PrepTest 147, Section 4, Question 3
Hospital patients generally have lower infection rates and(62 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(13 more words not shown)
- AMany of the(20 more words not shown)
- BMost of the(18 more words not shown)
- CInfection is more(18 more words not shown)
- DWoodville's hospital has(13 more words not shown)
- EWoodville's hospital is(19 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
What's helping Woodville keep up? Its rooms are semiprivate, yet its patients have roughly the same infection rates and lengths of stay as patients at nearby hospitals with mostly private rooms. Given the usual advantage of private rooms, I'd expect Woodville to have worse results.
What we’re looking for
Perhaps something compensates for the room arrangement, such as especially effective staff. We might also wonder whether Woodville treats less-sick patients, but the passage says the patients are very similar, so that explanation doesn't fit the information we're given. We need another way to reconcile the room types with the similar outcomes.
Working the answers
- A
Sharing doctors doesn't supply an advantage that offsets Woodville's apparently less favorable rooms. Those doctors work in the nearby hospitals too. Common staff could help explain some similarities, but A doesn't address why the room difference fails to produce the expected disadvantage.
- B
The age of the buildings doesn't tell us how they affect infection or recovery. An older hospital could have been renovated or could use effective procedures. We shouldn't invent an advantage or disadvantage from the construction dates. B leaves the relevant difference unexplained.
- C
This helps explain why sharing a room might increase infection risk in the first place. It doesn't explain why Woodville's outcomes match hospitals with more private rooms. If we assume Woodville's patients are in closer contact, C reinforces the expectation that makes the results surprising.
- DCorrect
A room designed for more than one patient isn't necessarily occupied by more than one patient. This policy means Woodville uses its semiprivate rooms like private rooms whenever it can: one patient gets the room. That reduces the practical difference between Woodville and the nearby hospitals.
I was looking for something that compensated for sharing rooms. D instead suggests the patients may often not be sharing them at all. It doesn't establish that the hospital is never full or that every patient is alone. But the policy gives us a direct reason the label 'semiprivate' might overstate the difference in patients' actual experience.
- E
A business-district location doesn't tell us how rooms are used or how patients are cared for. The nearby hospitals' different locations could matter in some way, but E supplies no connection to the infection rates or hospital stays we need to explain.
More Paradox questions
Learn the LSAT our way
Our platform drills Paradox questions at your level and adjusts as you improve.