Philosopher: Effective tests have recently

Answer choices

1. A

   Not as Well Illustrated8% picked this

   The advance of medicine fails to provide solutions to

   This answer is tricky to me, since it seems like a derivable inference. Since medicine is not yet able to prevent most life-threatening conditions with a genetic basis, it sounds like the advance of medicine has (so far) failed to solve 100% of problems. But that seems like such a hollow truth. Of course it will fail to solve 100% of problems. Common sense illustrates that Anything fails to provide solutions to 100% of problems. It seems like they wanted us to not pick this answer because the correct answer is better illustrated by the state of affairs than is this answer. But, we'd be judging that based on "the support for B involves more of the paragraph than does the support for A". Or we'd be disqualifying this by saying that the only unsolved problem referenced in the paragraph said that medicine isn't yet able to provide a solution for most of these genetic fatal diseases, not that the advance of medicine will never provide a solution.

   8%
2. B

   Correct80% picked this

   The advance of medicine creates new contexts in which ethical dilemmas

   Why this is right

   The advance of medicine created a new context in which we could warn people that they will likely develop a fatal, incurable disease, based on their genes, even though we can't prevent most of those diseases from occurring. That distressing knowledge would be harmful to some people, so it raises the question (the ethical dilemma) of whether we should use these tests.

   Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

   80%
3. C

   Out of Scope: understanding of disease2% picked this

   Medical technologies continue to advance, increasing our knowledge and understanding

   The technological medical advance in this paragraph only involved a better ability to predict which people will develop certain disease. A better ability to predict who will develop a disease doesn't need to come from a increase in our knowledge and understanding of that disease. It might be that we've always understood that the SP7 gene causes disease X, but it's only recently that we've developed a test that can reliably detect whether someone has the SP7 gene.

   2%
4. D

   Too Strong1% picked this

   The more we come to learn, the more we realize how

   Too Strong: the more X, the more Y Out of Scope: the more we learn We don't really learn anything in the passage. We "learn" which people are likely to develop a fatal genetic disease, but that's "learn" in the sense of "find out". It feels like this answer is saying "learn" in the sense of "gain knowledge/understanding". Also, we don't gain in terms of realizing how little we know. When we learn that Dave is gonna develop disease X, which medicine does not yet have any way to prevent, we haven't realized even more how little we know. We already knew that we don't know how to prevent disease X. We now know that Dave is screwed, unless we have a medical breakthrough at some point. But we haven't gained a new insight, which opened our eyes to newfound ignorance.

   1%
5. E

   Too Strong8% picked this

   The advance of technology is of

   We do have an advance in technology (we can better predict that certain people will have some of these bad diseases). For most of the diseases, we can't prevent them, so it's just giving people bad news. But it's hard to go all the way to impugning this advance as having "questionable value". We can't yet prevent most of these conditions; but if we can prevent 40% of these conditions, I bet this early-warning is of significant value to those people.

   8%