In a study of heart

Answer choices

1. A

   Correct71% picked this

   stress sometimes reduces the amount of pain a heart

   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%
2. B

   Out of Scope: beneficial pain1% picked this

   the pain experienced by heart patients is to some

   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%
3. C

   Too Strong12% picked this

   the severity of a heart patient’s condition is usually worsened by withholding information from the patient about the treatment

   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%
4. D

   Unsupported Causal Relationship10% picked this

   stress is probably an effect rather than a cause of reduced blood flow

   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%
5. E

   Out of Scope: more likely surgery5% picked this

   heart patients suffering from reduced blood flow to the heart who are experiencing pain from the condition are more likely to require surgery than

   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.

   5%