A study of National football League Statistics over the last ten years reveals that the loosing team threw more interceptions than did the winning team in 82 percent of the games played. This statistics clearly indicate that interceptions contribute greatly to team losses. The conclusion in the above argument depends on which of the following assumptions?

a. Fumbles do not hurt a team's chances of winning a game.
b. A team's chances of winning a game are greatly reduced if it throws any interceptions during a game.
c. A team that throws more interceptions than its opponent does and still wins the game must have superior players.
d. Interceptions do not result from a team's falling behind in the game.
e. Interceptions are harmful primarily because they make it easy for the other team to score points.

Hello chetan2u,

My only point of concern here is that falling behind in a game doesn't mean that the team will loose or has lost. The conclusion is specifically about the team that losses. Certainly a game isn't over until it's over.

On that basis I marked out D and chose A since i thought A is removing any alternate reasoning for the loss. I do understand that as per the premise interceptions are NOT the ONLY cause, so A can't be right; but D isn't making any sense either to me.

Please throw some light on my aforesaid doubt.

Regards
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I've seen every edition of the OG dating back more than ten years, and I've never encountered this question before. I would be shocked if this were ever an official question. An official question would not misspell 'losing', but far more importantly, official questions are carefully designed to be culturally neutral. This particular question is almost certainly not; someone who knows what a 'fumble' or an 'interception' is will have an easier time understanding the question than someone who does not know about those things. GMAT Verbal questions are designed to test your verbal reasoning abilities, and not your familiarity with American sports.

GMAC is very careful about this issue, and it's actually one of the things they're looking at when they collect data on experimental questions. This is the kind of question where I'd expect a US test taker and an international test taker of the same ability to perform differently. If GMAC ever used a question like this as an experimental question, that difference would show up in the question statistics they collect. They'd then either discard the question or edit it so that it wasn't unfair to non-Americans.

From a google search I only find one result that attributes the question to a specific source - one very old btg thread claims the question is from OG10. That's a misattribution unless I've somehow missed this question every time I've looked through that book. So anyone worried that this is a realistic (official) question need not be concerned -- you won't see something like this on the real GMAT.
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Conclusion: Interceptions >>Losses
Negation of option D: Falling behind in a game >>Interceptions (which might eventually lead to the loss).
Example of A causes B assuming that B does not cause A.

Option D!