argument76 wanwp 第十一次作业

wanwpUID: 2369605

TOPIC: ARGUMENT76 - The following appeared as part of an article in a health and beauty magazine.

"A group of volunteers participated in a study of consumer responses to the new Luxess face cream. Every morning for a month, they washed their faces with mild soap and then applied Luxess. At the end of that month, most volunteers reported a marked improvement in the way their skin looked and felt. Thus it appears that Luxess is truly effective in improving the condition of facial skin."
WORDS: 347          TIME: 00:30:00          DATE: 2007-8-10 11:24:33

In this argument, the arguer comes to the conclusion that Luxess is really effective in the improvement of the condition of facial skin. To substantiate his conclusion, the arguer cites a result of a study of consumer that most of the volunteers get a marked improvement of their skin looked and felt after they use it for a month. However, a close scrutiny reveals that this argument contains several flaws as follows.

The threshold problem of this argument is that the arguer provides no exact data of the volunteers, just like the number of participants, the ages of the volunteers and the gender of them. Due to lack of these evidences, it is entirely possible that only a few people participate in this study. Or perhaps the ages of the participants are very young. The condition of their skin is natural well. Either scenario, if true, will obviously undermine the credibility of the study.

Secondly, a month is too short to demonstrate the influence of Luxess. Commonsense tells us the condition of people's skin could not get a marked improvement in a month. The improvement must be clearer after a longer time. So we can draw a hasty conclusion from a one-month study. We need a longer time to prove the effect of Luxess.

Finally, the arguer ignores the differences in the daily activities of the volunteers. If the activities of the volunteers are quite different, for example someone stay in the office for a whole and someone has to stay under the sun. Different work conditions will bring great influence to the result of the study. Also the arguer fails to take into account the possible side-effect of Luxess. Perhaps Luxess has some bad influence to the skin but can not reflect in a short time. So the arguer also needs to testify this point.

In sum, this argument is unpersuasive. To support the conclusion, the arguer should provide clearer statistics of the study and the exact situation of the volunteers. To better assess the argument, I also need to know the quality evaluation of Luxess.