IMO B

The smell of something is relative which varies from person to person. This well-known fact has been ignored here.

I will go with A. It does very little to go to the issue!

In my opinion D.

The reason: Just because someone is an expert on the physiology of smell, it doesn't mean that her preference for a particular smell is somehow better than someone else's.

inactived wrote:The new perfume Aurora smells worse to Joan than any comparably priced perfume, and none of her friend likes the smell of Aurora as much as the smell of other perfumes. However, she and her friends must have a defect in their sense of smell, since Professor Jameson prefers the smell of Aurora to that of any other perfume and she is one of the world's foremost experts on the physiology of smell.

The reasoning is flawed because it

(A) calls into question the truthfulness of the opponent rather than addressing the point issue
(B) ignore the well-known fact that someone can prefer one thing to another without liking either very much
(C) fails to establish that there is widespread agreement among the experts in the field
(D) makes an illegitimate appeal to the authority of an expert
(E) misrepresents the position against which it is directed

Please elaborate your answer choice. OA will be provided later after few elaboration.

Thanks

is that D the answer

Confused between C and D. Finally, come up with D.

Joan, if has defect in her sense of smell, will smell A to be B.

In fact, Joan smells A to be A, and so does the expert.

However, that expert likes A while Joan does not. Then even all experts like A, it does not mean that Joan and her friends have defect in their sense of smell. They just do not like A, and their senses of smell are okay.

So the appeal to the authority of an expert here is unjustified.

B seems to be attractive to me

(B) ignore the well-known fact that someone can prefer one thing to another without liking either very much

However, this question is talking about Joan's and expert's opinions about a perfume, not someone's (only one person) opinion about some perfumes ( For example: Joan prefers X to Y, even she does not like both of them)

The new perfume Aurora smells worse to Joan than any comparably priced perfume, and none of her friend likes the smell of Aurora as much as the smell of other perfumes. However, she and her friends must have a defect in their sense of smell, since Professor Jameson prefers the smell of Aurora to that of any other perfume and she is one of the world's foremost experts on the physiology of smell.

The reasoning is flawed because it

(A) calls into question the truthfulness of the opponent rather than addressing the point issue
(B) ignore the well-known fact that someone can prefer one thing to another without liking either very much
(C) fails to establish that there is widespread agreement among the experts in the field
(D) makes an illegitimate appeal to the authority of an expert
(E) misrepresents the position against which it is directed

I feel it is E.

Aurora smells worse to Joan than any comparably priced perfume. This means to say that Aurora is here compared with Joan.

But the expert prefers the smell of Aurora to that of any other perfume. Here the Aurora is compared with any other perfume.

So in a sense here the reasoning misrepresents the position against which it is directed

whats the OA?

The correct answer is definitely choice D, and this is a great explanation:

silentuser wrote:In my opinion D.

The reason: Just because someone is an expert on the physiology of smell, it doesn't mean that her preference for a particular smell is somehow better than someone else's.

Let's consider choices A and B (the other choices under discussion):

Choice A talks about the truthfulness of the opponent. However, none of Joan, her friends or Professor Jameson is the author's opponent. The author is arguing that Joan and her friends have defective smell. This doesn't make them the author's opponent.

Choice B rightly points out that one can relatively prefer A to B without liking A in absolute terms. In other words, choice B is pointing to a classic flaw: treating a relative claim as absolute. However, although there is some relativism in the evidence (all of Joan and her friends prefer any comparably priced perfume other than Aurora), the author does not end up concluding that this means they don't like Aurora at all. Instead, he ends up arguing that they have a defect in smell.

This choice reminds us that we should be familiar with certain classic flaws (relative vs absolute; numbers vs percent; correlation vs causation) because classic flaw types Y and Z will usually present as wrong answers in a question where the flaw type was actually X.

Then again, flaw questions only account for about 3% of all CR questions.