Argument137 【CSMY作文互改小组】第三组第8次作业

meichengyuUID: 2121098

TOPIC: ARGUMENT137 - The following appeared in an editorial in the Mason City newspaper.

"At present, Mason City residents seldom use the nearby MasonRiver 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 MasonRiver. 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 MasonRiver."
WORDS: 419          TIME: 0:30:00          DATE: 2007-1-24

Citing several unfounded assumptions as well as some dubious evidence and presenting some simple analysis, the arguer asserts that the MansonCity council should increase its budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the MasonRiver because the recreation of the residents in this river may increase. However, we do not have to look very far to see the line of reasoning suffers from several critical flaws which will be discussed as follows.

To begin with, obviously, the author fails to establish the casual relationship between the anticipative increase of recreation in MasonRiver and the increase of budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the river. Lacking information about the budget distributed to the publicly owned lands now, the suggestion by the author that the council should increase the budget is hasty. It is possible that the government of Mason City already put a great deal of money on those publicly lands along the river before the plan of cleaning up Mason River. So the conclusion that the Mason City council should increase its budget for improvements to the publicly lands is baseless and unpersuasive.

In addition, another flaw which also weakens the logic of the argument is that the inevitability between the plan of cleaning up MasonRiver and the increase of recreational use of the river is unwarranted. No evidence quoted in the argument to show that the quality of the water in the river is the main reason why the region's residents do not like to do any recreational activity in it, although the people have been complaints about it. Some other key factors may be ignored by the author such as the feral fishes in the river, the dangerous volution in the river, the frigid weather in the location, etc. Without ruling out these possibilities, the conclusion from the analysis is unconvincing and dubious.

Last but not least, before I come to my own conclusion, it is necessary to point out other flaws which may undermine the argument as well. For instance, the survey cited in the argument is doubtful because of absence of information about that who conduct the survey, who were surveyed and responded, how many responders and whether the survey is representative enough. Until answering these questions, the survey is useless. Besides, it is also possible that there is another or other rivers which are much more suitable for recreational activity, therefore, cleaning up MasonRiver would do little help to increase the activity in it. So, no more analysis is needed to demonstrate my point of view that the author’s assertion about MasonRiver and the budget is wrong.

All in all, although the argument seems plausible, it is neither sound nor persuasive. The conclusion lacks credibility because the evidence cited in this argument did not lend strong support to the author's claim. To make it more logically acceptable, the arguer should have to provide more specific evidence concerning to the factors listed above.

[ 本帖最后由 meichengyu 于 2007-1-25 20:24 编辑 ]