Critical Reasoning

The cities with the densest population have the highest ratio of police officers to citizens. Such cities also have the lowest rates of property crime without contact between perpetrator and victim. Thus maintaining a high ratio of police officers to citizens can serve as an effective deterrent to at least certain kinds of property crime.
Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument above?
(A) The quality of training that police receive varies from city to city.
(B) High population density itself makes it difficult to commit a property crime that involves no contact between perpetrator and victim.
(C) Many nonviolent crimes in large cities are drug-related.
(D) A majority of the perpetrators of property crimes in densely populated cities are not apprehended by the police.
(E) Property crimes without contact between perpetrator and victim represent only a small proportion of overall crime.

OA [spoiler]is B. IMO D since it's also a potential answer. [/spoiler]

B is the correct answer.

Author concludes that high ratio of police is the reason for no contact between perpetator and victim.
But "B" weakens the argument by saying ,
High population density itself makes it difficult to commit a property crime that involves no contact between perpetrator and victim.

D shares an attribute with a variety of popular wrong choices: it makes a comment about subset of a logical variable. Sometimes, such a choice weakens the argument, unless the predicate--in this case, not apprehended by polics--is the crux of the argument.

The argument doesn't talk about how many got apprehended. So, it is useless to talk about that.

joyseychow wrote:The cities with the densest population have the highest ratio of police officers to citizens. Such cities also have the lowest rates of property crime without contact between perpetrator and victim. Thus maintaining a high ratio of police officers to citizens can serve as an effective deterrent to at least certain kinds of property crime.
Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument above?
(A) The quality of training that police receive varies from city to city.
(B) High population density itself makes it difficult to commit a property crime that involves no contact between perpetrator and victim.
(C) Many nonviolent crimes in large cities are drug-related.
(D) A majority of the perpetrators of property crimes in densely populated cities are not apprehended by the police.
(E) Property crimes without contact between perpetrator and victim represent only a small proportion of overall crime.

OA [spoiler]is B. IMO D since it's also a potential answer. [/spoiler]

The conclusion talks about crime being "deterred". Whether or not criminals are being caught does not have anything to do with whether they are committing crimes, and so does not have anything to do with whether crime is being deterred.

I was between A and B. I choose A"wrong". But I applied the new denial tests I learned from Testluv for the first time, so I am not upset

Clearly denying And B will sstrengthens the argument, but denying B will raise my doubt to 8 instead of 7 when denying A.

strategy works .

B weakens it because it clearly states.. OTHER factors for low crime..not high cop/citizen ratioc

I'd sayB but I'm afraid more because of my intuition than any logic.