A survey published in a leading medical journal in the early 1970s found that the more frequently people engaged in a...

shunhe on August 21, 2020

Hi @schicago,

Thanks for the question! So the first sentence certainly can mean a correlation, and indeed, there’s a decent chance it is a correlation! Is it necessarily true that aerobic exercise causes the lung disease risk to go down based on what we’re told in the passage? No, we’re just told about a correlation in the passage. Maybe people who have a lower risk of lung disease are more likely to do aerobic exercise. Or maybe there’s some third factor that underlies them both, like cigarette smoking. So it’s definitely not necessarily a causation in the first sentence, and that’s why (C) is the correct answer: the answer concludes causation from correlation. Saying that “aerobic exercise has a significant beneficial effect on people’s health” means that it’s the cause of those health benefits, those those health benefits are an effect, and an effect of what? Aerobic exercise, which then has to be the cause (since effects have causes). So the argument does conclude a causation, and that’s why (C) is the correct answer here.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.