Consider the following passages and draw on what additional information you can to say what underlying assumptions are likely in the context of each:
4.2.1 Many cold and fl u remedies and appetite suppressants which can be bought over the counter contain phenylpropanolamine (PPA), a drug which has been licensed for use for more than a decade. After years of legal and scientific wrangling over its safety, scientific advisers to the American Federal Drugs Administration (FDA) voted unanimously in November 2000 that it should no longer be considered safe, after it was the subject of a study by scientists at Yale University. In America, PPA is said to have been responsible for between 200 and 500 strokes a year in people aged under 50. The fi rst warning signs came in the 1980s when medical journals cited several dozen puzzling cases of young women who suddenly had strokes within days of taking appetite suppressants. However, the drug industry successfully argued that more research was needed to determine whether PPA was to blame, so the Consumer Healthcare Products Association funded a fi ve-year study by Yale University. The study found that young women were at increased risk of a stroke within three days of taking an appetite suppressant containing PPA or within three days of taking their fi rst PPA dose ever. Scientists who spoke on behalf of the drug industry said the Yale study was fl awed. (Adapted from a report in The Times, 7 November 2000)
4.2.2 An American study has revealed that marriage is fattening. The study found that during the fi rst 12 years of marriage the average American woman gains 21 pounds in weight and the average man gains 17 pounds in weight.
4.2.3 The following very famous argument was first published by Thomas Malthus in 1798 in his Essay on the Principle of Population (for further discussion of it see Fisher, 2004, chapter 3): Population, when unchecked, increases in geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second. By that law of nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind. . . . [This] appears, therefore, to be decisive against the possible existence of a society, all the members of which should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure, and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and their families.