At a movie theater box office, all tickets are sequentially prenumbered. At the end of each day, the beginning ticket number is subtracted from the ending number to calculate the number of tickets sold. Then, ticket stubs collected at the theater entrance are counted and compared with the number of tickets sold. Which of the following situations does this control detect?

Based on the scenario being described within the question it can be said that this control detects that some customers presented tickets purchased on a previous day when there wasn't a ticket taker at the theater entrance (so the tickets didn't get torn.) This leads to a miscount in the actual tickets sold, and is the main reason for this control method.

A) Some customers presented tickets purchased on a previous day when there wasn't a ticket taker at the theater entrance (so the tickets didn't get torn.)

Explanation:

This is probably one of the reasons why movie theaters do not use this type of tickets anymore, and all you need to do now is print them on the ticket expending machine. If we go back in time, this was probably an effective way of controlling how many people actually entered the theater.

Movies are a service, and they cannot be stocked and you cannot separate the customer and the service itself. Those seats that were not used in the theater during one specific day cannot be used in the future, the capacity remains the same. But having additional viewers will not change how the service is offered unless the theater was full.