Q21- Prolonged exposure to sulfur flames

[Favbe]

Anyone know why (B) would weaken the argument?

[karinac]

I had the same problem. I reasoned that the scents would probably be easier to identify if they were presented in environments the workers were accustomed to, so I don't understand why this is incorrect... unless the sulfur is supposed to overpower any other scent in the factory workers' environment? But I thought this was too much to assume with the given information.

I thought that (A) weakened it because if the scents were only replications and not exact, then couldn't it be argued that it would be easier to mistake the scents for something else?

[schmid215]

This should really be a "least" weaken, rather than a weaken "except", because (A) does weaken the argument, however minutely. (B) weakens because: 1. If you associate a given place with the smell of something, you're perhaps less likely to be given to detecting other smells and 2. The smell of that thing could overwhelm the nose and make it unable to detect other scents with precision.

[maryadkins]

The argument core is:

the 100 workers from a sulfur factory did worse on a study of scent recognition than 100 workers from non-sulfur factories

-->

sulfur permanently damages one's sense of smell

How might we weaken this? By showing that there was something wrong with the study, or another way of thinking about it is, by finding a reason why those may have been the results OTHER than sulfur permanently damaging the factory workers' senses of smell.

(A) is irrelevant (and therefore correct, since this is a weaken EXCEPT), because it applies to both groups, so it doesn't help explain the difference, at all: if the chemicals were slightly off but not perfect, then first of all, so what? It would have affected both groups equally. And second, how would that explain the results of the study in a way other than their senses of smell being damaged?

(B) you're right about:

1. If you associate a given place with the smell of something, you're perhaps less likely to be given to detecting other smells and 2. The smell of that thing could overwhelm the nose and make it unable to detect other scents with precision.

(C) means the control group had practice.

(D) muddies the waters: is it the sulfur that does the damage or something else?

(E) is like (C)"”the control group had more exposure to the scents beforehand.

[pewals13]

Very helpful. I can see now how important it is to focus on factors that might impact only one group.

[HughM388]

I think this question employs one of the tactics LSAC uses to make questions more difficult, especially in the later part of LR sections. I mention it here to help remind myself and others to beware of it.

The test-writers will use misdirection and suggestion (as they did in another question on which I commented here on MP, namely about reduction of absence rates in a TV factory) in an attempt to deceive you into a wrong answer or to disguise a correct one. In that question they played on the potential ambiguity of the implication of that term—"reduction"—when it's applied to rates that will result in a number increasing as opposed to decreasing as a result of reduction. (When you reduce an absence rate, the number of people at work counterintuitively increases.) This is one of the cleverer, and in my opinion more respectable, tactics in their employ.

The stimulus of this question includes information about sulfur-emitting factories along with a tale about a study using "chemically reproduced scents," and this is not done coincidentally. I think it's probable that most of us automatically connect the term "sulfur" to the concept of "chemical," and the test-writers are probably counting on test-takers to conflate these terms in a way that makes finding the right answer more difficult. This tendency to conceptually conflate those components of the stimulus made (A) more difficult to evaluate with clarity, at least for me.

If you can spot the test doing something like this early in the process of reading the stimulus, you may be able to anticipate and avoid the traps they've set for you in the answer choices.