This topic is dealt with in passage A but not passage B.

This topic isn’t dealt with in passage A.

This is a central topic of passage A, which argues that negative evidence (observations that contradict a theory) isn’t as powerful as Popper said. This is also a central topi co passage B, which argues that negative evidence predicted the existence of Neptune (because observations of Uranus’s orbit contradicted theoretical calculations) and helped support the theory of relativity (because observations of Mercury’s contradicted Newton’s theory).

Passage A is more about the challenges of confirming a scientific theory than about the “proper technique.” Author A never actually points the existence of a proper technique. She just says that negative evidence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and things are more complicated. And passage B is too specific; it only looks at how one theory (Newton’s) was eventually replaced by another (Einstein’s) in part because of evidence about Mercury. It doesn’t get into what the “proper technique” is for confirming scientific theories in general.

Author A doesn’t discuss the “irrelevance” of experimentation. She says that when experiments fail, it’s not always immediately obvious why. But she doesn’t take any stance on whether experiments are outright irrelevant. That’s enough to eliminate (E). Meanwhile, author B doesn’t discuss experimentation in the first place.