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TOPIC: ARGUMENT112 - The following proposal was raised at a meeting of the Franklin City Council.
"Franklin Airport, which is on a bay, is notorious for flight delays. The airport management wants to build new runways to increase capacity but can only do so by filling in 900 acres of the bay. The Bay Coalition organization objects that filling in the bay will disrupt tidal patterns and harm wildlife. But the airport says that if it is permitted to build its new runways, it will fund the restoration of 1,000 acres of wetlands in areas of the bay that have previously been damaged by industrialization. This plan should be adopted, for it is necessary to reduce the flight delays, and the wetlands restoration part of the plan ensures that the bay's environment will actually be helped rather than hurt."
WORDS: 469 TIME: 00:30:00 DATE: 2009/8/19 9:09:50
In this argument, the author advocates the plan about filling in 900 acres of the bay to alleviate the pressure on the flight delays. To back up this recommendation, the author claims that this is the only solution and the airport has already promised to fund the restoration of wetlands in areas of the bay. Careful examination of this reasoning, however, reveals that it lends little credible support to the author's viewpoint. The reasons are stated as follows.
In the first place, by suggesting the urgent need to build new runways to draw his conclusion, the author's recommendation rests on the assumption that lacking enough runways is responsible for the flight delays. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to doubt that this might not necessarily be the case. To be specific, perhaps the flights time are not well-arranged and the interval between departure times of flights are not balanced. Thus, there is time when the runways are fully occupied as well as they are totally empty. In this case, the flight time is to be blame rather than the insufficient number of runways. To reach the cited conclusion, the author should supply more detailed information to convince me that this scenario is unlikely.
In the second place, even though the flight delay is a result of the airport being short of runways, the author's viewpoint that it is reasonable to damage the environment if it will be restored in the future is open to doubt. The example provided in the argument about the previous damaged bay by industrialization just serves to undermine the author's opinion. As we all know, it takes millions of years for the environment to recycle and recover from the pollution. Considering this fact, to destroy and to restore it later is unwise, since we human can do little help for the recovery of the biosphere.
In the third place, the credibility of the author's claim that the airport will fund the restoration once it is permitted to build its new runways is questionable. Building a new runway is undoubtedly costly as common sense informs me. Thus, how much the airport could fund the restoration cannot be assured. That is to say, we cannot evaluate the effectiveness of the funding from the airport, which is the crucial factor when considering whether to allow it filling the bay. Unless the author can cite more concrete information about the airport's promise, I will remain doubtful about the amount of benefits the restoration of the bay could actually acquired from the airport.
To sum up, the argument is not based on valid evidence or sound reasoning, neither of which is dispensable for a conclusive argument. In order to draw a better conclusion, the author should reason more convincingly, cite more persuasive evidence, and take every consideration into account. |
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