Cigarette companies claim that manufacturing both low–and high–nicotine cigarettes allows smokers to choose how much ...

shunhe on January 9, 2021

Hi @Rosibeth23,

Thanks for the question! So remember that this question is asking us to help explain the finding of the nicotine study if true. So this is basically a paradox question. What’s the paradox? That people who smoke low and high nicotine cigarettes end up smoking the same amount of nicotine per day.

(B) tries to explain this by saying that smokers of the lowest-nicotine cigarettes available generally smoke more cigarettes per day than smokers of high-nicotine cigarettes. Sure, this has to be true. But does a statement as weak as this help fully explain the results of the study? First off, it only addresses smokers of “the lowest” nicotine cigarettes, when we just want “low” nicotine cigarettes. Also, “generally smoke more per day” is also vague, since we don’t know how many more that would be. Basically, (B) is too vague and so not as good an explainer as (A).

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