ARGUMENT 101处女作求大家点评打分，感激不尽
本帖最后由 Takeashot 于 2014-8-7 19:15 编辑这是我第一篇作文，马上就要考了，加油！
谢谢你们给我点评，我很担心作文的。
101) There is now evidence that the relaxed pace of life in small towns promotes better health and greater longevity than does the hectic pace of life in big cities. Businesses in the small town of Leeville report fewer days of sick leave taken by individual workers than do businesses in the nearby large city of Masonton. Furthermore, Leeville has only one physician for its one thousand residents, but in Masonton the proportion of physicians to residents is five times as high. Finally, the average age of Leeville residents is significantly higher than that of Masonton residents. These findings suggest that people seeking longer and healthier lives should consider moving to small communities.
Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.
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The recommendation made in this argument is quite captivating because it states one of the most popular wish of general public: having longevity and a healthier life. However, in rendering this argument, there are several implicit assumptions, if unwarranted, might compromise the cogency of this argument.
The first assumption the author basing his argument on is that, the number of sick leave taken by individual workers is a convincing indicator of the health level of the residents. However, this might not be the case, because we do not know whether people take sick leave because they are really sick or it is just an excuse for their own business. Maybe, people live in large city have relatively more things to concern about than their counterparts in small town, then people take more sick leaves to deal with them, but this has nothing to do with their health level. Without ruling out this possibility, the author's argument would not be persuasive as it is expected.
Moreover, the author again construes the number of physicians as an indicator of the health levels of the residents, but this assumption cannot be warranted without further evidence. Firstly, people live in different cities may have different kind of habits, we are not sure whether resorting to a doctor is the only way for someone to tackle his/her illness. Perhaps, considering the fact mentioned in this argument, people in Leeville are accustomed to deal with it by themselves, say changing their lifestyle, or going to the pharmacy by themselves or just waiting until the body cures itself. Accordingly, the number of physicians would probably remain at a lower level. Also, we are not given the information of the capability of these physicians, it is possible that the statistics cited in this argument could be attributed to a higher competence of the physician in Leeville. Without information concerning these details, we could not credit this unstated assumption by the author thus we could not evaluate the validity of this argument.
Even if both assumptions mentioned are confirmed, yet there is another precarious one that cannot withstand scrutiny. The unstated assumption is that both the cities, Leeville and Manston, are representative of small towns and big cities respectively. It is clear that the conclusion is solely derived from the data acquired from the citizens of these two places, but we lack specific information to determine the validity of this data source. Possibly, these two cities are just two peculiar cases of small towns and big cities, the situation in other cities might be completely different; if so, the conclusion in this argument would be suspicious. Thus, before following experiments conducted in other places that could yield consistent results, the argument would not be reliable.
Granted that all assumptions above are corroborated by evidences, we still could not easily extrapolate the conclusion drawn by the author, because the author assumes here that, living in small communities is equal to living in a small cities. Unfortunately, we lack corresponding evidence to confirm this assumption. There are a lot of potential factors that might result in a small community which is disparate from a small city, such as the environment, neighborhood and prices. For example, people may still be in a fast pace of life because of their work in the company and the competition around them, regardless of the benefits from the small community. Thus, while lacking further information to preclude this kind of scenario, this argument would remain dubious at best.
After all, the author of this passage is in the right direction trying to make a conducive recommendation towards citizens. But before the final conclusion comes out, he has to find specific evidences to confirm the assumptions mentioned above, otherwise his argument would not be persuasive and his work would be futile.
详见附件，个人觉得要改的地方有点多..囧 我自己也有一篇ARGU求点评的，如果得空的话帮忙看一下？
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1770167-1-1.html
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