501 Critical Reading Questions

a. The article raises the question, Could the dietary recommendations of
the last twenty years be wrong? (lines 10–11).
224.
d. The author expresses her objection by depicting the medical
experts as extreme, ridicul[ing] (line 2) one diet while extolling (line
3) another.
225.
c. Choices a and d are alternate definitions that do not apply to the
passage. The author uses gospel (line 8) with its religious implica-
tions as an ironic statement, implying that scientists accepted a
premise based on faith instead of on evidence.
226.
e. The author begins with Fact (line 14) to introduce and highlight
statistical information. She or he does not speculate about the
meaning of the statistics until the next paragraph.
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501
Critical Reading Questions

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1 1 9
227.
a. The author names a sedentary lifestyle of TV watching and Internet
surfing (lines 24–25) as a contributing factor to the rise in 
obesity rates.
228.
b. The passage suggests that the 1979 dietary guidelines responded
to a theory that dietary fat (line 34) increases heart disease.
229.
b. The passage describes the anti-fat message as oversimplified (lines
48–49) and goes on to cite the importance of certain beneficial
types of fat found in olive oil and nuts (lines 38–39).
230.
c. This example supports the claim that the body uses refined carbo-
hydrates in much the same way (lines 42–43) that it does sweets.
231.
e. Lines 42–43 support this statement.
232.
d. The last sentence is ironic—it expresses an incongruity between
conflicting dietary advice that targets different types of food as
unhealthy, and the reality that humans need to eat.
501