Q6 - Some have argued that body size influences

[mshinners]

Question Type:
ID the Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
It's cute how dated this question is. Newspaper personals?

An interesting stimulus in that we only get a viewpoint other than the author's. These people conclude that body size influences mating in all cultures. Why? They asked college students and looked at personals ads.

Answer Anticipation:
This is about the clearest example of a sampling flaw I can imagine. There's no way to validly draw a conclusion about all societies based on college students and people taking out ads in the newspaper. They just won't be representative of the vast majority of the world's population.

Correct answer:
(B)

Answer choice analysis:
(A) Wrong flaw (Causation Flaw). While this describes a certain type of correlation/causation flaw, that flaw isn't present in this argument (there's no correlation).

(B) Bingo. And "may be" is underselling it here.

(C) Wrong flaw (Causation Flaw/False Choice).

(D) Wrong flaw (Whole to Part). If anything, this argument flows in the opposite direction (premises about individuals; conclusion about society). However, we can draw broad conclusions about populations with a representative sample. We don't have that here.

(E) Wrong flavor (Sampling - too small of a sample). This answer is close. However, since we aren't told the sample size, we can't pick an answer that states, definitivitly, it was too small. For this answer to be right, we'd need the stimulus to say something akin to, "Based on asking those three college bros and reading 1 or 2 Craigslist ads."

Takeaway/Pattern: Learn the common flaws, but also learn how they're phrased in these abstract answers. Knowing what each flaw's answer choice sounds like can vastly increase your speed.

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