argument145 帮忙看看，小弟三月要考了

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A new study collected data that shows that people who snore are more likely to gain weight than are people who do not snore. It is well known that many people who snore also stop breathing frequently during the night for a few seconds, a condition called sleep apnea. The interruption of breathing wakes the person—often so briefly that the waking goes unnoticed—and can leave the person too tired during the day to exercise. Anyone who snores, therefore, should try to eat less than the average person and to exercise more.


In this article the author cites the result of a new study and some facts in order to support his recommendation that people who snores need to eat less and to take more exercise. However, close scrutiny of these facts reveals that none of them lends little credible support to his recommendation.

The threshold problem with this argument involves that the author provides no evidence that the result of the new study is statistically reliable. Without such evidence, it is entirely possible that the sample is too small to draw any conclusion. Also the sample might be unrepresentative of the overall people who snore. It is possible that most people who snore are less likely to gain weight than those who do not snore, but they don't attend this study. Lacking such evidence of a sufficient sample, the author can not justifiably rely on it to draw any conclusion.

Secondly, the study’s results are reliable only if all the factor might affect remained constant. However, maybe in this study the people who snore like eating food containing much more fat than that of those who don’t snore. Or perhaps age of the people who snore is older than that of the ones who don’t snore. As we know, older people tend to be fatter than the youth.  Without evidence of the study’s methodological reliability, the author’s conclusion is unjustifiable.

Finally, even if it is the lack of exercise that leads to overweight, the author assumption that to eat less and to exercise more are both necessary and sufficient for this purpose is unsubstantiated. Maybe even though some people eat less and exercise more, they are still fat for their nature of body. If this is the case, the best way to low weight is to take some drugs.

In sum, the author's recommendation is unconvincing. To bolster his recommendation, he should give evidence about the size and makeup of the study’s sample. To better assess this argument, I also need to know whether there are other causes for overweight except snoring and nature of certain person’s body