People who don't know that going high speeds uses more gas are at a disadvantage with this question... I picked a wrong answer because I thought about not using outside knowledge.
Admin Note: Edited title. Please use the format: "PT#.S#.Q# - brief description of question”
It's not the difference between refute and undermine, but what is being refuted and who is refuting. The empirical phenomenon is not what the columnist is trying to refute; he is trying to refute the hypothesis that "this is merely because we do not see the performers when we listen to recorded music", which is based on the empirical phenomenon in the first place.
So, E is correct because "it" refers to the empirical phenomenon that some made a hypothesis on. And this hypothesis is what the columnist is trying to undermine/refute.
I think what helped me see that D wasn't the correct answer is the fact that the answer makes a lot of assumptions, one being that more auditors is equivalent to increased likelihood of errors being detected. AND D doesn't even talk about an auditing procedure, it talks about the auditing departments of banks, essentially. The stimulus is about the likelihood of errors in banks' internal auditing procedures.
Couldn't this be a principle question?