Which one of the following is given by the passage as a reason for the difficulty a lawyer would have in determining ...

Christopher on June 6, 2018

@alisam, you're looking for the answer that cannot possibly be true. Given the information that you're given in the question, you cannot tell how many nylon or stainless steel instruments are in a "set." It's natural to assume that the sterilization to cost ratio is higher for nylon than stainless steel only because of material, but it could also be because there are twice as many pieces in the nylon set to accomplish the same job as the stainless set. This COULD be true, therefore it falls into the "each could be true" rather than the "EXCEPT", which is what the question asks for.

Likewise, you don't know actual cost of each set as we're only given ratios, so (A) is possible.

(D) is certainly possible that stainless steel costs more the nylon, but we don't know one way or the other. So it COULD be true.

(E) likewise could be true, if the energy required to make the instruments was the most expensive part of the process.

Only (B) is completely impossible because while 50 complete sterilizations only consumed 3.4 times as much energy as the creation of the nylon instruments, meaning the energy used for 1 sterilization would be 3.4x divided by 50. The math just won't work, therefore, (B) cannot be true and is the correct answer.