ARGUMENT71 【CSMY作文互改小组】第七次作业

stevenhuUID: 172722

ARGUMENT71
TOPIC: ARGUMENT71 - Copper occurs in nature mixed with other minerals and valuable metals in ore, and the proportion of copper in the ore can vary considerably. Until fairly recently, the only way to extract pure copper from ore was by using a process that requires large amounts of electric energy, especially if the proportion of copper in the ore is low. New copper-extracting technologies can use up to 40 percent less electricity than the older method to process the same amount of raw ore, especially when the proportion of copper in the ore is high. Therefore, we can expect the amount of electricity used by the copper-extraction industry to decline significantly.
WORDS: 446 TIME: 0:35:58 DATE: 2007-1-25
In this argument, the speaker asserts that the expected consumption of electricity by the copper-extraction industry would decrease dramatically. In order to convince us, the author introduced the previous electricity consuming cooper-extraction method, and claims that the new extraction method saves power. However, a close examination of the speaker's reasoning process would reveal several fallacies.
Firstly, the speaker unreasonably assumes the new cooper-extraction method would lower the cost from the mere fact that it saves 60% more electricity than original methods if the cooper in the ore is high. However, this fact is just one facet of the overall scenario, without speicification, the new method perhaps consume electricity much more than the old one when the cooper in the ore is low. Or apart from using electricity, the new method would also rely on huge consumption of water, which is also a precious energy, and costs much money. For short, without the specific information about the overall energy use in various conditions, the speaker's haste conclusion that it saves cost than the traditional one is soundless.
Secondly, given the condition that the new method would reduce cost a lot, which is of course unwarranted, whether cooper-extracting industry would surely adopt this new method is still an open issue. After all, new method usually means new equipment and facility investment and employee training。 Under this circumstance, the overall cost of changing to the new method would way excess the overall benefit it would bring to the industry. Therefore, I'm afraid little cooper-extraction firm would exploit this ostensible power saving method. With out specific demonstration that the industry will definitely use this new method widely, solely relying on the energy efficiency would hardly persuade us that the speaker's assumption is right.
In addition, to derive the speaker's assertion that the use of electricity in this industry would decline significantly, the author assumes the underlying condition that the total capability of cooper-extraction industry would remain unchanged. However, this assumption is also ungrounded. If the new method is really power saving and easy to exploit, due to this convenience, many cooper-extraction firms would surely try to improve their producing capability to conquer larger market share. Under this situation, whether the total power consumption will decrease would be uncertain, or even it will increase.
To sum up, the author fails to prove us his or her several ungrounded assumption such as the new method is really power saving, the whole industry will definitely adopt this new method in the next year, and the total amount of cooper production will remain unchanged in the next year. To make the argument persuasive, the speaker would at least demonstrate his or her above assumptions.