#11 - The present goal of the field of medicine seems to be

[brcibake]

I am not understand why B is the correct answer. I answered C. Why would it matter it people have more than one transplant?

[Jonathan Evans]

Hi, brcibake,

I am happy to note here that (C) is the credited answer, not (B), so fear not, you had it right!

Good job!

[itstanaya]

I chose the correct answer, but mostly just because I eliminated the other choices. I could use some help understanding how to interpret the stimulus in a way that leads to answer choice (C).

My interpretation of the stimulus doesn't make a lot of sense, and is definitely incomplete, but here it is: As more people live longer, more people are subject to developing degenerative brain disorders. Thus, those with DBD will form an increasing portion of the population.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi Tanya,

Great question. You have an understanding of part of the basics of the stimulus, but there's a bit more to it. Organ transplants allow us to live longer lives. We are not able to transplant brains. Therefore, as organ transplants allow people to live longer, degenerative brain disorders will become an issue for an greater percentage of the population.

This is an assumption question, so we are looking for what is absolutely needed for the argument to work. When we look at the argument, what's missing? Do we know anything about degenerative brain disorders based on the stimulus? We need something to say that brain transplants are the solution for degenerative brain disorder.

Let's look at answer choice (C). It says that there are degenerative brain disorders that cannot be cured without a transplant. To test that choice, we want to negate it. Focus on your main verb for negating. It becomes there are NOT degenerative brain disorders that cannot be cured without a transplant. That hurts our argument. If there aren't disorders that can't be cured without a transplant, the fact that we can't transplant brains won't matter. Since the lack of answer choice (C) hurts the argument, that must be the answer choice that's required for the argument to work.

Hope that helps!
Rachael

[dshen123]

How to negate D? Thank you!

[Jeff Wren]

Hi ashen,

Answer D can be somewhat tricky to negate due to the part about "a very small proportion."

The easiest/most straightforward way to negate this is to simply add the phrase:

"It is not the case that" before the answer.

In Answer D, the negation would be:

"It is not the case that degenerative brain disorders account for a very small proportion of deaths in the population at large."

The tricky part is understanding what exactly does that sentence mean. You might be tempted to think this means that degenerative brain disorders account for a large or significant proportion of deaths in the population at large, but this would not necessarily be true. Anything other than a very small proportion would be acceptable, such as large proportion, a medium proportion, or even a small proportion (as long as it isn't very small). Exactly what qualifies as "a very small proportion" isn't specified, but hypothetically let's say it's less than 1%. If that were the case, then anything above 1% would qualify as "not a very small proportion."