LSAT 147 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q3

LR Question 3 Explanation

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.

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1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.)
5. Why would this matter? The stimulus didn’t say how central business districts would affect infection rates.