What reason do people in "exhalation" initially give for the discrepancy between the clock and the town criers?

a. the decreasing need to replace air canisters

b. the clock's malfunctioning

c. the town criers losing their memories

d. the discovery of a dead being's memory pages

the answer is b

initially they thought it might be a defect common to all the turret clocks so as you said B is the answer.

Have a great Day :)

The answer is indeed letter B) the clock's malfunctioning.

Explanation:

"Exhalation" is a short sci-fi story by author Ted Chiang, narrated by a character who belongs to a race of air-driven mechanical beings. The narrator tells us that on the first day of every new year, the town crier is supposed to recite an ode written long ago specially for that occasion. That ode takes exactly one hour to be delivered. The town criers, however, all begin to complain that the clocks struck the hour before they were finished. People didn't worry much about it, since they thought it was just a malfunction that had the clocks running faster.  The excerpt below belongs to the story:

No one gave the matter much thought beyond the simple acknowledgement that seemed warranted. It was only some days later, when there arrived word of a similar deviation between the crier and the clock of a third district, that the suggestion was made that these discrepancies might be evidence of a defect in the mechanism common to all the turret clocks, albeit a curious one to cause the clocks to run faster rather than slower.