argument137 高频

子旋UID: 2196177

Argument137 The following appeared in an editorial in the Mason City newspaper.
"At present, Mason City residents seldom use the nearby Mason River for any kind of recreational activity, even though surveys of the region's residents consistently rank water sports (swimming, fishing, and boating) as a favorite form of recreation. Since there have been complaints about the quality of the water in the river, residents must be avoiding the river because they think that it is not clean enough. But that situation is about to change: the agency responsible for rivers in our region has announced plans to clean up Mason River. Therefore, recreational use of the river is likely to increase, so the Mason City council will need to increase its budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the Mason River."
Word: 486
In this argument, the author claim that Mason City (MC) needs to increase their budget as recreational use of this river is likely to increase. In order to support his argument, he presents the surveys of the residents’ favorite water sports. He also assumes that the cause of the fact that present seldom use of the river is attributable to the pollution in the river and recreational use is likely to increase after cleaning up the river. However, it is not necessarily the case. This argument is well-presented, but not thoroughly well-reasoned. It leaves many fallacies to be discussed and demonstrated.  

First, the arguer fails to consider the credibility of the surveys from the region’s residents. We cannot find any evidence about the time and place of these surveys, so it is presumptuous to judge that it reveals the real situations nowadays. The people who accept the surveys may be not representatives on this issue. It is also proper that the people have changed their attitude about water sports and would prefer other kinds of sports. In addition, the complaints from people may be out of time and loose its meaning.

Second, the arguer makes a false absolute inference that the residents must be avoiding the river because they think that it is not clean enough. The author may overlook other vital factors which are related to the people’s choice as their recreational use. Even though the water in this river is clean enough, people here may avoid having sports. For example, people follow the fashion of other sports like Ping pang and it is not fitted play it here, so they choose other places. Also, they may think swimming in the river would pollute the water and fishing, and boating may be not comfortable in the bad weather.  

Thirdly, the author simply assumes that the increased budget would lead to recreational use of the river, without ruling out other possible results of this policy. First, for most people in this city, it is far away to get here and there may have been other facilities near built these days and with good condition. Second, people may choose to have a good view of the nature and indulge into the attractive environment. If so, even there are still some ones come and have a good time here, the author’s suggestion to increase budget would be seriously weakened.

Overall, the reasoning behind increasing the budget to improve the recreational use of this river seems logical on the surface since the residents prefer the water sports as their favorites revealed in the survey and now dissatisfy with the quality of the water in the river. However, before the conclusion and decisions are made, he need to make a further survey about the real reason people’s not favorites of this river as the recreational use, he also need to study the feasibility of the new policy and its future.