Question

Read the excerpt.

Cooking authentic barbecue cuisine is a delicious activity for any home cook. It requires carefully balancing a mix of sweet, salty, acidic, and spicy flavors. Cooks can achieve these four basic flavors with some simple ingredients, such as brown sugar, soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, and cayenne pepper. Together, these ingredients create a tasty, smoky barbecue meal. Barbecue is a favorite in many US states and extremely common across the South. Since it is so familiar, anyone interested in perfecting their barbecue skills should avoid wasting money on expensive cookbooks and classes and simply use a trial-and-error method to make fantastic barbecue.

Which choice best explains the effect of the author’s use of a non sequitur?

The reasoning weakens the claim that barbecue cooking should be included as part of a culinary education.
The argument loses credibility by stating that barbecue mastery only requires simple understanding.
The reasoning distracts from the evidence that exceptional cooking requires skill and practice.
The argument may be dismissed because it disparages established avenues of learning to cook

Answer 1

The argument loses credibility by stating that barbecue mastery only requires simple understanding. The author leaps from listing a few basic ingredients to claiming formal instruction is unnecessary, which oversimplifies the skill involved and undermines the argument.