Argument137【Persistence小组】第16次作业

Andy85UID: 2250503

A137The 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."
1 即使河水能清理干净,人们回去玩么?也许人们不去河边的原因不是水质.
2 两岸的娱乐设施情况如何?
3 河水能清理到居民满意的程度么?


In this argument, the arguer advocates that the Mason City council will need to increase its budget
for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the Mason River, since the agency responsible
for rivers in this region has announced plans to clean up Mason River. To support this claim, the
arguer cites the result of a survey and the complaints about the quality of the river. This reasoning
seems to be convincing at the first glance, however, it is not sound at all.

In the first place, the assumption upon which the arguer brings out this claim is questionable. The
arguer assumes that the residents seldom use the river for any kind of recreational activities because
they think that it is not clean enough. However, it is just a correlation between them at best, and there are many other possibilities that the arguer fails to notice. Perhaps people do not use that river
because they have no time. If so, even when the instruments along the river have been improved, the
residents will not use them in the future.

In the second place, even assuming that the arguer’s assumption is correct, s/he fails to provide
sufficient information about the plan that is announced by the agency. How clean will the water turn
when the project has been taken out? Will the quality of the water reaches the standard that the
residents would be willing to take any recreational activities in the river? It is very likely that the
agency is just going to pick up the solid rubbish floating in the river, which can not thoroughly solve
the problem of pollution of the river. If it is the case, the residents still will not come to the river for
fun.

Finally, even the quality of the water can be improved a lot and suitable for taking water sports, there still could be no need for the council to increase the budget for improvements to the publicly owned
lands along the river, since the instruments for recreational activities are in perfectly good conditions. As no evidence has indicates that there are no instruments or they are out of use, it is too hasty for
the arguer to suggest the council to add new ones.

To sum up, if the arguer hopes to make his/her claim more convincing, there is still much work to do, more information to be collected, more surveys to be carried out.