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Question

“In the hospital, some nurses don't wear white dress, some doctors have private practice and medicines prescribed are of high cost. Therefore, treatment in this hospital is of poor quality”. What fallacy does this argument make?

This question was previously asked in
UGC NET 2019 Paper 1 Question Paper (5-Dec-2019) (Shift 2)
The correct answer is

Slippery slope

The argument lists a few isolated observations about the hospital (a few nurses not in white, a few doctors in private practice, some costly medicines) and leaps from these minor, unrelated premises to a sweeping negative conclusion that the whole treatment is of poor quality.

As per the official key, this is treated as a Slippery slope, in which a conclusion of large magnitude is reached from small starting observations without any real causal or logical link connecting the premises to that final claim; the chain of reasoning slides from trivial facts to an unwarranted extreme judgement.

Fallacy of composition wrongly transfers a property of individual parts to the whole, and fallacy of division does the reverse (whole to parts); fallacy of accident misapplies a general rule to a special case. Since the key identifies the unjustified escalation from petty premises to a drastic overall verdict, the intended answer is the sliding-scale reasoning. (A neutral note: several logicians would classify this pattern as a fallacy of composition, but the keyed answer is to be followed.)

Correct answer: Slippery slope

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