PrepTest 118, Section 3, Question 24
The increasing complexity of scientific inquiry has led(44 more words not shown)
If all of the statements(11 more words not shown)
- AClinical trials involving(14 more words not shown)
- BMost reports of(10 more words not shown)
- CWhen a technical(11 more words not shown)
- DPhysics papers authored(16 more words not shown)
- EMost technical articles(13 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Scientists collaborating on complicated work makes sense. If several hospitals contribute patients to a study, it isn't surprising that physicians from those hospitals share authorship. Likewise, work involving several laboratories may produce a paper with authors from each.
What we’re looking for
But where is this going? Nobody has claimed that collaboration makes the science unreliable, or that these papers deserve criticism. We have a set of facts to work with. The question asks what must be true, so we don't need to invent a problem or combine every detail into a grand conclusion. I don't have a precise answer prediction here. Let's look for a claim the passage actually establishes and be careful about expanding its scope.
Working the answers
- A
Never goes beyond usually. The passage doesn't give a rule covering every trial involving several hospitals. There's a second distinction too: it describes who coauthors reports, whereas A describes who conducts trials. We shouldn't automatically turn an authorship pattern into an absolute rule about conducting the work.
- BCorrect
The second sentence tells us that reports of these trials are usually coauthored by physicians from each participating hospital. Several hospitals contributing authors means multiple authors, and usually tells us this happens in most cases. B states just that.
We don't need the physics example to prove this answer. A must-be-true answer can follow from one sentence; it doesn't have to weave the entire passage together. Here, keeping the conclusion modest makes the question much easier.
- C
We have examples of articles involving multiple institutions, not a description of most multiauthored technical articles. Perhaps most such articles come from teams at a single university, while the hospital and laboratory cases discussed here are a small minority. Without knowing their share of all multiauthored articles, we can't extend their pattern to the whole category.
- D
Follow which group we start with. The passage starts with experiments using subsystems from several labs and tells us their papers generally have authors from those labs. D starts with papers whose authors come from several labs and assumes that particular kind of experiment. Those researchers could have collaborated on something else. Knowing what the subsystem papers usually look like doesn't tell us that most shared-author papers involve subsystems.
- E
Solely rules out additional contributors, and the passage doesn't do that. Someone might help interpret the results or write the report without conducting the experiment. The fact that participating physicians or laboratory researchers appear among the authors doesn't establish that nobody else does. E also makes a claim about most technical articles, extending beyond the particular categories described.
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