Argument204 [Victors小组]自由习作

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题目：ARGUMENT204 - The following appeared as a letter to the editor of a farming publication.

"With continuing publicity about the need for healthful diets, and with new research about the harmful effects of eating too much sugar, nationwide demand for sugar will no doubt decline. Therefore, farmers in our state should use the land on which they currently grow sugar cane to grow peanuts, a food that is rich in protein and low in sugar. Farmers in the neighboring country of Palin greatly increased their production of peanuts last year, and their total revenues from that crop were quite high."
字数：361          用时：0:30:00          日期：2007/7/25

Several fallacies lie in the reasoning of the argument, which prevent the author from reaching a complete suggestion about whether should our farmers change to grow peanuts.

Does healthful diet excludes foods contains high sugar? The answer in the argument seems to be too extreme. Commonsense tells us that varieties of difference kinds of nutrition are needed by a person every day, including protein as well as sugar. What is most important is to balance the amount of them in the diets, where too much sugar is harmful as well as too little. A hasty conclusion that national demand for sugar will 'no doubt' decline due to the emphasis of healthful diets is far less than direct and reasonable.

What is more, there is a chance that the nation's sugar is mainly for exportation. On this condition, internal demand may not compose a main part of the total amount, and then even an actual declination of the demand in the country will not influence much in the whole market of sugar. Without a more clearly illustration, whether it is necessary for farmers to worry about the bad effect of the diet changing or not leaves arguable.

The author also points out that neighboring country achieved highly success from growing peanuts. However, merely this information cannot predict a surely positive harvest in our country. In that it may vary a lot in the relevant conditions between Palin and our country, from earth condition to climate, disadvantage of either can prevent the peanuts from growing perfectly and then prevent us from a similar yield. Conceding that the possibility of this failure is negligible, is a good harvest sure to bring a great increase in revenue? Economics tells us that income is not always increase in due proportion to production: market will determine the income, which we are most concerned about. A possible poor market of peanuts lies as a risk for all the peanuts planters. So the rationality of the act of the transplant is still in doubt.

So, without complete thought on the deduction to the ultimate assertion, the author fails to provide us a cogent demonstration to convince us that peanuts should substitute sugar.