[a习作temp] 临考求狠拍，有拍必回，信誉保证 [复制链接]

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发表于 2009-8-12 12:36:09 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

TOPIC: ARGUMENT200 - Statistics collected from dentists indicate that three times more men than women faint while visiting the dentist. This evidence suggests that men are more likely to be distressed about having dental work done than women are. Thus, dentists who advertise to attract patients should target the male consumer and emphasize both the effectiveness of their anesthetic techniques and the sensitivity of their staff to nervous or suffering patients.
WORDS: 474
TIME: 00:28:29
DATE: 2009-8-12 10:49:14

Having relied on a dubious study and unsound causality, the author believes that dentists should emphasize both their effectiveness of their anesthetic techniques and the sensitivity of their staff to patients when they do advertisements. A close examination, however, will shows this conclusion is unconvincing.

To begin with, the author fails to prove that men are more likely to faint while visiting the dentists on the mere fact provided by a study. Actually, the effectiveness of the statistics is open to doubt. How many respondents involved in the study? What is the proportion of men to women in the sample? Can they represent the overall patients? Without these evidences, it is quite possible that most of the respondents are men, say, more than three times than women. Also, even if the proportion is reasonable, the sample may be too small to represent all the dental patients. In such case, the study cannot prove men are easier to faint. Without responding to this concern, the author’s conclusion is unwarranted.

In addition, even if the study is reliable and men are much easily faint, the author also takes it for granted that the faint is necessarily due to being distressed. However, it may due to other possible alternatives. Perhaps, these men have taken some pills before the dental work, and the pills which contain certain chemical compound lead to the faint; while the women took another kind of pills which can avoid fainting. If so, the more faint of men has nothing to do with the distress. Since the author fails to ruling out these possibilities, the conclusion that the faint results form be distressed cannot convince me.

Even if the men are actually more likely to be distressed than women when having dental work,
it would nevertheless be perfunctory to conclude that the advertisement should focus on the male consumers and emphasize the anesthetic techniques and the sensitivity of the staff. First, this way may be useless. Since the author fails to provide any information about the client, it is highly possible that there are more female customers than male customers. If so, the advertisement may be useless since the female does not care about the anesthetic techniques. Moreover, even if there are more male customers, this kind of advertisement may have side effect. The male may begin to focus on the problem of distress which they did not care before. If so, they may turn to be more nervous and afraid of visiting the dentists and therefore such advertisements will not helpful to attract more customers.

In sum, the argument is weakened by the flaws discussed above. To better evaluate it, the author needs to provide more details about the statistic. Besides, the author should also prove the causal relationship between faint and distressed. I also need to know the effect of the advertisements.