The higher the average fat intake among the residents of a country, th

Though many answer choices try to give the causal relationship between cancer and fat intake on a national lever, only C completely weakens the argument that national fat intake is causal to the incidence of cancer on a individual level.

Option C states that when the cause (average fat intake) is lesser , the effect is (cancer) is still there. This weakens the argument, does it not ? Please guide


Regards

Hi harsh ,

I think you are talking about countries ... instead of country ..right ?

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Hello Mohit,

Intially I was confused between countries and country. But all the options contain contries so that is not an issue. Right now my concern is how can we relate high fat intake to environmental pollution, as stated in option D. I mean if C is a Farfetched option then D also to seems to be.

A weakener of a causal claim can be that Z caused X and Y both. D states just that.
Ask yourself, what if pollution lead to cancer and cancer led to high fat diet consumption.

D is a weakener.

A country is not specific. Had it been the country, then it would have been a specific case.

I hope this clarifies your issue

(C) vs (D)

(C) Cancer is a prominent cause of death in countries with a low average fat intake.

This one just states an statistic about countries with a low average fat intake, does that weaken the argument? Although this is a curious fact, it remains intact the cause effect between fat intake and risk of cancer, Incorrect.

(D) The countries with high average fat intake are also the countries with highest levels of environmental pollution.

This one makes us doubt about the causality between fat intake and risk of cancer, so it is the winner. Remember that at weaken questions, you do not need to "destroy" the argument, but just need to debilitate it. Correct

option C says cancer is a prominent cause of death lets suppose / assume a country having population 100 . Now lets say in a year their were 10 deaths and 8 of them were due to cancer now this makes the cancer a prominent cause but this data only shows deaths not occurrence of cancer in that country.

option C says cancer is a prominent cause of death lets suppose / assume a country having population 100 . Now lets say in a year their were 10 deaths and 8 of them were due to cancer now this makes the cancer a prominent cause but this data only shows deaths not occurrence of cancer in that country. you can compare with a country with 2 deaths or 0 but have 60 occurrences of cancer in same population.

Hi experts GMATNinja KarishmaB DmitryFarber IanStewart

I wanted to confirm my reasoning on option C

(C) Cancer is a prominent cause of death in countries with a low average fat intake

Even though "incidence" means occurrence/rate/frequency (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictio ... /incidence), the conclusion talks about "risk of cancer", and option C talks about cancer deaths which is a shift in scope, hence, no impact on the conclusion.

Please let me know if I am going wrong somewhere.

Someone earlier in the thread wrote that this is an official GMAT problem, and it is not -- it's a very old LSAT problem. And it's a low-quality problem at that. For one thing, half the stem is redundant (naturally if cancer incidence is higher as fat intake goes up, cancer incidence is lower as fat intake goes down -- there's no need to say that), and answer C uses the word "prominent" in a bizarre way.

I'm not really sure why answer C would be tempting here. Premises in CR questions are premises. We know that as fat intake goes up, cancer incidence goes up. Even if C said Cancer is very common in countries with low fat intake, we would absolutely know from the stem that cancer is even more common in countries with high fat intake. Premises cannot be false. But as you point out, answer C does not even talk about cancer incidence. It talks about cancer deaths, and the argument has nothing to do with cancer deaths, so answer C does nothing to weaken the conclusion.

This is a classic correlation/causation argument, and we can weaken any argument like this by finding an alternate cause. Answers B and D are the only contenders, because they both suggest that high fat intake countries are different from low fat intake countries in meaningful ways other than fat intake. So there might be another explanation for the correlation described in the stem. I would happily choose answer B here if answer D was not there, but D is better because pollution could directly cause cancer, while the wealth mentioned in answer B cannot (though it might be true in wealthy countries that people are exposed to more risks, e.g. to more radiation from technology, say, which is why B is the clear second-best answer here).

I simply eliminated C here because its talking about dying from cancer where as the passage is only talking about the occurence of cancer in the respective countries. Since we are not given the percentage of population that is not dying from cancer, the arguement becomes vague.

Hence, answer D becomes the correct choice.

Please let me know if my reasoning is correct or not?