第一次写AW，没有掐时间
The following is a memorandum from the business manager of a television station.
"Over the past year, our late-night news program has devoted increased time to national news and less time to weather and local news. During this period, most of the complaints received from viewers were concerned with our station's coverage of weather and local news. In addition, local businesses that used to advertise during our late-night news program have canceled their advertising contracts with us. Therefore, in order to attract more viewers to our news programs and to avoid losing any further advertising revenues, we should expand our coverage of weather and local news on all our news programs."
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.
Noticing that the increased time to national news and decreased time to weather and local news correlates with complaints and cancel of contract in the late-night news, the author argues for an increase in weather and local news on all news programs. However, the argument is rife with assumptions and therefore not strong enough to result in an increase in local news on the news programs.
To begin with, the author discusses how the increased time to national news and less time to weather and local news possibly result in some negative outcomes. Hence, the author assumes that the change in time for those news are significant enough to be perceptible. However, the terms “increased” and “less” are vague. Since the author doesn’t clarify how much was the original amount of time for both news and how large are the increase and decrease, it is entirely possible that the increase and decrease are trivial, therefore not recognized by the audience at all. For example, if the original amount of time to national news was 10 minutes and the increase is 10%, the increase will be only 1 minute, which is hardly perceptible. If this were true, the whole argument would be undermined since the problem it concerned with doesn’t exist in the first place.
Additionally, the assumption that the change in time to national news and local news causes the complaints and the canceled contracts is suspicious. Firstly, the complaints are only “concerned with” the coverage, there is no proof that the complaints ask for a larger amount of time to be devoted to local news. In contrary, it is possible that the complains are for a decrease in time to local news or simply irrelevant to the amount of time but about the content of the local news. Likewise, there is no proof that the decrease in local news causes the advertisers to cancel their contract. Therefore, these two correlations could not sufficiently support the argument.
Moreover, the author generalizes the conclusion based on late-night news to all news programs, thereby assuming that late-night news program is representative for all news program regardless of their time or content. This assumption, however, is also questionable. Since the audience group of late-night news are different from other news programs, the preference of late-night news does not guarantee the same in the morning news. Therefore, even if the conclusion that late-night news audience prefer local news is valid, the argument is still vulnerable unless the author can prove the generalization to be reasonable.
To sum up, the argument engages in three major assumptions. If any of these assumptions were to prove wrong, the whole argument would be thrown into question. Therefore, more evidence should be provided to justify these assumptions and strengthen the argument.作者: 黄维浩 时间: 2016-2-6 17:10:26
The business manager proposed that in order to increase viewer-ship and stop losing more advertising revenues, the television station should expand coverage of weather and local news. His proposal is based on two observations. First, since increased time devoted to national news and less time to weather and local news, viewers has been mostly complaining about the station's coverage of weather and local news. Secondly, local businesses have canceled their contract with the station.
However, his observations doesn't give much credence to his conclusion. He assumed that viewers' complaints is due to the cut-down of coverage time in weather and local news. However, it could be true that viewers' complaints has more to do with the quality of the coverage and less to do be the quantity of the coverage. If his assumptions about viewers' complaints is false, we should expect shrinking, instead of expanding, the station's weather and local news coverage.
The manager also assumed that local businesses found the late-night news unattractive because of the shortening of weather and local news coverage. But he provided no concrete evidence to support this argument. The cancellations of business contracts could be a result of declining viewer-ship, unsatisfactory coverage quality, or economic down-turn. Simple expansion of the coverage of weather and local news might not help with these matters, and hence could be futile in attracting more advertising contracts.
In a word, the business manager's observations are valuable. But expansion of weather and local coverage might not be the answer. In order to boost viewer-ship and advertising revenues, we need to look into the complaints from the viewers and solicit more feedback concerning advertisement from local business owners.
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先写了一篇贴上来了，等我看看你的再交流吧。作者: 黄维浩 时间: 2016-2-6 17:37:46