PrepTest 132

Incorrect. Assuming the people in the study weren't lying about their back pain, spinal issues aren't sufficient to cause back pain since there are people who have them but not the pain.

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Argument

Valid or Flawed:
Flawed

Question Type:
Errors in Reasoning

Stimulus Summary:
Study – Some people who reported no back pain had issues in their spine that are blamed for back pain
Conclusion – These issues don't cause back pain

Answer Anticipation:
A study was done, so the first two flaws we should consider are, as always, a sampling flaw and a correlation/causation flaw.

The sample here was of people who said* (we'll come back to this) they never had back pain, but the conclusion was about those who do experience back pain. It's possible that these people differ in some key way which allows the spinal issues noted to cause back pain in them but not in the people in this study.

Second, correlation/causation. The conclusion here is that one thing doesn't cause another, and it's based on a correlation (between spinal conditions and not experiencing pain). The way this conclusion is phrased, however, essentially says something else caused the back pain, but a few counterexamples don't disprove that something could serve as a factor in back pain when coupled with other causes.

Third, circling back to the asterisk from above, whenever we're dealing with what people think, believe, or say, there's always the possibility that they're lying. In this case, maybe these people wanted to appear tough and so said they weren't in pain despite suffering from that pain.

There are a lot of issues here that the correct answer could deal with, so let's stay open as we head to the answers.

Answer Explanation:
Unlike (A), this answer brings up the possibility that spinal issues play a role in back pain without themselves being sufficient. If that's the case, then it explains why certain individuals with these issues don't have back pain while still allowing spinal issues to serve as a factor in that pain. The argument doesn't consider this a possibility in ruling out spinal conditions as causing back pain, so this answer highlights a way that it's flawed.

Key Takeaway:
Use your rules of thumb to think through flaws based on common elements in the stimulus! Some of that work will likely not lead you to the correct answer . . . but it could have, and it will take less time to do this than to go back and reconsider the entire question if you focus on the wrong flaw during your Anticipation.

Incorrect. It's a little tough to understand this answer in the abstract, so let's put content into it. The effect must be back pain, but it's unclear what the particular phenomenon is—the study noted individuals who did have spinal conditions. Since this answer doesn't really line up with the stimulus, we should eliminate it.

Incorrect. This answer sounds like it's getting at a sampling flaw in the argument. However, the characteristic present in half of a given sample here is that they had spinal conditions. There's no indication that the Doctor believes that these issues are present in half of the population—just that they're not causing back pain. The sampling flaw in the stimulus was a jump between those without back pain to those with it.

Incorrect. This answer, rephrased, states that something that's not a causal factor for an effect could still be correlated with that effect. The argument concludes that spinal conditions aren't a causal factor for back pain, so those concepts match up. However, the argument would still work if people who have back pain are more likely to have spinal conditions than those who don't have back pain since the correlation would be relatively weak considering the high rate of people without back pain having these conditions.