Yeah, the question-writers were clearly trying to copy an LSAT question here. It's somewhere in LSAT PrepTests #29-38, I think -- but in any case, they didn't do a great job on the execution. Again, it's brutally, brutally hard for even the best test-prep companies to copy the style of actual tests. The GMAT spends $1500-$3000 developing each individual question, and I have reason to suspect that the figure is even higher for the LSAT.
So this isn't a criticism of the question-writers, since they're trying to accomplish the impossible... but fwiw, here's where they lost me:
Quote:
In this prompt, the conclusion can be tricky to properly identify because it has two parts to it: “save the money they would spend on radar detectors” and “simply pay the tickets.” The conclusion is essentially saying “radar detectors don’t help drivers avoid tickets,” based on the statistic that radar detector owners get 10% more tickets than those who don’t.
No, that's not really what the conclusion is saying. Here's the conclusion of the passage:
Quote:
Drivers should therefore save the money they would spend on radar detectors and simply pay the tickets they’re going to receive whether they use a radar detector or not.
Now, that's a completely different animal. In writing the explanation, they're committing a cardinal sin of CR: changing the language of the conclusion so that it says something subtly different. Actually, this isn't even subtle: the explanation changes the conclusion pretty radically. As GMATNinjaTwo likes to say, whoever wrote the explanation is "putting words in the passage's mouth" -- and that's a huge error when you're doing CR.
(B) might be the best of the bunch, but it's still a pretty lousy answer. So don't worry too much about this one.