Read the passage below, and answer the questions that follow. Passage: Researche
ID: 3461549 • Letter: R
Question
Read the passage below, and answer the questions that follow.
Passage:
Researchers from Tenon Hospital in Paris reported to the American Urological Association that dogs can be trained to detect the odor of chemicals released into urine by prostate cancer. The researchers first trained a Belgain Malinois to identify urine samples from patients with prostate cancer and to differentiate them from urine samples from healthy subjects. They then determined whether the dog could select a urine sample from a prostate cancer victim when four urine samples from healthy people were present. The dog was correct in 63 out 66 tests—more accurate than the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test now used to detect prostate cancer. The researchers currently are training other dogs.
Questions:
Do you think the dog's success rate was coincidental? Why or why not?
Do you see any weakness in the experiment?
If you were testing the ability of this dog to detect urine from victims of prostate cancer, would you do anything differently?
Explanation / Answer
the dogs success rate was not coincidental as the success rate is way higher than the coincidental limit and also because dogs have the inborn biological tendency to smell unusual things. hence considering this i will consider the success is evident
the weekness in the experiment is that only one breed of dog is used and the conlusion or result is made on all the breeds and the sample size is also very small
i would have rndomly chosen dogs from different breeds for the experiment and aa larger sample size too.
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