a single individual at some of those ages
This option kind of explains the thinking of the author of the argument. Lets look at it in detail.
"Projecting from responses collected at one time from many individuals of widely different ages": Yes the responses were collected from diverse people of different ages
"Projecting those to hypothetical earlier responses of a single individual at some of those ages": Now the above ages are applied to "hypothetical earlier responses" of a single individual i.e. They have taken ages of 48, 36, 28 etc. and applied it to one single individual. Now a single individual cannot be of all these ages at one single time. Therefore the argument hypothesizes the same.
So this option correctly elaborates the reasoning of the argument, hence is correct.Bunuel wrote:
(B) reinterpreting what certain people actually said in the light of what would, in the circumstances, have been the most reasonable thing for them to say
There is reinterpretation happening but not of "most reasonable thing for them to say". In fact argument is hypothesizing the findings to a single individual
Bunuel wrote:
(C) qualifying an overly sweeping generalization in light of a single well chosen counterexample
The counterexample in the article doesnt make much sense and hence cant be categorized as "well chosen". A single individual cannot be of all these ages at one single time.
Bunuel wrote:
(D) deriving a contradiction from a pair of statements in order to prove that at least one of those statements is false
The argument finds the reasoning difficult to explain but doesnt term it as false
Bunuel wrote:
(E) analyzing an unexpected unanimity among respondents as evidence, not of a great uniformity of opinion among those respondents, but of their successful manipulation by their questioners
There is no "successful manipulation" that is happening in the argument
So IMO the answer is A.