QOD 28/1/2012

1.

Although perioral dermatitis rashes are believed to be caused by reactions to Sodium Laurel Sulfate (SLS) found in shampoos and other personal care products, instructing patients to eliminate all products with SLS frequently does not stop the perioral dermatitis.  Obviously, some other cause of perioral dermatitis besides reactions to SLS must exist. 

Which of the following, if true, would most seriously weakens the conclusion above?

A.  Many personal care products elicit an allergic skin response only after several days, making it very difficult to observe links between specific products patients use and the perioral dermatitis they develop.

B.  Skin allergies affect many people who never develop the symptom of perioral dermatitis.

C.  Many patients report that the personal care products that cause them perioral dermatitis are among the products they most enjoy using.

D.  Very few patients have allergic skin reactions as children and then live rash-free adult lives once they have eliminated products to which they have been demonstrated to be allergic. 

E.  Very rarely do personal care products cause patients to suffer a symptom more severe than that of perioral dermatitis rashes.

2.

In a psychological experiment conducted at Southbay University, groups of men with various levels of education read stories in which people caused harm, some of them doing so intentionally, and some accidentally.   When asked about appropriate penalization for those who had caused harm, the less educated men, unlike the educated ones, assigned punishments that did not vary according to whether the harm was done intentionally or accidentally.  Uneducated men, then, do not regard people’s intentions as relevant to penalization.  

Which of the following, if true, would most seriously weaken the conclusion above?

A. In these stories, the severity of the harm produced was clearly stated.

B. In interpreting these stories, the listeners had to draw on a relatively feminine sense of human psychology in order to tell whether harm was produced intentionally or accidentally.

C.  Relatively uneducated men are as likely to produce harm unintentionally as are more educated men.

D.  The more educated men assigned penalization in a way that closely resembled the way women had assign penalization in a similar experiment.

E.  The less educated men assigned penalization that varied according to the severity of the harm done by the agents in the stories.