TOPIC: ARGUMENT84 - The following appeared in a memo written by the head of the Gorham School.
"Our school cafeteria should make changes in the lunches that it serves in order to improve the health of our students. Several teachers and I have observed that students who eat these meals tend to eat the main course and the dessert, but seldom finish the vegetable portion. This pattern means that students are missing the vital nutritional benefits of fruits and vegetables, which are typically rich in vitamins and minerals. Therefore, the school cafeteria should serve larger fruit and vegetable portions along with smaller main course and dessert portions. This change will be effective because, according to research conducted at the Rose Children's Hospital, children eat the same amount of food served to them-about 55 percent, on average-no matter what the main course is."
WORDS: 316 TIME: 00:30:00 DATE: 2009-7-25 15:48:54
In this argument, the author suggests that their school cafeteria should make changes at lunch. To support his conclusion, he pointed out that according to his and several other teacher's observation students at lunch usually fail to finish their vegetable portion. He also cited a survey conducted in a hospital to convince us that his proposal will be very effective.Although the argument is well-presented, I find the argument questionable in several aspects.
To start with, what the author and several teachers have observed does not necessarily be true to every student, it is quite possible that most students finished their vegetable portion yet they didn't see. Furthermore, granted this observation is representative enough, the author also assumes without justification that currently the vitamins and minerals students taking in are not enough. The fact that the students are not observed eating vegetables and fruits in this cafeteria at lunch does not necessarily indicates that they lack vitamins and minerals. It is entirely possible that they eat a lot of vegetables and fruits at breakfast or dinner. Another question is that it is quite possible that presently the cafeteria has being offering so large portions of vegetables and fruits that hardly no normal school children could finish them. Then how absurd it would be to sever even larger fruit and vegetable portions!
Besides, even if the vegetables and fruits students taking in are really far from enough, the author's suggestion may still not render a effect that he expects to witness. Not only because that we can not generalize from what is true in a hospital to what must be true in this very school--let's assume that the survey in the Rose Children's hospital is conducted in a scientific way and is reliable, which the author fail to provide enough information to support --in fact children in hospital may actually not have many choices but to passively eat whatever the hospital offers thanks to their special healthy conditions, while school children can eat whatever they want to eat,but also because that there may be other more important factors leading to these children's refusal to eat the vegetables and fruits offered by the cafeteria, such as the horrible taste, the limited selection...etc. For that matter, even if the cafeteria makes changes according to author's will, students still tend to eat inufficient vegetables and fruits at lunch.
In sum, the argument is not as convincing as it stands.作者: rjyuu 时间: 2009-7-25 19:18:16