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Hi All:

Can someone please explain why D is the correct answer. Thank you very much!!

I'm not great at explaining LR answers but I'll take a stab...

The sociologist argues that "any person who wants to be as happy as possible would do well to consider NOT having a pet."

But if its true that most people who have pets feel happier BECAUSE they have pets...that would weaken his argument because if these people did not have pets, they would not be "as happy as possible" as he states in his argument.

That probably didn't do much to help...its the best I can put it into words.

I think that's a pretty good explanation. Here's what I wrote:

The argument's conclusion is that people who want to maximize their happiness should not get a pet. Why? Because those who have pets are less happy than those who do not. Since this is a weaken question, we should look for a gap. The gap lies somewhere between the two forms of measurement. The conclusion focuses on maximizing one's potential for happiness while the premise compares two groups.

Analogously: You should not take heart medication because in general, those who take heart medicine have more heart problems than those who do not. The problem here is that comparing these groups is probably not valid since those who take heart medicine are predisposed to have heart problems.

Similarly, perhaps those who get pets are generally less happy to start with (and thus they get pets in an effort to cheer up). However, if pets do tend to make you happier, as (D) indicates, regardless of which group you're in, you'll probably get happier, contrary to what the conclusion suggests.

(A) is incorrect because it only tells us about some people with pets; that may mean two people!
(B) is out of scope because wishing is not the issue, happiness is.
(C) is irrelevant. What does reasonably happy mean?
(E) is also irrelevant because feeling unhappy sometimes doesn't give us a sense of the overall tendency that we're concerned with.

Thank you!