This is a resolve, reconcile, explain question, as the stem asks: Which one of the following, if true, offers the best prospects of an explanation of why the two changes in smoking habits do not both result in reduced health risks?
The stimulus begins by telling us that smoking pipes or cigars is less dangerous to your health than is smoking cigarettes. The next sentence begins with however, which should always jump out at us on RRE questions because it indicates that a discrepancy is about to be introduced. In this case, the discrepancy is that quitting cigarettes sharply reduces your risk of smoking-related issues, while switching from cigarettes to cigars/pipes retains the risk level of cigarettes. Since we’ve been told pipes/cigars are less harmful, we’d expect some kind of improvement by switching to them. The correct answer will explain why we don’t see an improvement. Let’s take a look at our options:
Answer Choice (A) What we’re interested is why switching from the worst option (cigarettes) to a better one (pipes/cigars) doesn’t lead to less risk. The fact that going cold turkey is best doesn’t explain why there isn’t any improvement going from the worst to something better.
Answer Choice (B) So quitting cigarettes and then picking them back up won’t necessarily reduce your risk; but we want to know why switching from cigarettes to pipes/cigars doesn’t reduce risk!
Answer Choice (C) All this does is eliminate a possible difference between the two smoking options, without doing anything to explain why people who switch from cigarettes to cigars don’t experience improvement.
Answer Choice (D) Smokers for the most part sticking to a single option doesn’t explain why those who do completely switch to a less dangerous option don’t receive the reduced health risk associated with that option.
Correct Answer Choice (E) If what makes cigarettes worse is the way you inhale them, then if a cigarette smoker switches to another option but continues smoking the same way, it would make sense there wouldn’t be any health benefit. The difference in health benefits isn’t about what you are smoking, but how you are smoking.
We should recognize this as a resolve, reconcile, explain question, as it asks: Which one of the following most helps to explain why the price of vinyl records went up?
The first thing we learn in this stimulus is that when compact disks became available they were priced higher than vinyl, and this was attributed to the production costs of the novel technology. Because people hadn’t quite figured out how to cheaply make the new product, it was expensive. Think about how much a flatscreen television cost when they first became available compared to how cheap they are now. As the production technology became more efficient, compact disks became more affordable. But vinyl, whose production technology had long been established, suddenly went up in price. So we seem to have a discrepancy, where one product reduced in price as its production process became more refined, while another went up in price even though it had been produced for a long time. The answer which satisfyingly explains why the prices of these two products behaved differently will be correct. Let’s see our options:
Answer Choice (A) This explains why consumers were willing to pay for the more expensive new product, but does nothing to explain why vinyl suddenly became more expensive.
Answer Choice (B) This explains why some bought vinyl instead of compact discs, but again does nothing to explain the price change of vinyl.
Correct Answer Choice (C) This gives us a reason why vinyl, despite having been around for awhile, had its price rise after the introduction of compact discs. Just as it was expensive to make compact disks at first because their production costs were high, the demand for compact disks decreased the production of vinyl, which made them more expensive to produce per item. Because they were no longer the only option available, they became more of a niche item produced at a smaller level with more production costs.
Answer Choice (D) Interesting! But this does nothing to help us.
Answer Choice (E) This answer is pretty much the same as B, we get a motivation for purchasing one of the two products, but nothing to explain the vinyl price increase.