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In this argument, the speaker concludes that the respondents in Leeville (LV) had misrepresented their reading habits. In order to support this conclusion, the speaker cites two survey conducted by a researcher. In addition, he pointed out that there are some contradicts between two surveys. However, this argument seems well-reasoned at first glance, yet suffers critical flaws as discussed bellow.
A threshold problem with argument is that the speaker failed to provide any solid evidence to prove that the respondents of the survey are statistically significant and covered so randomly of citizens in LV. It is entirely possible that the research is not well designed and just picked out a small share of the whole population rendering the research lack of credibility.
Secondly, another problem undermines the survey is that the speaker point out that readers are more likely to read mystery novels, just because this type of book is most frequently checked out. However, in all probability, this could not be the case. Perhaps that part of citizen is not used to borrowing book from the library for they already have classic books stored at home. It is also possible that some kind of mystery novel is on hot sale recently, while from a long term of view, People may still like borrowing books related to library classics. In short, in order to support this conclusion, the speaker must rule out all other feasible explanations for the disparity.
Thirdly, the mystery novels maybe easy to read, hence, readers might return it in a very short time, which leads to a high frequency of checking the books out. On the contrary, the library may not have enough literary classics for people to read, so it is not possible for the readers to borrow it. Under such an assumption, the speaker must take the statistical information of other libraries and book stores into account, to make the survey much more trustworthy.
The last but not the least, the author failed to prove that the respondents in first study are related to the public library, this situation means that even if all the forgoing assumptions turns out to be true, It is still hard to conclude that the respondents has misrepresented their reading habits. The speaker should make a more deep research to prove that two surveys are actually related to each other.
In a word, this argument, while seems well supported at first, has some critical flaws that seriously undermines its conclusion, rendering the article hardly persuasive. Thus, in order to draw a better conclusion, the speaker need to reason more convincingly, cites evidences that are more reasonable and take every possible consideration into account. |
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