考前求拍argument 53_请各位帮忙看看可以得几分~~感激

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语言都很一般，主要是想看看思路对不对。谢谢各位了！

TOPIC: ARGUMENT53 - Thirteen years ago, researchers studied a group of 25 infants who showed signs of mild distress when exposed to unfamiliar stimuli such as an unusual odor or a tape recording of an unknown voice. They discovered that these infants were more likely than other infants to have been conceived in early autumn, a time when their mothers' production of melatonin-a hormone known to affect some brain functions-would naturally increase in response to decreased daylight. In a follow-up study conducted earlier this year, more than half of these children-now teenagers-who had shown signs of distress identified themselves as shy. Clearly, increased levels of melatonin before birth cause shyness during infancy and this shyness continues into later life.
WORDS: 408
TIME: 00:33:24
DATE: 2010/2/3 17:56:00

The speaker claims in the statement that shyness during infancy is caused by increased levels of melatonin before birth and that the shyness continues into later life. To support the claim, he correlated increasing melatonin levels which happens during decreasing sunlight with infants who had mild distress born in Autumn. And when the infants under experiment grew up, the shy character of half of the samples indicate the problem carried on. I found this statement problematic for the following reasons.

To begin with, whether the mild distress of the researched infants was caused by melatonin is a question unsolved. First, the sample was too small (only 25 infants) and can hardly be representatives to draw any efficient conclusion. There is a huge chance that in average, a dominant percentage of infants (besides those born in Autumn) undergo mild distress before they were born due to neurological instead of chemical reasons. Second, If melatonin should increase due to decreasing daylight, the most active period of this chemical should be in Winter during which the sunlight hits its lowest level. Thus, the infants with mild distress, if resulting from melatonin, should be conceived in winter rather than summer. Therefore, unless the speaker can provide more precise evidence on what exactly melatonin does to brain functions as well as rule out other possible causes, we can hardly relate it to the mild distress the infants showed.

The follow-up study also fails to illustrate the claim since there is a large difference between shyness and mild distress. According to experience, it is commonplace that many 13-year-old teenagers undergo shyness as they are steping into a period during which huge changes happen both physically and mentally. As time passes, unlike distress which would stay as a part of the personal character,
the shyness may be gotten rid of naturally. Finding 12 of 25 children showing shyness is not a strong evidence to group them as suffering from melatonin in earlier years. Therefore, lacking the relation of shyness in teenage years with the mild distress and samples of a larger size, we can hardly blame melatonin as the reason which causes the shyness to begin with.

In sum, the speaker failed in his experiment to find the true reason which caused the mild distress of infants since he falsely correlate the two issues that happened during the same time as having cause-and-effect relations. With more mistakes, he equals different concepts (shyness and mild distress) in later researches. Unless a larger sample be contained into the experiment and a more specific analysis of what melatonin functions can be provided, the conclusion should not be drawn with hast.