TEST11 CRITICAL REASONING 2
section iv
time—35 minutes
25 questions
directions: the questions in this section are based on the reasoning contained in brief statements or passages. for some questions, more than one of the choices could conceivably answer the question. however, you are to choose the best answer; that is, the response that most accurately and completely answers the question. you should not make assumptions that are by commonsense standards implausible, superfluous, or incompatible with the passage. after you have chosen the best answer, blacken the corresponding space on your answer sheet.
questions 1-2
a physician who is too through in conducting a medical checkup is likely to subject the patient to the discomfort and expense of unnecessary tests. one who is not thorough enough is likely to miss some serious problem and therefore give the patient a false sense of security. it is difficult for physicians to judge exactly how thorough they should be. therefore, it is generally unwise for patients to have medical checkups when they do not feel ill.
1. which one of the following, if true, would most seriously weaken the argument in the passage?
(a) some serious diseases in their early stages have symptoms that physicians can readily detect.
(b) under the pressure of reduced reimbursements, physicians have been reducing the average amount of time they spend on each medical checkup.
(c) patients not medically trained are unable to judge foe themselves what degree of thoroughness is appropriate for physicians in conducting medical checkups.
(d) many people are financially unable to afford regular medical checkups.
(e) some physicians sometimes exercise exactly the right degree of thoroughness in performing a medical checkup.
2. which one of the following, if true, would provide the most support for the conclusion in the passage?
(a) not all medical tests entail significant discomfort.
(b) sometimes unnecessary medical tests cause healthy people to become ill.
(c) some patients refuse to accept a physician’s assurance that the patient is healthy.
(d) the more complete the series of tests performed in a medical checkup, the more likely it is that a rare disease, if present, will be discovered.
(e) physicians can eliminate the need to order certain tests by carefully questioning patients and rejecting some possibilities on that basis.
3. people often pronounce a word differently when asked to read written material aloud than when speaking spontaneously. these differences may cause problems for those who develop computers that recognize speech. usually the developers “train” the computers by using samples of written material read by the people who will be using the compute.
the observations above provide most evidence foe the conclusion that
(a) it will be impossible to develop computers that decode spontaneous speech.
(b) when reading written material, people who have different accents pronounce the same word in the same way as one another.
(c) computers may be less reliable in decoding spontaneous speech than in decoding samples that have been read aloud.
(d) a “trained” computer never correctly decodes the spontaneous speech of a person whose voice sample was used to train it.
(e) computers are now able to interpret oral speech without error.
4. one of the requirements for admission to the lunnville roller skating club is a high degree of skill in roller skating. the club president has expressed concern that the club may have discriminated against qualified women in its admissions this year. yet half of the applicants admitted to the club this year were women. this proves that there was no discrimination against qualified women applicants in the club’s admissions this year.