argu158 <彼岸小组> 第八次作业 by choupghead

choupgheadUID: 2969431

The author asserts that the restrictions on the size of sites and the number of homes built near the sites are unnecessary. To convince us, he cites the result of a study, which I cannot go all the way with.

To begin with, the size of the study is doubtful that only five sites and 300 people were examined, which may engage only a little part of the state. Without offering us more information to prove that just the five sites and 300 people could represent the similar situation of the whole state, any conclusion from the study is unconvincing.

Even if that report could reflect the real situation in the state, the means it was conducted is also questionable. First, the conclusion that the proximity of homes to garbage sites only has a small statistical correlation with the incidence of unexplained rashes among people living in these homes is resulted in average, which may efface the potential crisis behind the statistic. It is quite possible that the statistical correlation is quite close on one site but indicates little among others so that we cannot overlook the special situation of the one site. Second, that higher incidence of the rashes near the largest trash could not tell us more. The author wrongly supposed that the larger the size of site is, the higher incidence of rashes it will cause, which was not proved by any evidence in the argument. Maybe when the size of a garbage site becomes larger than the largest site referred to above, it may cause much more severe incidents of rashes.

However, even if in each site the proximity of homes to garbage sites has only a small correlation with the incidence of unexplained rashes among people living in these homes and the incidence of rashes would not increase with the size of garbage sites nearby get larger, we still cannot infer that it will be the same case while involving the problem of health. Obviously, rashes cannot represent all kinds of diseases that affect our health. Probably, garbage sites will cause other severe diseases to people living nearby and the size of sites may accelerate the damage.

Finally, even if garbage sites has nothing to do with people's health and with the size increases the case will be the same, to claim that there's no need to restrict size of such sites in our state or to place any restrictions on the number of homes built near the sites is too early. The environment of people's living contains many factors, not only health. To people living nearby, larger garbage sites may cause many other problems such as transportation, the scenery surrounded and even the price of the houses, which together influence the living level of local people.

To sum up, without providing more details about the study such as the representativeness of people examined and the influence of the sites to other diseases, we cannot conclude that larger size of the sites would not be worse to people's health. Besides people’s health, government should also take other factors into consideration to make the final decision.