As advances in medical research

Answer choices

1. A

   Unrelated to Goal Weak Language2% picked this

   It remains true that doctors sometimes prescribe ineffective medications due

   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%
2. B

   Unrelated to Goal5% picked this

   Life spans have increased precisely because overall health

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

   5%
3. C

   No Impact15% picked this

   The vast majority of serious infections are now curable, although many

   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.

   15%
4. D

   No Impact27% picked this

   As a population increases in size, there is a directly proportional increase in the number

   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".

   27%
5. E

   Correct51% picked this

   Modern treatments for many otherwise fatal illnesses increase the patient's susceptibility

   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.

   51%