Logical Reasoning

PT145 · S2 · Q12 When doctors vaccinate a patient

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When doctors vaccinate a patient, their intention is to expose him or her to a weakened form of a disease-causing pathogen and thus to make the patient better able to resist the pathogen and less likely to develop a severe form of that disease later.

Doctor's Goal

Help a patient to avoid a severe form of a disease.

Doctor's Method

Give the patient a vaccine with a weakened form of that disease, so that the patient will be better able to resist that pathogen later.

Implicit Principle

We want something like, .

i.e.

12.

Which one of the following best illustrates the principle that the passage illustrates?

  1. Some directors instruct actors not

    Bad Match

    We're looking for "expose yourself to something mildly bad, so that you're better prepared later to avoid something way worse". This is talking about "avoid doing something mildly good (don't rehearse your lines)".

    0% picked this

  2. Correct

    Some parents read their children

    Why this is right

    We're looking for "expose yourself to something mildly bad, so that you're better prepared later to avoid something way worse". This is talking about presenting the dark side of humanity to your kids (treachery and cruelty) in a weakened, more manageable form (fairy tales) so that they will be less vulnerable to these dark things later in life. Using a fairy tale is a "safe" way to expose kids to something nasty, in the hopes that when they encounter this nasty stuff later in life, they will deal with it better. Similarly, vaccines are a "safe" way to expose people to something nasty, in the hopes that when they encounter this nasty stuff later in life, they will deal with it better.

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

    86% picked this

  3. In some circumstances, firefighters use

    Bad Match

    We're looking for "expose yourself to something mildly bad, so that you're better prepared later to avoid something way worse". This firefighter example would match if the passage had said doctors sometimes "fight an existing disease by blasting it with some other disease, so that there's a disease explosion, and the original disease is deprived of its ability to grow".

    5% picked this

  4. In some cases, a business

    Bad Match

    We're looking for "expose yourself to something mildly bad, so that you're better prepared later to avoid something way worse". This is talking about "expose yourself to something mildly bad so that you can be better prepared to do something awesome later". (Shutter your operations for a bit, which will mean you're not making any revenue and taking a bit of a financial hit so that you can re-open your business once you've better positioned yourself for profitability.)

    3% picked this

  5. Some police departments energetically pursue

    Bad Match

    We're looking for "expose yourself to something mildly bad, so that you're better prepared later to avoid something way worse". This is somewhat tempting because it's talking about cracking down on minor crimes (which sounds like a mild bad) in order to deter a more-serious crimes (which sounds like something way worse). But the logic doesn't match as well as (B)'s. In this answer, we're doing something harsh to a Person X that did a mildly bad thing, so that Person Y will be too scared to do a severely bad thing. In the original, we're doing a mildly bad thing to Person X (infecting it with a weak disease), so that Person X will be better protected in the long run.

    5% picked this

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