Consumer advocate: TMD, a pesticide used on peaches, shows no effects

Question

Consumer advocate: TMD, a pesticide used on peaches, shows no effects on human health when it is ingested in the amount present in the per capita peach consumption in this country. But while 80 percent of the population eat no peaches, others, including small children, consume much more than the national average, and thus ingest disproportionately large amounts of TMD. So even though the use of TMD on peaches poses minimal risk to most of the population, it has not been shown to be an acceptable practice.

Which one of the following principles, if valid, most helps to justify the consumer advocate’s argumentation?

(A) The possibility that more data about a pesticide’s health effects might reveal previously unknown risks at low doses warrants caution in assessing that pesticide’s overall risks.

(B) The consequences of using a pesticide are unlikely to be acceptable when a majority of the population is likely to ingest it.

(C) Use of a pesticide is acceptable only if it is used for its intended purpose and the pesticide has been shown not to harm any portion of the population.

(D) Society has a special obligation to protect small children from pesticides unless average doses received by the population are low and have not been shown to be harmful to children’s health.

(E) Measures taken to protect the population from a harm sometimes turn out to be the cause of a more serious harm to certain segments of the population.

KaranB1 · Answer

IMO-  C  as the answer choice  clearly defines that TMD is unacceptable as per the scenario described   in the prompt.

Saasingh · Answer

Why is answer not C? It clearly states that if it harms "any" portion it shouldn't be used. "Any" here can support the children.

Dont understand how D is better than C

MartyTargetTestPrep · Answer

The correct answer is indeed (C).

Saasingh · Answer

Ah, I think the OA changed. Glad to know. Thanks MartyTargetTestPrep for response

JonShukhrat · Answer

Dear  IanStewart

Could you please evaluate my understanding of the stimulus? 
One expert, in his first post  here , claims that “Using TMD on peaches would harm 20% of peach eaters” and again later “We know that it harms 20% of peach eaters”.

I quite disagree with this claim because the stimulus says that a certain amount of pesticide is harmless, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that a disproportionately greater amount would be harmful. If someone says that “drinking 0.01 liter of water shows no negative effect on health”, this doesn’t imply that drinking 300 times more or 3 liters is surely harmful, right? (question 1)

Otherwise, conclusion wouldn’t say “it has not been shown to be an acceptable practice” because if the advocate already knew that eating disproportionately large amounts of pesticide surely harms, then he could conclude “it has been shown to be unacceptable”. Am I right? (question 2)
 
I also was thrown off by “only if” and “it is used for its intended purpose” parts of choice C. I am usually extra cautious about “only”, but here I guess “only” gives even greater justification to the argument and thus is favorable. 
I initially crossed C off because nothing in the stimulus talks about “it is used for its intended purpose” part. However, now I can see that it doesn’t harm the arguments and hence is ok. Am I correct here? (question 3)

Sorry for so many questions, and many thanks beforehand!

IanStewart · Answer

Yes, that expert post is simply incorrect. We have, from the stem, no data about how harmful the pesticide is in larger-than-per-capita doses.

The second expert post in that thread also is problematic, because it subtly changes the conclusion (though that post is otherwise the clearest explanation in that thread, I think). The conclusion here is that the pesticide has not been "shown to be acceptable". The argument's conclusion is *not* that the pesticide is "unacceptable", which is how that second post reframes it. Of course, if we rephrase conclusions to mean something other than what they say, we might be looking for an answer that isn't there, so that's not a good practice. If you think this argument is claiming that the pesticide is unacceptable, then the definition of "acceptable" matters a lot. If instead you interpret the conclusion as it's written, paraphrasing, "we don't have enough information to say whether the pesticide is acceptable", then the definition of "acceptable" may still matter. But it might not. That conclusion is only about how much information we need to have in order to say something is acceptable. So either of these answers would have been perfectly correct here, even though they contain no definition of "acceptability":

F) One can only conclude that a pesticide is acceptable when one has information about how that pesticide will affect 100% of the population. 
G) To decide if a chemical is acceptable, it is not sufficient to only use data about how that chemical affects an average individual.

As the question is written, the justifying principle we need will either explain what "acceptable" means, or will explain what evidentiary standards we need to meet in order to make a decision about "acceptability". But in advance, we don't know what we're looking for.

