Of all of the surgeons practicing at the city hospital, the chief surg

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION

(A) No. This is perhaps the second-best answer. The implication of the stated conflict of interest is that the administrators might exaggerate the abilities of the chief surgeon. However, this is speculation. If there were no conflict of interest, it would still be possible that the staff would consider him the best surgeon.

(B) No. How he was appointed does not resolve the discrepancy between the chief surgeon’s reputation and his apparently poor record.

(C) No. This does not resolve the discrepancy between chief surgeon’s reputation and his apparently poor record, though it does imply that younger surgeons who trained under him might be loyal to him. However, this would have relevance only if these surgeons, not the hospital administrators, claimed the chief surgeon was the hospital’s best surgeon.

(D) Yes. This explains the apparent paradox well. If the chief surgeon is assigned the high-risk cases, it’s to be expected that he would have a higher number of patients who die. For example, suppose 90 percent of surgery patients at the hospital survive their operations, but only 75 percent of the chief surgeon’s patients survive. Clearly, the chief surgeon’s survival rate is much lower than the hospital’s average. But if the chief surgeon performs only open heart surgery and the national survival rate for these operations is just 50 percent, the chief surgeon’s survival rate is impressive.

(E) No. The statements in the passage compare the chief surgeon’s current performance to that of the current staff, not to that of the previous staff or previous chief surgeon.