PrepTest 156, Section 2, Question 3
A recent study has found that, surprisingly, the(25 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(11 more words not shown)
- AGovernment safety inspectors(15 more words not shown)
- BGovernment safety inspectors(9 more words not shown)
- COnly those industries(14 more words not shown)
- DWorkers behave especially(13 more words not shown)
- ESome of the(23 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Maybe the inspectors go to those industries because the work is dangerous.
Think about an accountant working in an air-conditioned office and a firefighter entering a burning building. Imagine the firefighter's industry gets safety inspections and the accountant's does not. Would the firefighter's higher risk show that inspections make work dangerous? Of course not. The jobs were very different before any inspector arrived.
That's the possibility I want to test here. The passage compares monitored industries with unmonitored industries and finds a higher risk of serious injury in the monitored group. But those groups may have started with very different risks. Inspectors could improve safety at a dangerous job without making it as safe as an office job.
What we’re looking for
We're asked to explain the surprising finding. My prediction is that the government selects inherently dangerous industries for monitoring. If danger helps determine where inspectors go, the presence of inspectors and higher injury risk can easily occur together.
Working the answers
- A
Training employees to work safely gives us another reason to expect inspections to reduce risk. That doesn't explain why the monitored industries have higher risk than the unmonitored ones. We still need to know what makes those groups different.
- B
This could explain why inspectors fail to get safety rules followed. But failing to improve safety is not, by itself, an explanation for why the monitored industries are more dangerous. If two groups started equally safe, ineffective inspectors wouldn't explain the higher risk in one group. We need a reason for that difference.
- CCorrect
The government monitors only industries that already have an inherently high injury risk. That is the difference we were looking for. These industries aren't a random selection of jobs; they are selected from dangerous ones.
The firefighter example now makes sense. Monitoring can be a response to a dangerous job, so we shouldn't assume that the presence of monitoring created the danger. The inspection system could help and still leave monitored jobs riskier than many unmonitored jobs.
- D
Extra caution would tend to make monitored work safer. Like A's safety training, that makes the higher risk harder to explain, unless we add some other difference between the industries. D doesn't provide that difference.
- E
This compares one monitored industry with another monitored industry. But our puzzle compares monitored industries with unmonitored industries. Different injury rates within the monitored group don't explain why that group has the higher risk in the comparison we're given.
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