Argument200 【天下无G askme习作】第20次作业

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TOPIC: ARGUMENT200 - Statistics collected from dentists indicate that three times more men than women faint while visiting the dentist. This evidence suggests that men are more likely to be distressed about having dental work done than women are. Thus, dentists who advertise to attract patients should target the male consumer and emphasize both the effectiveness of their anesthetic techniques and the sensitivity of their staff to nervous or suffering patients.
WORDS: 498          TIME: 0:29:42          DATE: 2007-2-25

Giving some facts and analyses, the argument that dentists should target the male consumer and emphasize both the effectiveness of their anesthetic techniques and the sensitivity of their staff to nervous or suffering patients seems logical. However, a careful examination of this argument would reveal how groundless the conclusion is.

To begin with, aside from the claim that men are more likely to be distressed, it is possible that other factors are instead responsible for more men fainting while visiting the dentist. Such alternatives might include the fact that there are more tooth problems happening to men. If there are more men than women suffering from pain in tooth, it is natural that more men visit the dentist. Thus, even if men and women are equally to be distressed, there are more men than women to faint while visiting the dentist. Without ruling out this factor, the conclusion is unconvincing.

Furthermore, even assuming that men's fainting attributes to distress, it does not follow that women are not so distressed as men. Perhaps, women express their distress in more hidden ways. For example, if women, when feel distressed, would deeper their breath or if their heartbeats would accelerate, these ways are so hidden that dentists are nearly unable to detect their. Compared to these ways, men's fainting is easy to find out and thus men appear more likely to be distressed. As a result, without considering this possibility, we cannot take the conclusion seriously.

Next, granted that men are more likely to be distressed, it is hasty to conclude that dentists should target the male consumer in advertisement in order to attract more patients. However, this is not the case. It is highly possible that there are far more women than men visiting the dentist. If only targeting the male consumer, the dentist would lose large part of market and thus profit. Lacking such evidence, the arguer's conclusion is premature at best.

Finally, even if most of consumers are men, the arguer falsely rests on the unjustified assumption that emphasizing their advantage of techniques and staff is effective to attract male patients. As common sense and experience tells us that no matter how advanced the techniques are, it might remain painful to deal with tooth. If so, perhaps the male consumer does not believe their advertisement so that the number of patients would never increase conspicuously. In addition, as we know, the repute is easy to lose but hard to restore. If there were much accidents and men fainting in some dentists, their advertisement would hardly contribute to attracting consumers. Any of these scenarios, if true, would serve to undermine the conclusion.

To sum up, the conclusion lacks credibility because the evidence cited here lends no strong support to what the arguer maintains. To strengthen this argument, the arguer should provide more evidence about the number of the male consumer and the distress of the female consumer. To better evaluate this argument, we need more information about the advertisement.

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恩，最后一段不错。