It is difficult to keep deep wounds free of bacteria. Even strong antibiotics fail to kill the bacteria that live in ...
Gregory-CoffeeFebruary 10, 2022
"A" versus "C"
This question threw me for a loop, mostly due to the description of packing the wound with a "sweet substance" and nothing related to an "absorptive substance" in the premise. From the "sweet substance" descriptor, my mind went to using the sugar as a food substance, which is described in answer choice "C." The term "sweet substance" does not at all imply anything to do with a dehydrating effect and instead might imply any sweet substance such as honey could have the same effect as the sugar. Although the term "bacteria" often gets a bad reputation, the human body could not survive without bacteria and some bacteria are very beneficial in wound care. So, if the beneficial bacteria out-competed the bad bacteria inside the deep wound, then the sugar as a nutrient could have a positive effect and thus solve the paradox. For this reason, I believed answer choice "C" to be the best answer. However, I may also have been over-thinking the question from a scientific point-of-view, but I would appreciate some more clarification and input on this question.
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On Paradox questions, sometimes it helps to just say the paradox before anticipating a way to explain/resolve the paradox or looking at the answer choices. To do that, just ask a question about the two contradictory-seeming facts from the passage. Here, the paradox is “why can packing a wound with a sweet substance like sugar kill bacteria deep in a wound, when strong antibiotics can’t?”
Notice what’s not in that paradox: whether bacteria can be beneficial. The paradox is only about “killing” the bacterial. It sounds to me like you did overthink it — specifically, you added “bacteria can be good” to your analysis. Of course, if (C) is true, sugar will cause the bacteria to proliferate. That would make the physicians’ success in “eliminating the bacteria from deep wounds” all the stranger.
