VerbalCritical Reasoning

Free GMAT Critical Reasoning Practice Question

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Among the patients at a certain clinic, those who take a daily fish-oil supplement have, on average, lower blood pressure than those who do not. Many people start taking fish oil precisely because a doctor has warned them about rising blood pressure. The lower readings among supplement users therefore show that fish oil lowers blood pressure.

Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument depends?

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Answer & Explanation

Correct answer

E

The argument treats the gap between users and non-users as the supplement's effect, but the users are self-selected and could simply be people who already manage blood pressure well by other means, and the stem even notes a selection effect (people start fish oil after a doctor's warning) that, if anything, should bias users toward higher readings, making the observed lower readings demand an explanation.

(E) is the load-bearing assumption: negate it and the fish-oil group was already eating low-salt and exercising more, so their lower readings trace to those habits and the supplement is not shown to do anything.

The same-axis near-miss is (A), which also guards against a confounding cause among users, but it forecloses only one specific co-taken supplement; it leaves every other healthy-habit explanation untouched, so its negation does not collapse the conclusion the way (E)'s does, (A) is too narrow to be a depended-on (necessary) assumption. (B) addresses dose in principle, (C) addresses compliance with advice, and (D) addresses measurement calibration. Only (E) closes the correlation-to-causation gap the causal claim requires.