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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
Complete-the-passage. 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 (kiosk stores had shorter waits) to a causal prediction (adding kiosks everywhere will cut waits). The gap the student must close: maybe the kiosks did not cause the shorter waits, so the prediction has no support.
Why (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. Rolling kiosks out to every store, including the busy ones, would therefore have no guarantee of cutting waits. This completion supplies exactly the reason the connector demands. Notice that you must infer the selection mechanism yourself; the stem never mentions store traffic, so this is a real evidence-to-conclusion bridge, not a word echo.
Why the others fail: (B) points the wrong way. If kiosk users buy fewer items, their transactions are faster, which would tend to shorten waits, not explain why the plan would fall short. It is a tempting checkout-related fact, but the direction is backward. (C) names a familiar kiosk hassle, which is why it is easy to grab, but 'occasional' assistance is too weak to undo the observed wait advantage, and it never addresses why that advantage would not carry over to other stores. (D) changes the subject from wait times to budget. Whether the chain can afford the rollout is a different question from whether the rollout reduces waits. (E) swaps the metric: it compares customer-satisfaction scores, not wait times. A satisfaction difference does not bear on the wait-time prediction.
The key discipline: the completion must give a reason the prediction fails on its own metric (wait times) by undermining the causal leap. Only (A) does that, by revealing the correlation rests on how the kiosk stores were selected.
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