Logical reasoning PrepTest 129 · Section 2 · Question 9

Incorrect. First off, in establishing a common cause of world hunger, if anything, this answer is strengthening the argument—eating less meat won't prevent hunger from natural disasters, so maybe it won't reduce hunger much overall. However, it even fails to do that, as there being one common cause of world hunger doesn't mean that there aren't others that could also be addressed to make a dent in it.

Incorrect. This answer might explain one cause of there being less food than there might otherwise be, but that doesn't speak to reducing hunger by not eating meat. If anything, this suggests that any type of food being grown will be reduced by natural causes.

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Facts

Question Type:
Weaken

Stimulus Summary:
More people becoming vegetarians won't significantly reduce world hunger.

Answer Anticipation:
While most Weaken questions feature an argument, this one asks us to weaken a claim. When we're tasked with doing that, we don't have the logic of an argument to analyze, so we need to go directly at the statement itself.

Here, the claim is that meat consumption going down overall won't decrease world hunger. To weaken that claim, we'd need to show that lowering meat consumption would decrease world hunger. Any answer that suggests cutting meat out of people's diets would result in more people having food will serve as a correct answer here, but we can't get much more specific than that.

Answer Explanation:
If fewer people were eating meat, then there would need to be less meat raised, and so land currently dedicated to that could go towards other uses. If that same land can feed 10x as many people if it's used for non-meat food sources, then that increases the number of people who can be fed using the same land and thus suggests that hunger might be lowered. This answer undermines the claim by showing how a reduction in meat consumption could result in more food being available, thus potentially reducing hunger.

Key Takeaway:
When asked to weaken a claim instead of an argument, there are likely to be a lot of avenues the correct answer could take. Establish what the correct answer will have to say—generally, it'll support the opposite claim—and stay flexible.

Incorrect. Reducing meat consumption won't help with distributing food to these remote areas, so the hunger being discussed in this answer wouldn't be alleviated by people cutting meat out of their diets, and thus it doesn't weaken the claim.

Incorrect. First, there's a bit of a shift between hunger and famines in this answer choice—famines involve hunger, but not all instances of hunger are a famine. That said, if anything, this suggests that cutting meat out of a diet wouldn't prevent these famines, as they were a result of economic, social, or crop issues, not meat shortages.