Argument 14习作，求点评

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14) The following appeared as part of an article in a business magazine.

"A recent study rating 300 male and female Mentian advertising executives according to the average number of hours they sleep per night showed an association between the amount of sleep the executives need and the success of their firms. Of the advertising firms studied, those whose executives reported needing no more than 6 hours of sleep per night had higher profit margins and faster growth. These results suggest that if a business wants to prosper, it should hire only people who need less than 6 hours of sleep per night."

Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.

2015/11/1 19:21-19:51
My response:

The author of the argument points out a business that wants to prosper should hire only people who sleep less than six hours per night. And the author’s conclusion is based on a series of assumptions, which include the reliability of the report from subjects, whether this relationship exists in other areas and whether a person who has longer sleep time is also qualified to do the job. And we need to reexamine these assumptions in order to evaluate the arguer’s suggestion critically.

To begin with, in order to let his or her argument becomes more convincing, the author of the argument cites the result of a study, and the author assumes that subjects that took part in the study expressed their true sleeping times. Nevertheless, it’s possible that what subjects said can’t represent their true sleeping times. Perhaps these executives hold the view that sleeping time is a privacy issue, which can’t be told to strangers easily. Or researchers used an inappropriate method to get the subjects’ sleeping time. For instance, maybe the question “How long do you sleep everyday” in the questionnaire researchers used to collect data just has two choices: “less than 6 hours” and “more than ten hours”. And thus even a subject sleeps 7 hours per night, he or she might choose the former choice, which will cause the result to be inaccurate. Hence, if things aforementioned happened, the author’s conclusion is unwarranted.

Further, the author’s conclusion is also based on an assumption that any business who wants to prosper should hire people who need less than 6 hours of sleep per night. Nevertheless, the author just gives the evidence to support this statement in the advertising area. Even if in this relationship indeed exists in the advertisement industry, it might not exist in other areas. For example, in some factory, workers can be exhausted after a day’s work, which requires them to have a good rest in the night. Therefore, people who sleep less than 6 hours per day might not have enough energy to do this job well, and thus this business has less chance to prosper. Hence, if the relationship between sleeping time and the success of a business doesn’t exist in other area, the author’s argument will be unconvincing.

Finally, the author of the argument points out a business who wants to be successful should just hire people who sleep less than six hours, which assumes that all the people sleep more than six hours are not qualified to do the job. And the author doesn’t provide any information. Perhaps for some people, they just have to sleep seven hours per day and then they could work with higher efficiency. Or it is possible that some people who is skillful in doing their work so they can finish their assignments within a much shorter time, and thus he or she can have more time to have a rest. Consequently, the author’s conclusion will be invalid if people who sleep more than six hours can do a better job.