When we interpret the stem correctly, answer A almost becomes correct. The main issue with A is the nebulous phrase "at low doses". We're probably meant to infer that the "disproportionately large amounts" mentioned in the stem are not "low doses", and if that inference is correct, then answer A is clearly wrong. But those "disproportionately large amounts" are just measured relative to other people, and not to some absolute standard of dosage, so they could still be "low doses". Anyway, if "low doses" is deleted from A, it is fairly good as an answer. The argument says the pesticide is not "shown" to be acceptable, so it's saying we can't reach a conclusion without more information. We do need, if we want to further justify A, to assume that the pesticide's "overall risks" are related to how "acceptable" it is, but that doesn't seem too far-fetched an assumption.

C, though, states a justifying principle in a much more forceful way, so it's clearly a better answer. There is a bit of a distraction in the wording of C -- the first half, about whether the pesticide is "used for its intended purpose", has nothing to do with the argument. But that doesn't matter, if you reread the question asked. As long as the principle enunciated in the second half of answer C is valid, the argument gains its strongest justification, and that would be true even if answer C also included a short essay about squirrels or space exploration. But that kind of trickery, where an answer contains some irrelevant information to disguise that it's the right answer, is something I'd really only expect to see in an LSAT question, and not in a GMAT question.

I've said elsewhere that I find the writing of official GMAT Verbal questions much clearer than that of official LSAT questions, and this question illustrates why. If you saw answer C here on the GMAT, it would be in an SC question:

Use of a pesticide is acceptable only if it is used for its intended purpose and the pesticide has been shown not to harm any portion of the population.

The sentence means to say that the pesticide is acceptable only if it is used for its purpose. But it says that the "use" is acceptable only if it is "used" for its purpose. That doesn't make sense; we don't use the use of a pesticide. The sentence should say something more like, rewriting it in five seconds (so this might not be perfect) :

It is acceptable to use a pesticide only for its intended purpose, and only if the pesticide has been shown not to harm any portion of the population.

GMATGuruNY · Answer

A only if B  =  If A, then B .
The B portion of an IF-THEN statement is a NECESSARY CONDITION.

C:  Use of a pesticide is acceptable only if it is used for its intended purpose and the pesticide has been shown not to harm any portion of the population. 
Rephrased as in IF-THEN statement:
 If the use of a pesticide is acceptable, then  the pesticide is used for its intended purpose, and the pesticide has been shown not to harm any portion of the population . 
C implies the following principle:
For the use of a pesticide to be acceptable, the two conditions in the green portion are necessary and thus MUST be satisfied.
Neither of these two conditions is satisfied by the limited information in the passage.
The argument does not state that TMD is used for its intended purpose, nor does it indicate that TMD has been shown not to harm children.
Since the green conditions have not been satisfied, the use of TMD has NOT been shown to be acceptable -- STRENGTHENING the conclusion of the argument.

C

Krishishere · Answer

can anyone tell me why E is not the answer?

svasan05 · Answer

(A) The possibility that more data about a pesticide’s health effects might reveal previously unknown risks at low doses warrants caution in assessing that pesticide’s overall risks.  The conclusion is based on possible ill effects in higher doses and not in low doses. This option does not help the conclusion. Eliminate.

(B) The consequences of using a pesticide are unlikely to be acceptable when a majority of the population is likely to ingest it.  The conclusion talks about a minority of the population ingesting the pesticide and yet the practice not being proven acceptable, while this option is about a majority consuming the pesticide. Irrelevant. Eliminate.

(C) Use of a pesticide is acceptable only if it is used for its intended purpose and the pesticide has been shown not to harm any portion of the population.  Correct answer. If the pesticide must be  shown  to not harm "any" portion of the population, then it must not harm children. This is not established by the stimulus and hence this practice is not shown to be acceptable.

(D) Society has a special obligation to protect small children from pesticides unless average doses received by the population are low and have not been shown to be harmful to children’s health.  This implies that if "average doses received by the population are low" and "have not been  shown  to be harmful to children’s health", then society has no obligation to protect small children. This weakens the conclusion. Eliminate.

(E) Measures taken to protect the population from a harm sometimes turn out to be the cause of a more serious harm to certain segments of the population.  There is no such instance being shown in the stimulus/conclusion. Eliminate.

Hope this helps.

GMATGuruNY · Answer

E:  Measures taken to protect the population from a harm sometimes turn out to be the cause of a more serious harm to certain segments of the population. 
The argument discusses whether the use of TMD is acceptable.
TMD is a pesticide used to protect PEACHES; it is not a  measure taken to protect the population from a harm .
Thus, the statement in E is irrelevant.

VerbalBot · Answer

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Consumer advocate: TMD, a pesticide used on peaches, shows no effects

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Consumer advocate: TMD, a pesticide used on peaches, shows no effects

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