LSAT 118 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q9

LR Question 9 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Public health expert: Until recently people believed that …

QUESTION TYPE: Identify the Conclusion

CONCLUSION: Public health policy should focus more on educating people about disease transmission to reduce disease.

REASONING: Medicines that kill one strain can create new strains that are resistant to the medicine.

ANALYSIS: The expert’s critique of the current approach is basically that the disease strains are evolving more rapidly than medicine can keep up.

You kill off Strain 1 with a drug. Great. But because these organisms reproduce so quickly, Strain 2 emerges. And now it’s resistant to the drug that worked on Strain 1.

So the problem isn’t that medicine doesn’t work. It’s that treatment alone becomes a constant game of catch-up.

Anyways, we’re looking for the conclusion. That comes at the end.

Ask yourself: is the point that relying only on medicine isn’t always effective, or is the main point what we should do about this problem? It’s the latter.

The expert thinks we should do a better job educating people about how diseases spread, so fewer people get infected in the first place.

___________

1. This is a premise. It justifies that we should focus on something else to fix the problem.
2. That’s insane. The expert never even implied this. They said relying on treatment alone is problematic because resistance evolves.
3. CORRECT. This is an abstract version of the conclusion. The author’s recommendation is: Increase emphasis on public education about disease transmission. That’s a specific proposed policy change.
4. Also absurdly strong. This is saying: If you know everything about COVID-19, you will never catch it. The expert never said that.
5. Tempting because of the opening discussion, but unsupported. The stimulus says people believed biochemical research would eventually win. That does not necessarily mean policymakers ignored microbial reproduction.