137The following appeared in an editorial in the Mason City newspaper.
'At present, Mason City residents seldom use the nearby Mason River for any kind of recreational activity, even though surveys of the region's residents consistently rank water sports (swimming, fishing, and boating) as a favorite form of recreation. Since there have been complaints about the quality of the water in the river, residents must be avoiding the river because they think that it is not clean enough. But that situation is about to change: the agency responsible for rivers in our region has announced plans to clean up Mason River. Therefore, recreational use of the river is likely to increase, so the Mason City council will need to increase its budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the Mason River.'
In the argument, the author suggest that they should increase its budget for improvements to the public lands along Mason River (M) for the reason that certain agency is ready to clean up M due to the complaints about the quality of the water before.
The editorial is well-presented but the claim and advice of the author may be put into questions for some insufficient evidence.
Admittedly, local residents avoided the river just because it is not clean enough, however, this reason is far from the claim that the recreational use of the river is likely to increase. Probably, there will be other elements which will influence the extent of the attractiveness of the M like the location of the river or the relevant traffic condition near it. Actually, the investment to improve the publicly owned lands should be considered in a wider situation judging all kinds of aspect. That is to say, only by cleaning up the river may not lead to the conclusion that we should increase the budget for project the author tenders.
Furthermore, the evidence seems to be groundless for the local people may have other causes to avoid the river. According to the argument, the author blames all the result that residents seldom use M for recreation on its quality. Yet he does nothing to rule out the other possible facts which may lead to the same condition. For example, the residents can not find convenient traffic routines to go to the river or there has already been a more taking recreational site in the local area, which takes up most of the residents who look for entertainment. In general, the author has not given us any more details about the M and the local area, which prevents us to find a real answer to the existing problem and makes his conclusion a little hasty.
Last but not the least, the arguer should provide us more concerning and specific contents about the survey, on which he establish a basic point that the residents rank water sports as their favorite form of recreation. First of all, he can list the sizes of the samples in these surveys to convince us that such surveys can cover the inhabitants in the M city. Secondly, the information of the sex, age or income status of the residents are also necessary. Different people of different conditions may give different answer to the questions, i.e. some people won't choose swimming as their favorites for they have not learned to. The author had better pay some attention to these factors of the surveys to insure that the surveys have given us a result built on credits.
In sum, the author can not assure that water sports is a favorite recreation for the local people, on the other hand, he fails to give us objective and complete explanations of the fact that people intend to avoid M river, finally, little evidence has been introduced to support the final conclusion that we can really make profits through investing on the publicly owned lands along the river. So the author had better reconsider his suggestion and try to find more precise and objective evidence to make his conclusion logically sound.作者: @amy@ 时间: 2006-1-25 22:17:46