argument177 FLY AW小组第四十九次作业

xmbjowlUID: 2182375

TOPIC: ARGUMENT177 - The following is a letter that recently appeared in the Oak City Gazette, a local newspaper.

"Membership in Oak City's Civic Club-a club whose primary objective is to discuss local issues-should continue to be restricted to people who live in Oak City. People who work in Oak City but who live elsewhere cannot truly understand the business and politics of the city. It is important to restrict membership to city residents because only residents pay city taxes and therefore only residents understand how the money could best be used to improve the city. At any rate, restricting membership in this way is unlikely to disappoint many of the nonresidents employed in Oak City, since neighboring Elm City's Civic Club has always had an open membership policy, and only twenty-five nonresidents have joined Elm City's Club in the last ten years."
WORDS: 497          TIME: 上午 12:35:25          DATE: 2006-7-24


On the basis of some untenable facts and unjustifiable assumptions, the assertion that to be effective, the membership of Oak City's Civic Club should continue to be restricted to the locals, rather than the nonresidents seems a wholly ramshackle one to me.

To begin with, the fact that the nonresidents working in Oak City are not capable of understanding the business and politics can only backfire the author's assertion. There is no following information indicating uncapability of the outsiders in this repect. It is entirely possible that a nonresident who works in the city has a far more objective perspective toward his/her workplace, since he/she can make a full comparison between the city where he/she works and the one where he/she lives. Then, what about our residents? Contrary to the nonresidents, they probably have a strong sense of local protection, with reluctance to admitting the drawbacks in the city. If so, the residents-constituted club may be ineffective in discussing and dealing with the local issues.

Besides, the causality between the residents who pay taxes and a better understanding of how to best distribute the money available is open to doubt. The author fails to provide the evidence to support this assumption. As an individual with commonsense, a professional consultant, the government, or the communities are surely more clear about the best usage of the money, since they have more knowledge regarding the city organization, more objective views of the merits and the drawbacks of a certain city, and they are more likely to attain a common plan which would be put into practice effectively and efficiently. On the contrary, the ordinary residents have no such necessary characters in deciding the usage of the taxes revenues. Thus, hardly can the seemingly irrelevant facts imply a cause-and-effect relationship.

Granted the preceding facts to be substantiate, as for the fact occurs in Elm City, whether the same scenario would also work in Oak City strikes more doubts. The author fails to take into account the differences between the two cities. They may vary greatly in the geographical conditions, the amount of the locals, the policies to be put into practice, etc. Without such detailed information and a complete comparison between the two cities, it is entirely possible that the enthusiasm of the nonresidents of Elm City is much lower than that of Oak City, or the government in Elm City issues policy to limit the number of the nonresidents participating in the club. Thereby, with so many potential differences between the two cities, how should one make a hasty deduction that the opening membership policy would not work in Oak City, as the speaker claims?

Simply put, the author’s suggestion in this letter is fallacious due to lack of supporting information and unjustifiable deduction. To strenghthen this suggetion, more detailed information should be provided, including a complete comparison between the Oak City and the Elm City, the evidence demonstrating the abilities of the residents in city organization, and a survey aiming at the nonresidents who work in the city.

[ 本帖最后由 xmbjowl 于 2006-7-25 00:06 编辑 ]