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A regional grocery chain found that, over the past year, its stores equipped with self-checkout kiosks had shorter average customer wait times than its stores without kiosks. On the strength of this finding, the chain's management plans to install kiosks in every store, expecting that doing so will reduce average wait times across the chain. This expectation may be mistaken, however, because ___
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Correct answer
A
This is a complete-the-passage item. The connector "because" must introduce the reason the expectation "may be mistaken," so the credited completion has to supply a genuine reason that installing kiosks chain-wide would not reduce average wait times. The argument leaps from a correlation to a causal prediction: kiosk stores had shorter waits, so adding kiosks everywhere will cut waits. The gap to close is that the kiosks may not have caused the shorter waits in the first place, so the prediction would have no support.
(A) is correct. If management had placed kiosks specifically in stores whose customer traffic was already relatively light, then the shorter waits at those stores are explained by light traffic, not by the kiosks. The observed advantage was a feature of the stores that were chosen, not an effect of the kiosks themselves. Rolling kiosks out to every store, including the busiest ones, would then carry no guarantee of cutting waits. This supplies exactly the reason the connector demands, and since the stem never mentions store traffic, you have to recognize on your own that this selection story explains away the kiosk stores' advantage.
(B) is wrong because it points the wrong way. If kiosk users buy fewer items, their transactions are faster, which would tend to shorten waits rather than explain why the plan would fall short.
(C) is wrong because "occasional" staff assistance is too weak a drawback to erase the wait advantage already observed in the kiosk stores, and it never explains why that advantage would fail to carry over to the other stores.
(D) is wrong because it shifts from wait times to budget. Whether the chain can afford the rollout is a different question from whether the rollout reduces waits.
(E) is wrong because it swaps the metric from wait times to customer-satisfaction scores. A satisfaction gap does not bear on the wait-time prediction the conclusion actually makes.
The completion must give a reason the prediction fails on its own metric, wait times, by undermining the leap from correlation to cause. Only (A) does that, by showing the correlation rests on how the kiosk stores were selected.
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