Q5 - The radiation absorbed by someone

[romanmuffin]

Picked A. Is A wrong because it is talking about X-ray radiation being absorbed by airline flight crews, which is mixing two distinct concepts presented in the stimulus?

I can kind of see why the other answer choices are wrong, but I can't figure out why D is the right one. Can someone walk me through this one? Thanks!

[jiyoonsim]

Oh this was tricky - and like yourself, I picked A over D.
I'd say the key here is to play only with the flight radiaion and dental X-ray radiaion, but nothing else. This is more like a weakner question than flaw question.

A) looks agreeable because of the wording. But if you pit A into other words, it turns into the classic out-of-scope choice: There may be other forms of dangerous radiations.
The other forms of radiations are clearly out of focus, since all we have to care are radiations from dental X-ray and commercial airflight.

B) Clearer than A but similar with A - "other health risks" are out of focus. And both X-ray and flying does give us exposure to some radiation.

C) Radiation of higher intensity is out for the same reason.

D) The stem says
- dental x-ray radiation and airflight radiation are pretty much same in danger level
- dental x-ray radiation does negligible harm
THEREFORE airflight radiation also does negligible harm.

I'll throw an example:

Let's say the dental x-ray radiation and airflight radiation are 10.
How long does it take you to take x-ray? About a minute.
How long is the airflight? Clearly longer than a minute.

So we can say the total exposure of each are:

10 x 1 min = 10 for x-ray
10 x 60 min = 600 for airflight

Our stem forgot to consider this - the time of exposure.

E) Risks other than radiation is also out of scope.

[kylelitfin]

Oh this was tricky - and like yourself, I picked A over D.
I'd say the key here is to play only with the flight radiaion and dental X-ray radiaion, but nothing else. This is more like a weakner question than flaw question.

A) looks agreeable because of the wording. But if you pit A into other words, it turns into the classic out-of-scope choice: There may be other forms of dangerous radiations.
The other forms of radiations are clearly out of focus, since all we have to care are radiations from dental X-ray and commercial airflight.

B) Clearer than A but similar with A - "other health risks" are out of focus. And both X-ray and flying does give us exposure to some radiation.

C) Radiation of higher intensity is out for the same reason.

D) The stem says
- dental x-ray radiation and airflight radiation are pretty much same in danger level
- dental x-ray radiation does negligible harm
THEREFORE airflight radiation also does negligible harm.

I'll throw an example:

Let's say the dental x-ray radiation and airflight radiation are 10.
How long does it take you to take x-ray? About a minute.
How long is the airflight? Clearly longer than a minute.

So we can say the total exposure of each are:

10 x 1 min = 10 for x-ray
10 x 60 min = 600 for airflight

Our stem forgot to consider this - the time of exposure.

E) Risks other than radiation is also out of scope.

While your reasoning is spot on, I think the correct answer can be arrived at much more quickly when you consider the subject shift from the initial premise to the conclusion.

Notice how it begins with the premise describing SOMEONE during an ordinary flight.

What does it do in the final sentence? Someone becomes members of an airline crew. To paraphrase:

Radiation absorbed by your average person on a flight is no more harmful than radiation absorbed through a dental X-ray. A dental X-ray doesn't cause any significant harm to a person, so the radiation absorbed by an airline crew is similarly negligible.

Wait a second, that's not the same ordinary circumstance referenced in the initial premise. Members of an airline crew are on flights for a significant portion of their day. They would be exposed to the radiation much more frequently than your average Joe.

And thus, the error is that the stimulus fails to consider that the airline crews constant exposure to the radiation could create serious harm. (D) is correct.

Hopefully this helps!

[WaltGrace1983]

I also picked (A) over (D) but I was simply going too fast. When I was reviewing, I correctly chose (D) after I realized what a bad mistake I made! Here is what is going on...

The radiation absorbed by someone during a flight isn't more dangerous than that received during an X-ray
+
X-ray doesn't do much harm to a person

-->

The flight radiation won't do much harm to a person

There are two big flaws here. The first one that came to mind was that perhaps there are lots of different types of radiation in a flight (lets say 5) and so you cannot really compare the radiation in an X-ray to the many types of radiation encountered during a flight. This is nice debater thinking but the problem with this is that, irregardless, the "background information" that you probably skimmed over too quickly - like I did - says very clearly that THE RADIATION IS NO MORE DANGEROUS. Thus, it doesn't really matter that there may be more types of radiation at different intensities - the radiation itself collectively is not more dangerous.

Secondly, and here is the REAL flaw, one is exposed to radiation in different ways on a flight. That is, one is exposed to the radiation for a period of at least an hour, maybe five, maybe twenty. So, even though the radiation might be no more dangerous collectively, it could be that it is more dangerous after one is exposed to it for such a long period of time.

(D) totally gets at this flaw. It sounds like a great out of scope answer choice probably because it is a slightly odd "flaw" answer choice. I agree with the above, it is phrased more like a weakener.

(A) is wrong because it is definitely out of scope though has a lot of the key words I was looking for. However though, this is basically talking about EVERY OTHER form of radiation than that being discussed here. No good.

(B) We don't care about "other health risks."

(C) We don't know if the X-rays are of higher intensity or not on the flight. Either way, we know that they aren't any more dangerous than in a dental X-ray.

(E) similar to (B), we don't care about other risks.

Hope this helps someone.

[mkd000]

I disagree with WaltGrace that there are 2 flaws, the first being that there may be other forms of radiation other than X-rays. This is not a flaw. Why? Because the stimulus explicitly states that the radiation absorbed during flights is no more dangerous than those absorbed by X-rays during dental exams. It doesn't matter if people absorb UV, Gamma, etc. rays in air flights. Point is, the level of danger still = level of danger of radiation from dental exams.

Feedback on this comment please!