PrepTest 135, Section 2, Question 9
Reducing stress lessens a person's sensitivity to pain.(59 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(9 more words not shown)
- AAll of the(17 more words not shown)
- BAnticipating surgery is(7 more words not shown)
- CListening to music(2 more words not shown)
- DThe psychological effects(9 more words not shown)
- EBoth anesthesia and(5 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
We played music. When did we establish that we reduced stress?
The researchers' conclusion is about stress and sensitivity to pain. Their study compares two recordings: one contains conversation, and the other contains music. The music-only patients require less anesthesia during surgery and fewer painkillers afterward than the conversation-only patients.
That gives us a difference associated with music, but the researchers explain it in terms of stress. We need a connection between those ideas. Perhaps listening to music reduced the patients' stress; then the results could help support the proposed relationship. Without that connection, the study hasn't shown that reducing stress was what distinguished the groups.
What we’re looking for
So the necessary assumption should connect music with stress reduction. We aren't saying the two are identical, or that this one assumption settles every possible question about the study. We're identifying the unstated link this argument relies on.
Working the answers
- A
The comparison concerns patients who listened only to music and patients who listened only to conversation. It doesn't require every patient in the entire study to have kept the same recording before and after surgery. There could have been additional patients who switched recordings and weren't included in this particular comparison. A broad rule covering everyone isn't needed for the inference described.
- B
We don't need to rank how stressful the two phases of surgery are. Anticipating surgery could be more stressful, less stressful, or equally stressful compared with recovery. The researchers still need music to reduce stress if the musical treatment is supposed to support their conclusion.
- CCorrect
Listening to music reduces stress. That supplies the missing link between the study's musical treatment and the conclusion's stress reduction. If music didn't reduce stress, the fact that music listeners needed less medication wouldn't give this argument its proposed evidence about the effect of reducing stress.
- D
The psychological effects don't have to remain completely unchanged by medication. Music could still reduce stress even if anesthesia or painkillers changed the strength of that effect. The argument needs the relevant stress reduction, not a guarantee that medication leaves every psychological effect untouched.
- E
Anesthesia and painkillers needn't reduce stress for the researchers' explanation to work. Their account is that lower stress reduces sensitivity to pain and therefore reduces the need for those drugs. A further claim that the drugs themselves reduce stress isn't the missing connection between music and the proposed cause.
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