Q6 - Michaela: I think doctors who complain about patients

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Flaw (Misinterpretation - i.e. "how was the 2nd person being a bad listener?")

Stimulus Breakdown:
M: It's a little unfair for doctors to complain about their patients doing some medical research on the Internet, since it's natural for a patient to be thirsty for more info about their condition.
S: It's not unfair. Doctors are well trained. How can you say a doctor's opinion isn't worht more than an untrained Internet opinion?

Answer Anticipation:
Michaela would likely respond, "I never said a doctor's opinion isn't worth more!" She was just saying it's understandable that patients use the internet to research their condition. We might scrounge for general details on WebMD, and then hope that our Doctor can lend her GREATER expertise to our evolving understanding of our condition.

We have a pretty easy prephrase here since Sam literally says "How can you maintain _____ " and then fills in that blank with something that Michaela never said. So to complete the question stem, we'd want to hear "he interpreted M's remarks to mean that 'a doctor's opinion is not worth more than what untrained people can learn from searching the Internet'."

Correct Answer:
B

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Not even close to our paraphrase.

(B) YES. It's worded with annoying backwards syntax (instead of saying "Bob does not have more money than Carla", it says "Carla has at least as much money as Bob"), but it's exactly what we prephrased.

(C) This starts off great, as do so many trap answers, but ends incorrectly. We're comparing "your doctor vs. internet doctors". The whole "opinions of doctors published on websites" comes out of nowhere. We were just talking about researching a medical condition on the Internet. In doing so, we MAY come across the opinions of doctors on websites, but maybe not. We can't equate "doing Internet research about a medical condition" with "reading the opinions of doctors published on websites".

(D) Somewhat close: "take an opinion more seriously" is not too far from "an opinion is worth more". But the second half of this one also fails. Our prephrase (Sam's accusation) is about comparing "doctor's opinion vs. the result of Internet research". This is about "doctor's opinion vs. patient's opinion".

(E) Neither person was talking about patients who don't research.

Takeaway/Pattern: It was easy to find the misinterpretation because Sam accused Michaela of a claim that she never said. However, the correct answer is well disguised with backwards syntax, while the tempting trap answer of (C) will fool a lot of people, unless they are vigilantly reading every word in an answer choice to verify its accuracy.

#officialexplanation