Public health professional: The Happydale Department of Environmental

Official Explanation

The public health professional says the DES proposal would require DES to collect biological data from all area beaches. If anything, this would make DES more likely to detect pathogens before they cause waterborne diseases, so the passage gives us no reason to think adopting the proposal would increase incidents of waterborne disease. Thus, the first option is not supported. The public health professional also explicitly says the proposal would help reduce the number of beach advisories, so the second option is not supported either. The public health professional does not indicate how much of a priority education currently is for DES. So although the proposal would promote education as well as monitoring, there is no reason to suppose it would result in DES shifting its principal priorities from monitoring to education. Therefore, the third option is not supported either. Since the public health professional says the program would require collecting biological data from all area beaches, probably no area beaches would remain entirely unmonitored if the program were successfully adopted. Thus, the fifth option is not supported either. But since the public health professional says some area beaches are currently unmonitored, the fourth option is supported.

The correct answer is There will be fewer, if any, entirely unmonitored beaches.

The public health professional gives us no reason to suppose that any aspect of the current situation will change if the DES proposal is not adopted. The first four options all describe changes in the current situation, so the public health professional's statement does not support any of them. In contrast, the fifth option merely says that some beaches will remain entirely unmonitored. And indeed, some of them probably will remain unmonitored unless the proposal or some similar program is introduced to monitor them. The public health professional does not indicate that any other monitoring program is likely to be adopted if the DES proposal is not adopted. Therefore, the public health professional's statement suggests that the outcome described in the fifth option is likely to result if the proposal is not adopted.

The correct answer is Some beaches will remain entirely unmonitored.