AEGUMENT180求拍，8月10号就考试了，考完后定回拍

shemleungUID：2299487

TOPIC: ARGUMENT180 - The following is a recommendation from the personnel director to the president of Acme Publishing Company.

"Many other companies have recently stated that having their employees take the Easy Read Speed-Reading Course has greatly improved productivity. One graduate of the course was able to read a five-hundred-page report in only two hours; another graduate rose from an assistant manager to vice president of the company in under a year. Obviously, the faster you can read, the more information you can absorb in a single workday. Moreover, Easy Read costs only $500 per employee-a small price to pay when you consider the benefits to Acme. Included in this fee is a three-week seminar in Spruce City and a lifelong subscription to the Easy Read newsletter. Clearly, Acme would benefit greatly by requiring all of our employees to take the Easy Read course."
WORDS: 508
TIME: 00:30:00
DATE: 2009-8-6 11:41:15

In this recommendation the personnel director suggests that Acme Publishing Company should require all their employees to take the Easy Read Speed-Reading Course which will benefit the company a lot. The director cited evidence that two graduates from other companies which sent their employees to take this course has greatly improved their reading speed or got promotion, and the cost is not much. I find this argument unpersuasive for several reasons.

First of all, the director commits the "After this, therefore because of this" fallacy. The fact that one graduate of the course was able to read a 500-page report in two hours and another graduate got promotion in a year may not result directly from taking the course. Probably they have already done very well at their work and learn most of the reading skills by their own after work, or the promotion is simply by luck.

Secondly, even if the improvement of the two graduates cited above is because of the reading course, it tells little about the improvement of reading speed of other employees in those companies. Only two people are far from representative enough. Maybe except these two graduates, all the rest employees have become even counterproductive at their work because of the extra time and energy spent on the course.

Thirdly, the director fails to establish a causal relationship between the speed of reading and the improvement of productivity by employees. The amount of information absorbed in a single workday does not imply that the employees can fully leverage these information to their work. It is also not known that what kind of readings they do. They may simply read some stuff which is irrelevant to their work faster. If this is true, it may have detrimental effects on their productivity.

Finally, even if the course did result in an improvement of productivity in other companies, the director still commits the fallacy of false analogy. The productivity improvement at other companies does not necessarily mean that Acme will achieve the similar result by sending its employees to take the Easy Read course. The nature of work and the quality of personnel among these companies are all different. It is possible that the reading skill at Acme is not as important as in other companies, and there are more important skills to be acquired. The employees at Acme may also feel uncomfortable with taking the course because they have already had too much work to finish and can merely spend extra time on this.

In conclusion, the argument is unpersuasive as it stands. To strengthen the argument, the director should provide more information about other employees' reading speed improvement at those companies which required taking the Easy Read course and find more evidence to establish a causal relationship between the reading speed and productivity improvement. To better evaluate the argument, we still need more information about whether the nature of work and personnel quality at Acme are similar to those at other companies so that the implement of this strategy can have effective results.