argument137 [jet小组]第11次作业

sunneptuneUID: 2451588

In this argument, the author concludes that with the increasing of recreational use of the river, the Mason City need to increase its budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the Mason River. To support this conclusion, the arguer points out that once the residents in this region considered the water sports as their favorite form of entertainment before the quality of water going to bad. In addition, the arguer reasons that recently the agency responsible for rivers in this region has announced plans to clean up Mason River. As discussed below, the argument suffers from several critical flaws and therefore is unpersuasive as it stands.

                              

First of all, in the argument the author only points out there have been complaints about the quality of the water in the river, which lacks details of the complaints to substantiate that the quality of the water in the river has indeed gone to bad. We are not told the amount of people who complained. Moreover, the author provides us no information about the people who are not content with the quality of river. Perhaps there are only few people to complain many years ago, but these days the quality of river has improved a lot. There is another possibility that only a short area of this river experienced the pollution due to the nearby factories, but the majority areas of this river did not have such problem.

                        

Secondly, even assuming the river is not clean enough, no evidence is provided to support the author's assertion that the bad quality leads to the declination of people. The author fails to take into account many factors lead to the same result. Maybe the residents along this river discover another better place to have recreational activities, so they abandon this river. Moreover, perhaps these days most of residents along this river are as busy as bees, so they have little time to have sports due to the limitation of time. Without ruling out these factors, the author cannot easily draw this conclusion.

                                      

Finally, even conceding that people avoid this river because of the bad quality of water, the author's assumption that this situation is about to change because of the plans with the purpose of cleaning the water is unwarranted. Admittedly, the plans have made for a better prospect, which does not mean these plans will achieve their final objectives. The author overlooks many factors, such as the degree of the water pollution and the speed of carrying out these plans and so forth. Moreover, even if the water is clean again, it is hard to say whether residents would come back.

                                    

In sum, this argument is well-presented, but not well-reasoned. To strengthen the argument, the author should provide us the evidence to prove the quality of water is bad. To better evaluate the argument, we also need more information about the details of the plans.

michaelxuywUID: 2330197

文章没有驳“M河使用率上升”与“政府增加财政预算”的因果关系，这个与结论有关的推断我觉得还是应该驳一下的。其它几段的分析还是比较到位的，如果认证得再充分一些，其它可能的因素再分析得再详细一下，会使文章更有说服力。另外文章语言不错，用词比较准确，句型句式也比较丰富。一些拙见，希望对楼主有帮助:)