argument137

superyfanUID: 2716198

137.The 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."

当前，Mason市很少利用附近的Mason河来进行娱乐活动，尽管对该地区居民的几次调查一直指出他们把水上运动（游泳、垂钓和划船）作为他们最喜欢的娱乐形式。由于曾经存在对于这条河水质的投诉，居民一定是因为他们认为河水不够干净才不在这里活动。但这种情况就会改变了：我们地区负责河流管理的部门公布了澄清Mason河的计划。因此，河流的娱乐用途很可能将会增加，因而Mason市的市委有必要增加用于改善Mason河沿岸公共土地的预算。


In this editorial in the Mason City newspaper, the author recommends that budget for the improvements to the publicly owned land along the river should be increased with the increasing trend on recreational use of the river. To support this recommendation, the author points out that the agency has already planned to clean up the river. However, this argument rests on series of unsubstantiated assumptions, and it is therefore unpersuasive as it stands.

To begin with, the author assumes that the situation that the river is not clean enough will be changed after the agency cleaning up it. However, this is not necessarily the case. It is entirely possible that the agency fails to clean up the river thoroughly since such a project costs both time and money while at the same time the agency gains little profits from it.

Secondly, Even assuming that the agency has been well responsible for this work, the author doesn’t mention whether the river is suitable for developing recreational uses again. Perhaps the river was polluted so seriously before and thus can never be recovered its clean level to fulfill the recreations. On the other hand, to those residents, the author fails to show any accurate statistic of present survey on the question that after a long time, do residents still consider water sports (swimming, fishing, and boating) as a favorite form of recreation? Maybe during such a long time, they have developed other kinds of sports to replace the water sports since such sports cannot be available to them. In either event, the author cannot conclude that recreational use of the river is likely to increase.

Finally, even if recreational use of river will be increased as the author claims, the suggestion that to upper the budget for improving the publicly owned land along the river is not convincing. The author doesn’t refer to any condition about the publicly owned land along the river, including the present situation about it, the reason of the necessity to improve it, the advantage and potential profits after its improvements and so on. Without any explanation on this recommendation, the author seems to be too hasty to raise the suggestion.

In sum, the recommendation that in order to prepare for the increase in the recreational use of the river, the council needs to upper the budget, which is used on improving the publicly owned land along the river, is not well supported. To convince me that such a measure is necessary, the author must provide more strong evidence and clear statistic. Otherwise, the suggestion is not justifiable.