处女作A234，求拍

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第一次写，没有限时，所以有点长。欢迎大家狂拍。
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TOPIC: ARGUMENT234 - The following appeared in a newspaper feature story.
"There is now evidence that the relaxed manner of living in small towns promotes better health and greater longevity than does the hectic pace of life in big cities. Businesses in the small town of Leeville report fewer days of sick leave taken by individual workers than do businesses in the nearby large city of Mason City. Furthermore, Leeville has only one physician for its one thousand residents, but in Mason City the proportion of physicians to residents is five times as high. And the average age of Leeville residents is significantly higher than that of Mason City residents. These findings suggest that people seeking longer and healthier lives should consider moving to small communities."
WORDS: 626          TIME: 00:23:54          DATE: 2010-2-27 21:10:23
In this argument, the author recommends that people who are willing to seek longer and healthier lives should consider moving to small communities. In order to bolster this recommendation, the author cites the following fact: (1) businesses in the small town of Leeville report fewer days of sick compared with nearby large city of Mason City; (2) Leeville has fewer physicians for one thousand residents; (3) the average age of Leeville residents is signficantly higher than that of Mason City residents. Although this recommendation seems somewhat plausible at first glance, closer scrutiny reveals that it suffers from a series of logic fallacies.

First of all, the author makes such a general conclusion that there exists a close relationship between the community's size and the residents' health and lifetime, simply based on a comparison between Leeville and Mason City. However, the author provides no evidence to confirm that these two communities can be representative of others. It is entirely possible that in some other large cities, people live a healthier life than those in small towns. Without considering the size and representativeness of the sample, the author cannot justifiably form any convincing conclusions.

Furthermore, the author cites the fact that businesses in the small town of Leeville report fewer days of sick leave taken by individual workers. But no information about the population of these two towns is provided. Perhaps the population of workers is much smaller in Leeville, and the portion of the workers who got sick is even bigger. In this situation, the people in Leeville are actually not as healthy as those in Mason City. In addition, the author ignores such a phenomenon that some workers may not ask for a sick leave even though they are sick. If this phenomenon widely exists in Leeville, the report of sick leave cannot reflect the real health condition of its residents. Unless these possibilities are eliminated, any conclusions made on this fact are unwarranted.

Thirdly, the author also cites the fact that Mason City has more physicians than Leeville. But the number of physicians can not directly reflect the residents' health condition. Common sense makes me know that the overall population is usually bigger in cities than in small towns. So Mason City should have more physicians for its bigger population. Also, it is entirely possible that some people living in Leeville are willing to see the physicians in Mason City when they get sick. In this case, the residents in Leeville may not remain healthy even though there are fewer physicians in Leeville. Without providing explanations to these possibilities, the author can not make any reasonable conclusions based on this fact.

Finally, the author mentions that the average age of Leeville residents is significantly higher than that of Mason City. But the author obviously fails to realize this possibility that most of the residents living in Leeville are perhaps old ones who already got retired from work, while the majority of the people in Mason City are still young enough to make progress in career. In this case, the average age of residents is meaningless when used to reveal the health condition of these two communities.

In one word, the author's recommendation that people who are willing to seek longer and healthier lives should consider moving to small communities is unpersuasive as it stands. In order to strengthen this recommendion, the author should provide more detailed information on the population of Leeville and Mason City to confirm that the people living in Leeville are really healthier. In addition, the author should do the same study in some other cities to make sure this relationship between city's size and people's health is a widely exsiting phenomenon. Only by doing these can the recommendation become more convincing.

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