【Flyer杀G】小组-7.8作业ARGUMENT 137

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ARGUMENT 137
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."





Citing surveys of the region's residents consistently rank water sports as a favorite form of recreation, the author alleges the action of cleaning up the river will incur an increase of recreational use of the river. Therefore, author recommends that the Mason City council should increase its budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the river. However, the argument relies on a series of unproven assumptions and is therefore unconvincing as it stands.
To begin with, the argument assumes that the residents avoiding the river because it is not clean enough. Yet the mere fact that some of the residents complaint about the quality of the water hardly suffices to infer any such common sense of the majority. Without the better evidence of most of people really do like the quality of the water, it is just as likely that there is no such common sense in Mason City. For that matter, thing might be quite different, in which event the author’s recommendation would amount to especially poor advice.
Even assuming that the residents really mind the quality of the water in the river, cleaning up the river might not succeed to attract more residents to play around the river , because it is probably for those people are used to going to journey out during their holidays or have some other place to enjoy their water sports. Thus without ruling out these and other reasons why residents do not choose to play around the river, the author cannot convince me that the cleaning of the river will certainly attract more people, let alone preparing for improvement of some public owned lands.
Nor can the author justify the recommended policy of action on the basis of growth of the player number. Even if the clearer water will induce more resident to playing water sports, it is unnecessary to increase the investment in the public owned land, because people may not really care about other facilities around the river.
According to the themes’ logics, people going to river just want to take part in the water sports and then return to home, so they may not really have more interests to spend time in the lands around there. Or else, the wild environment may make people feel comfortable. In short, the author cannot defend the recommended policy of improvement the public owned lands because of neglecting other possibilities.
In sum, argument relies on what might amount to false prediction, as well as lack of enough evidence about the reason why people do not go to play in the river. To strengthen the argument, the author should provide better evidence of reasons about why people do not choose to play around the river, and clear evidence that cleaning will actually attract more residents go to there. Even with these additional evidence, in order to properly evaluate whether or not agency should spend money improving the lands, we would need to know the interests and preferences of the potential guests and the present situations of these lands, what residencts' the common feelings about this rivers is,what these land be used to do, whether or not the public facilities around need to be improved.