Critical Reasoning

Source: Veritas Prep CR-2

Question is in image.



OA: E

Can someone analyze this problem?

[spoiler]E
This is also an OG 12 question.[/spoiler]

This is E. Do you have any question in the same, so that I can help you to understand.

I couldn't understood it. Can someone analyze it.

akhp77 wrote:I couldn't understood it. Can someone analyze it.

Hi,

Conclusion: physician should use the test that gives the smallest percentage of false negative results.

Premises say that the test actually is faulty and might give Positive when actually negative and negative when actually positive.

But the conclusion is only asking to take smallest percentage of False negative results.
What about False Positive???

This is explained in option E.
It says that all the food allergies have the same proportion of false positive results. So there is no need of considering higher/lower percentages of them.

Hope this helps!!

Hey guys,

I received a PM to chime in here and hopefully didn't come to the party too late!

One thing that is pretty important in this question is that it's not a pure argument, but more a strategy/policy question. For those questions, it's important to keep in mind that the objective is crucial!

Here, the objective is to "most accurately determine food allergies", and the proposed plan is to use the test that gives the smallest percentage of false negatives (implied in that is that we don't care about tests for false positives).

The statement that shows that this plan is most likely to achieve the objective - "most accurate" way of testing - is going to be correct, and so E, which demonstrates that minimizing false negatives is really the only way to minimize falsehoods, is correct. If all tests give a similar number of false positives, the only way to be more accurate is to minimize false negatives, so E shows that the plan will likely achieve its objective.


When you see these Plan/Strategy questions, make sure to focus on the objective! As you can see here, some of these questions are written pretty shrewdly so that you could draw your own objective (e.g. "In order to make sure that the tests allow for maximum safety" in this case, which is a nice goal, but not the explicit goal given here).

Thanks Brian for reply

Veritas Prep CR-2 is some what tougher but good one.