In response to high mortality in area hospitals

Answer choices

1. A

   Correct60% picked this

   The conditions for which elective surgery was performed would in the long run have been life-threatening, and surgery for them would

   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%
2. B

   No Impact3% picked this

   The physicians planning elective surgery performed before the five-week period had fully informed the patients who would undergo it of the

   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%
3. C

   Strengthens, if anything22% picked this

   Before the suspension of elective surgery, surgical operations were performed in area hospitals at a higher rate, per thousand residents of the

   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%
4. D

   Weak Impact8% picked this

   Elective surgery is, in general, less risky than is emergency surgery because the conditions requiring or indicating surgery

   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%
5. E

   Too Weak7% picked this

   Even if a surgical procedure is successful, the patient can die of a hospital-contracted infection with a bacterium that

   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%