A new government policy has been developed to avoid many

The premise, goes on to describe the government policy and how the vaccine will be administered.

The conclusion is -


so every year it will be necessary for all high-risk individuals to receive a vaccine for a different strain of the virus.


The question stem reads:

The relationship can be represented as P (premise) + A(assumption) ---> Conclusion; Which means we are in search of an assumption which will ENABLE the conclusion to become logical, therefore the test maker concedes that their are some apparent HOLES in the argument. At this point we can try to paraphrase or move onto the answer choices..

Lets keep the Premise and conclusion in mind so that we can attack the answer choices:

(A)

The number of individuals in the high-risk
group for influenza will not significantly
change from year to year.

If we add this assumption to the premise provided, do we get a logical conclusion? Even if the no. of people in the group do not change or change it will have no bearing on whether those people would need or not need the vaccine next year. WE CAN SAFELY move on ..

(B)



The likelihood of the virus occurring has nothing to do with the repeated inoculation of a different type of vaccine (strain).. Even if the incidence of influenca epidemic drops significantly we have no indication from either the passage or the answer choice which suggests that the government will roll back its decision to vaccinate people. The argument still remains in the same LOGICAL position as it existed in the original passage (we are to strengthen this logical position of the argument through the introduction of an assumption)

(C)



A Basic requirement in any assumption question is that the assumption must be an ADDITIONAL PREMISE. This is a craftily worded paraphrase of an all ready mentioned premise : " Each year’s vaccination will protect only against the strain of the influenza virus" , Therefore this FAILS the test ( P + A ---> Conclusion)

(D)



This is the correct answer. The assumption fills one major HOLE in the argument (something which some may be able to paraphrase before reviewing the answer choices). If someone made this argument to me (passage). I could rebut by saying " What if you have 2-3 consecutive years where every year a similar strain will be considered dangerous" " would your conclusion not be FALSE then?" If you wanted to WIN the argument, you can rebut by saying " Each year the strain of influenza virus deemed most likely to be prevalent will be one that had not previously been deemed most likely to be prevalent. "..And you will win the argument

This meets the P + A --> Conclusion test as it makes the overall argument more logical.

(E)



This answer choice is out of scope, as it goes on a different tangent altogether and is the easiest one to eliminate because of that !

Hope this helps

OA : D

This question becomes so much easier, if we take a bit of time to write down the premise and conclusion on our scratch pads before we begin searching for the correct assumption ( this way we can easily realize that C is a rewording of a pre existing premise so that we can avoiding falling into the trap)...