Logical Reasoning

PT142 · S4 · Q7 In a study of heart

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In a study of heart patients awaiting treatment for reduced blood flow to the heart, those still waiting to find out whether they would need surgery were less likely to experience pain from the condition than were those who knew what type of treatment they would receive.

Setup Claims

We've got some heart patients suffering from reduced blood flow to the heart.

Some of them already know what treatment they'll need to address this. Other patients are waiting to find out whether they'll need surgery.

The patients still waiting to find out experienced less pain overall from their blood flow condition than did the people who already knew what kind of treatment they were going to receive.

Fill-in-the-Blank

If we were to assume that the uncertainty o fnot knowing whether you were going to need surgery is more stressful than knowing what your treatment would be, then we can conclude ⎽⎽⎽⎽⎽ .

Evaluate

The blank we're filling in (like the vast majority of Logical Completion questions) is prefaced by Conclusion language, so the answer choice should sound like a reasonable inference we can conclude by synthesizing the claims we were given.

This final sentence starts with "Assuming X is true". We should just pretend that's one more fact we have to go off. What can we infer by combining these ideas?

Are there any overlapping ideas?

Yes, both the first sentence and the second sentence are talking about "uncertainty/knowledge about the future". Let's line up the two things we know about those.

Uncertain about future Know future (might need surgery?!) (type of treatment)

1st: less likely to more likely to experience pain experience pain

2nd: more stressful less stressful

Goal

The conclusion will likely connect "more stress, thus less likely to experience pain". The author will probably be thinking there's some causal chain like,

(It's kind of like the old folk remedy for toothaches, which is to hold an ice cube. It's not that the toothache goes away, but you're distracted by the ice cube.)

Let's look for a safely worded answer that synthesizes the two things we know about people who do / don't know their upcoming treatment for a heart problem.

Which one of the following most logically completes the argument?

Correct
stress sometimes reduces the amount
Why this is right
We fall in love at first sight with the weak (thus, highly supportable) wording "sometimes". We also love that this is clearly synthesizing. It's joining stress from the 2nd sentence to less experience of pain from the 1st. What may be worrisome to many of us is that this author is speculating a causal connection between stress and less sensitivity to heart-condition pain, based on a correlation between the two. People still waiting to find out if they would be getting surgery were both more stressed and less likely to experience heart-condition pain. While it's a flaw to be sure that a correlation implies a causal relationship, this author is saying something is "reasonable" to conclude, not bulletproof or logically implied. In the reasonable world of Most Supported, this correlation is evidence that "sometimes stress can lower the amount of pain a heart patient experiences".
Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
71% picked this
the pain experienced by heart
Out of Scope: beneficial pain
This answer would be okay if it said, "The stress experienced by some heart patients is to some extent beneficial". That would line up with our inference that being stressed by not-knowing whether you'll need surgery is having the beneficial effect of making you experience less pain from the heart condition itself. There's nothing in this paragraph that's saying that feeling heart pain is helping anyone.
1% picked this
the severity of a heart
Too Strong
Too Strong: usually Out of Scope: withholding / worsening Do we have evidence to say that most of the time that you withhold information from a patient about what treatment they'll receive, the severity of their heart condition will worsen? Definitely not. We never talked about withholding information from a patient about their treatments. There are patients who still don't know whether they'll need surgery, but that doesn't mean that anyone is withholding information about their treatment from them. The patients might not know whether they need surgery yet because they're still waiting on a CT-scan. We also never talked about a heart condition getting worse.
12% picked this
stress is probably an effect
Unsupported Causal Relationship
This answer is talking about whether stress ? reduced blood flow to heart or whether reduced blood flow ? stress The paragraph talked about neither of those causal relationships. The patients all had reduced blood flow to their heart before this paragraph even begins. It's a background condition. Within this paragraph, it is suggested that not knowing whether you'll need surgery causes stress, and that stress causes you to not experience as much pain from that reduced-blood-flow heart condition you already had.
10% picked this
heart patients suffering from reduced
Out of Scope: more likely surgery
This answer is saying that one group is more likely to require surgery than another group, but the passage doesn't allow us to compare likelihood of surgery. We don't know anyone's likelihood of surgery. One group is full of people who don't know whether they'll need surgery. Maybe they all will. Maybe none will. We don't know. The other group is full of people who do know what treatment they'll be getting. Will that treatment be surgery? We don't know.
6% picked this

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