Logical Reasoning

PT140 · S3 · Q26 As advances in medical research

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As advances in medical research and technology have improved the ability of the medical profession to diagnose and treat a wide variety of illnesses and injuries, life spans have increased and overall health has improved.

Given that ...

Life spans have increased and overall health has improved (due to improved ability to diagnose and treat a wide variety of illnesses and injuries)

Why is it that ...

Over the past few decades there has been a steady and significant increase in the rate of serious infections?

Evaluate / Goal

We just need something that has changed that could explain why there are more serious infections nowadays.

It could relate to the change we've already heard about (improved ability to treat / diagnose diseases, or life span increasing, or health improving), or it could come from something we haven't heard about that also changed over the past few decades.

Stuff we know has changed that could explain the change - some of the new ways we treat or diagnose diseases lead to serious infections - as people's life spans get longer, that invites more serious infections - as people's health improves, that somehow (probably indirectly) leads to more serious infections

Stuff we haven't talked about that could explain the change - Over the past few decades, air pollution has worsened, which can lead to serious infections

26.

Which one of the following, if true, most helps to resolve the apparent discrepancy in the information above?

  1. It remains true that doctors

    Unrelated to Goal Weak Language

    This has nothing to do with explaining an uptick in serious infections, and it's almost never the case that the correct answer on Strengthen / Weaken / Paradox would use language as weak as sometimes (i.e. "at least once").

    2% picked this

  2. Life spans have increased precisely

    Unrelated to Goal

    This has nothing to do with explaining an uptick in serious infections.

    4% picked this

  3. The vast majority of serious

    No Impact

    This is only talking about what happens once someone gets a serious infection (we are better able to cure it). But our job is to explain why there is an uptick in people getting serious infections in the first place.

    14% picked this

  4. As a population increases in

    No Impact

    This would help explain an uptick in the number of serious infections, if we knew that population had increased in size, but we were never told that population has increased in size. The fact that life spans are getting longer does not clearly imply that population size is increasing. More importantly (but trickier), we're asked to explain an uptick in the rate of serious infections, not the number of them. The rate of serious infections would be a per capita number, so it wouldn't matter whether the population had gone up / gone down / stayed same. It would be something like 3% of people have had a serious infection in the past year. Or it would be like, "people have an average of 2 serious infections per year".

    28% picked this

  5. Correct

    Modern treatments for many otherwise

    Why this is right

    This builds off something we know has changed, in order to explain the change in rate of serious infections. We know that modern treatments have gotten better, allowing life spans to increase. So we know that illnesses that would otherwise be fatal are now treated in a way that allows the patient to survive. However, these treatments "increase susceptibility to infection". If people are more susceptible to infection, then we would expect the rate of mild, moderate, and severe infections to all rise.

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

    53% picked this

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