Recent epidemiological studies report that Country X has the lowest incidence of disease P of any country. Neverthele...

shunhe on July 21, 2020

Hi @ankita96,

Thanks for the question! So let’s recap the stimulus quickly. We’re told that Country X has the lowest incidence of disease P of any country, but people who get disease P in country X are much more likely to die from it than are residents of any other country. And we’re looking for an answer choice that’ll help us resolve this paradox, and you’ve mentioned that you know why (C) is correct, so I won’t go into it.

Let’s take a look at (A), which tells us that there are several forms of disease P, some of which are more contagious than others. So let’s ask ourselves: does this resolve this paradox? This issue we care about is the fact that the disease is way more severe in country X, and not how contagious the disease is (which is just about how easy it is to spread from person to person). We need to explain why more people die from disease P in country X, and knowing that some strains are more contagious than others doesn’t do anything to help explain this fact. So (A) can’t be the right answer, since even if it does explain why other countries have more of disease P (since they would presumably have the more contagious versions), it doesn’t explain why the disease is more severe in country X, and so doesn’t fully resolve the paradox in the same way (C) does.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.

ankita96 on July 22, 2020

Hi, Thank you so much, this was really helpful!

shunhe on July 22, 2020

Glad that helped!