- ALoose edible oil is sold in the district by some four hundred shops and by hawkers at the weekly haats
- BThe loose oil sold in the district is pressed at three crushing units, two of them outside the state
- CThe district has no testing laboratory of its own, a sample must travel four hundred kilometres and the carriage met from the office's own funds, and in eleven years the office has drawn six samples, of which four spoilt on the way and were never examined
- DThe penalty for selling adulterated oil was raised two years ago
Step-by-Step Solution
The officer reads an empty record as a finding about the oil, and an empty record means that only if somebody looked. Two examined samples in eleven years, out of oil sold by hundreds of hands, is not a search that could have turned adulteration up had it been everywhere; so the silence is the silence of nobody having looked, not of nothing being there. How many shops sell the oil and where it is pressed describe the trade without telling us what was tested. A heavier penalty bears on what a seller risks, and would matter only after adulteration had been detected — it does nothing to show that the district's testing could detect it.
Answer: C) The district has no testing laboratory of its own, a sample must travel four hundred kilometres and the carriage met from the office's own funds, and in eleven years the office has drawn six samples, of which four spoilt on the way and were never examined