Logical reasoning PrepTest 153 · Section 3 · Question 13

Incorrect. This would help to explain. If the dieters are preoccupied, they aren't paying attention to piloting. Sorry your plane crashed, the pilot was worried about how he'd look in a bathing suit . . .

Incorrect. If they consumed alcohol before the diet and didn't change their alcohol consumption when dieting, the same number of drinks would impair them more. This could help to explain. Cross it off.

Incorrect. Sure, if you're more vulnerable to irritability and fatigue, you could definitely have a harder time piloting aircraft. This is out, too.

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Facts

Question Type:
Bizarro Paradox

Stimulus Summary:
70 pilots participated in a study of their performance. Half of them chose to diet by cutting calories. The other half didn't. The non-dieters performed well, but the dieters saw their performance drop versus its level before their diets. In fact, in this group, dieting was associated with an impairment roughly equivalent to being mildly drunk.

Answer Anticipation:
So, we've got a cause-and-effect relationship (maybe) here. How could cutting calories affect pilots in the same way as drinking on an empty stomach? Either some sort of reason for this causal relationship, or evidence that something else (not the dieting) caused the impairment, would help to explain this. And since this is an explain EXCEPT question, you're going to cross off the answers that do explain, and leave the one that doesn't alone. The correct answer will either have no impact on the unexpected nature of the stimulus, or it'll actually make the study's results more confusing.

Answer Explanation:
Their motivations for going on the diet aren't relevant to explaining the correlation between dieting and a dip in performance. This doesn't explain, making it correct.

Key Takeaway:
The key to the very rare Bizarro Paradox question type is understanding the stimulus well enough to recognize all four answer choices that DO explain, so that you can select the remaining, correct answer choice. So, take a moment before visiting the answer choices to think about why, exactly, the phenomenon described in the stimulus is unusual or surprising. What would the expected thing be? What happened instead? This preparation will help you to recognize and eliminate answers that explain.

Incorrect. Of course, if dieting deprives the brain of something it needs to function, that would explain why dieting tends to cause poor performance in jobs that require a high-functioning brain.