Argument234--很傻很幼稚，有拍必回

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TOPIC: ARGUMENT234 - The following appeared in a newspaper feature story.

"There is now evidence that the relaxed manner of living in small towns promotes better health and greater longevity than does the hectic pace of life in big cities. Businesses in the small town of Leeville report fewer days of sick leave taken by individual workers than do businesses in the nearby large city of Mason City. Furthermore, Leeville has only one physician for its one thousand residents, but in Mason City the proportion of physicians to residents is five times as high. And the average age of Leeville residents is significantly higher than that of Mason City residents. These findings suggest that people seeking longer and healthier lives should consider moving to small communities."

In the newspaper feature story, the author suggests that people should consider moving to small towns if they are seeking longer and healthier lives, by making a comparison between Leeville and Mason City in several aspects. His conclusion seems reasonable at the first sight; however, his deduction is not persuasive as it stands for the existence of several fallacies and faults.

The first thing that I want to point out is that the author's comparison between Leeville and Mason City actually does not lend any credibility to his assumption that in Leeville people's lives are longer than the ones in Mason City. First, although businesses report fewer days of sick leave in Leeville than in Mason City, the illness rate in businessmen is not necessarily lower in Leeville. It is entirely possible that in Leeville individual workers still do their daily work when they are sick, unless suffering from some serious illness; or in Mason City when employees do not want to go to work, they prefer to report a sick leave even they are not sick.

Second, even businesses in Leeville are less likely to have sick. It is not warranted that the average illness rate is lower in Leeville. Perhaps only a few people in both the city and the town do business. Furthermore, even in Leeville people have fewer physicians, people could still be less healthy in Leeville than in Mason. Maybe when people in Leeville suffer from serious illness they will go to nearby Mason for further treatment, thus there is no need to hire more physicians in Leeville. Those evidences provided by the author could not indicate any difference of overall illness situation between the two regions. For the above reason, the author should not assume that in Leeville people are much healthier.

Turning to the next, even the author could provide, if any, evidence to support his above assumption, his conclusion is still not strengthened by the assumption. On the one hand, maybe in Mason people get sick much more time than people in Leeville, there is a possibility that in Mason people still have a longer life, because the author do not prove that frequency of sick has any effect on the life expectancy. On the other hand, no evidence was given to suggest that in a nationwide area people in cities have a shorter life than those in small communities. Maybe in Mason and Leeville the situations are totally different from the overall conditions. To support his conclusion, the author has to provide study results which could establish relationship between his assumption and conclusion.

In a nutshell, without a more detailed inspects and research, the author's conclusion is open to doubt, there is no reason for people who are searching for a longer and healthier life to move to smaller towns.