Logical Reasoning

PT14 · S2 · Q21 In response to high mortality in area hospitals

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In response to high mortality in area hospitals, surgery was restricted to emergency procedures during a five-week period.

Conclusion (it can be concluded)

Before the 5-week period, the risks of elective surgery had been incurred unnecessarily often in the area.

Evidence

During a 5-week period, surgery was restricted to emergency procedures only. During this period, mortality in these hospitals was found to have fallen nearly 1/3. The number of deaths rose again when elective surgery was resumed.

Evaluate

Because the author is interpreting the causal significance behind an anomaly, we can use our Explain Curious Fact mindset.

Curious Fact ... Why did the mortality rate in hospitals go down by 33% during the period when only emergency procedures were being allowed and then go back up when elective surgery was resumed?

Author's Explanation ... People are incurring the risks of elective surgery unnecessarily often (i.e. people are choosing to have elective surgery and dying from it).

Goal

We weaken this type of argument primarily by finding an answer that suggests an Alternate Explanation for the curious fact. So we can look for an answer that seems to provide a different way of looking at why mortality dipped when the hospital was only doing emergency procedures and rose again when they resumed elective procedures.

Or we might see an answer that just attacks the plausibility of the Author's Explanation / Conclusion itself, something that helps us argue that people had not been incurring the risks of elective surgery unnecessarily often.

21.

Which one of the following, if true, most seriously undermines the conclusion above?

  1. Correct

    The conditions for which elective

    Why this is right

    This answer basically picks a fight with the conclusion. It helps us argue that people who do these elective surgeries aren't incurring risk unnecessarily often. Sure some of them die during these procedures, but the conditions they're being treated for would eventually threaten to kill them, and the longer they wait for the surgical intervention, the riskier that gets. In other words, people aren't choosing to have these elective surgeries in a careless sort of way ... they're not dying of elective surgeries like plastic surgery or body-reshaping; the surgeries aren't treating conditions that are less risky than the surgery itself. Rather, the people choosing elective surgeries are making a sobered long-term gamble, that it's better to risk a surgery now to try to keep this condition from becoming life-threatening than it would be to postpone surgery until the condition has become life-threatening, at which point the surgery would be riskier.

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

    60% picked this

  2. The physicians planning elective surgery

    No Impact

    This probably strengthens, if anything. In order to argue that people are incurring the risks of surgery unnecessarily often, it would help you to establish that the people electing to have these surgeries are well aware of the risks but choose to incur them anyway.

    3% picked this

  3. Before the suspension of elective

    Strengthens, if anything

    This answer is telling us that this area has an elevated rate of surgeries, which strengthens the plausibility of the author's notion that in this area, people are choosing to have surgery too much.

    22% picked this

  4. Elective surgery is, in general,

    Weak Impact

    This tilts in the right direction, because it's downplaying the riskiness of emergency surgery. But it has way less effect on the argument than the correct answer does. The fact that elective surgery is less risky doesn't mean it's not still risky. Being a stuntman may be less risky than being a fighter pilot, but that doesn't mean that being a stuntman isn't risky. Also, the author would fall back on her evidence here. She'd say, "Sure, elective surgery is less risky than emergency surgery. But nonetheless, when these hospitals added back in elective surgeries, their mortality rate went up significantly." Ultimately, the author isn't trying to compare the riskiness of elective surgery to that of emergency surgery. The author is comparing the riskiness of elective surgery to the option of not having surgery at all.

    8% picked this

  5. Even if a surgical procedure

    Too Weak

    This answer only provides one-data-point's worth of impact. Saying "Even if X is true, Y can still happen" is saying that it's possible that there could be a case where X and Y both occur. Our author was never implying that anyone who makes it out of surgery okay will therefore live, so it doesn't hurt her argument at all for us to say that some people end up dying after (either type of) surgery.

    7% picked this

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