QUESTION TEXT: Hospital patients generally have lower infection rates…
QUESTION TYPE: Paradox
PARADOX: In hospitals, patients housed in private rooms have shorter stays and fewer infections than those housed in semiprivate rooms. Woodville hospital has only semiprivate rooms, but infection rates are more like a hospital with private rooms. The types of patients in Woodville are much the same as those in hospitals with private rooms.
ANALYSIS: To solve this, think about why private rooms help: it’s because there’s no one else in them. It’s not the room itself; private rooms don’t have magic antibiotic walls.
If Woodville’s semiprivate rooms usually just house one person, then we’d expect infection rates to be similar.
___________
- If Woodville’s doctors had been better, then that could have explained the better outcomes. So this answer makes things more confusing by removing a possible explanation: it shows Woodville’s doctors aren’t exclusive to Woodville.
- This doesn’t really explain anything. It would need to also say “and older hospitals are associated with lower infection rates” or something like that.
- This explains why private rooms have lower infection rates. But it doesn’t explain why Woodville’s semi-private rooms also have lower infection rates.
- CORRECT. This explains things. It means that Woodville hospital’s rooms are effectively semi-private most of the time.
(Note also that the competing hospitals only mostly had private rooms. So, Woodville could have more than 1 person in up to 30-40% of its rooms and still match the other hospitals.) - Why would this matter? The stimulus didn’t say how central business districts would affect infection rates.
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