Argument 76洗面奶 下个礼拜就在考试啦

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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: 561
TIME: 00:30:00
DATE: 2010/3/10 9:44:54

Giving some postulations and facts, citing a study, the author concludes that the Luxess face cream is effective in improving the conditions of facial skin. The argument seems logically sound at the first blush, further pondering and close scrutiny reveal, however, it fraught with ungrounded, unwarranted and unsubstantiated claims.

As a threshold matter, by relying on the study to support the conclusion the author assumes that the outcome of the study is statistically reliable. Unfortunately, the statistical and methodological reliability of the study is still in suspense. Firstly, no warrants have been offered that the number of the volunteers is statistically significant and that those volunteers are representative of all in general.
It is entirely possible all of those volunteers are come from one small region, there were only several volunteers took part in this study. Secondly, we are not assured whether or not the study was anonymous, or even confidential. If it were not, and all those volunteers are the employees or those stable customers of Luxess Company, they would provide responses that they believed their superiors would approve of, irrespective whether or not the responses are reasonable. Unless the experimenter sampled a sufficiently large number of and did so randomly across the entire spectrum, the outcomes of the study are not convincing for drawing any conclusion that face conditions were improved due to the utilization of Luxess.

Even though the abovementioned assumption can be substantiated, the author also positively establishes a causal relationship between the improvement of face conditions and the use of Luxess face cream. However, the sequence of these events, in itself, amounts to scant evidence that the latter should be the reason of the former. Actually, host of other factors, including favorable weather conditions, less pressures, rosy working environments, or the more balanced diets, might just as likely be the reason why their face conditions were ameliorated. Furthermore, we are not sure what the exact role the soap exercises in this study. For lack of scientific evidence to prove that the soap would no exercise positive influence on the face skin, possibly, it is the mild soap that worked effectively to improve the face conditions, rather than the Luxess face cream. Without ruling out scenarios such as these, the author can not convince me that the Luxess face cream would truly effective in improving the face condition.

Finally, there are another two flaws in this study. On the one hand, the author unfairly based the conclusion on the personal experience and feeling. Commonsense informs us that our feelings and motions are subjective factors, which would be influenced by a myriad of factors, such as some pleasant matters, or some lucky incidents and the healthy communications and socializations. After experiencing those joyful things, people might be more likely to come up with a positive answers rather than a disappointed one. On the other hand, the experimenter fails to make another comparison group, which is used for making comparison of the outcomes. Actually, the results might be meaningless and risky if there is no counterparts and peer groups for comparison. For lack of this evidence, it is hard to assess the merits of the speaker's conclusion.

To put all the things into a nutshell, the conclusion reached in this argument is misleading and invalid. I would suspend my judgment to the author's conclusion until the author can provide me concrete information that the study is statistically reliable, and the improved face condition is attributable to the use of Luxess face cream but not the mild soap. It would also be useful to carry out a study which provides objective answers to respondents.