PrepTest 151, Section 2, Question 6
Michaela: I think doctors who complain about patients(66 more words not shown)
Sam’s response indicates that he(6 more words not shown)
- Ahealth information found(5 more words not shown)
- Bthe opinion of(25 more words not shown)
- Cthe opinion of(18 more words not shown)
- Da doctor’s explanation(19 more words not shown)
- Epatients who do(13 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Michaela didn't say the patient's research is just as good as the doctor's training.
Wanting to learn about your condition is understandable. We could also understand a doctor's concern that a patient might find misleading information or misunderstand what they read. Those concerns don't force us to choose between treating all patient research as worthless and treating it as equal to a professional opinion. A patient could research, ask questions, and still give the doctor's judgment more weight.
Sam jumps to that second position. He asks how Michaela can maintain that a doctor's opinion isn't worth more than an untrained person's Internet findings. That is the claim he thinks she made, even though her actual point was that complaints about patients' curiosity are a little unfair.
What we’re looking for
The question asks for Sam's interpretation of her remarks. We need the position he attributes to her, not his own position and not a claim Michaela clearly stated.
Working the answers
- A
Internet information could be trustworthy without deserving as much weight as a doctor's informed judgment. Sam's reply makes the stronger comparison about the value of the two opinions. A doesn't capture what he challenges Michaela for supposedly maintaining.
- BCorrect
Sam treats Michaela as saying the researched patient's opinion deserves at least as much weight as the doctor's. His question—how can you say the doctor's isn't worth more?—reveals that interpretation. Michaela only defended the desire to learn; Sam reads that defense as denying the greater value of medical training.
- C
The comparison is between a trained doctor and an untrained patient, not between two doctors. A website might contain a doctor's writing, but Sam's explicit contrast concerns the opinion the patient develops from searching, not the relative standing of different medical professionals.
- D
This is closer to Sam's own view: the trained doctor's explanation should count for more. We are asked what Sam thinks Michaela means. He challenges her as though she were denying that greater weight, so D puts us on the wrong speaker's side.
- E
Neither speaker compares patients who research with patients who don't. Sam contrasts a doctor's opinion with an untrained researcher's opinion. E introduces a different comparison about how much consideration different patients give their doctors.
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