PrepTest 118, Section 3, Question 19
Editorial: Medical schools spend one hour teaching preventive(42 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(9 more words not shown)
- APreventive medicine makes(19 more words not shown)
- BEvery hour devoted(14 more words not shown)
- CMedical schools could(7 more words not shown)
- DImprovements in doctors'(13 more words not shown)
- EThe time required(20 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
What if preventive medicine takes less time to teach? A smaller share of classroom time doesn't, by itself, show that students are missing something.
The editorial compares one hour of prevention with ten hours of treatment. Let's accept that doctors' use of preventive techniques greatly reduces costs. The question is whether more teaching time would address a gap. Perhaps the relevant prevention techniques are simple to explain, while the curative techniques need much longer instruction. In that case, the unequal hours might make sense. We haven't been told whether the prevention instruction is thorough.
What we’re looking for
The conclusion is conditional: if cost-effectiveness is the goal, the current time is insufficient. We don't have to establish that every medical school actually has that goal. We do need the argument to rule out our objection that the current allocation already teaches prevention thoroughly. That's the assumption I'd look for.
Working the answers
- A
Preventive care needn't rely on technologies with lower upfront costs. It could require expensive equipment and still reduce later medical expenses. The argument gives us cost savings from using the techniques, not a claim that every input is initially cheaper. A also doesn't show that students need more instruction.
- B
The passage gives no fixed savings rate for each extra teaching hour. The argument could work with smaller or uneven gains, provided the present instruction leaves something important untaught. Saying every hour reduces costs by at least 10 percent is much stronger than the reasoning requires.
- C
The schools could reallocate existing hours instead of adding more. More time on prevention could mean less time on something else. So the recommendation doesn't depend on the total number of teaching hours being able to increase.
- D
Curative medicine could become more cost-effective too. The editorial doesn't need every improvement in treatment to raise costs in order to criticize insufficient teaching of prevention. Both kinds of improvement could help. D makes an unsupported blanket claim about the alternative.
- ECorrect
Thoroughly teaching prevention requires more time than the schools currently allocate to it. This rules out the possibility that the apparently small allotment is already enough.
If the current time fully covered prevention, pointing to prevention's benefits wouldn't establish that the schools teach it for too few hours. E is needed for that complaint. It doesn't tell us the ideal number of hours or guarantee that every additional lesson saves a particular amount of money.
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